Portable, total emersion

"Easy and Affordable Portable Baptism Pools - that are designed to take a beating as well."

Get them while they are hot, or at least tepid.

In other baptism news, there are rumors that Lady Gaga will be the god mother to Elton John's baby.

UK seizes breast milk ice cream

BBC:

Ice cream made from breast milk has been removed from a central London restaurant on health grounds following complaints by members of the public.

The dessert, called Baby Gaga, went on sale at ice cream parlour Icecreamists in Covent Garden in February.

But Westminster Council officers removed the product to make sure it was "fit for human consumption".

I hope they look into whether the company is adulterating the breast milk. No doubt this is the sort of free advertising the business was hoping for. If the government decides breast milk ice cream is fit for human consumption, then what?

My first thought when I read about this product was it's going to take breast milk from the mouthes of babes. It's like when corn is used to produce ethanol. That corn more expensive for human consumption. And that can even lead to revolutions.

To read more about the supply chain for breast milk for ice cream check out this article.

The milk has been donated by women who were paid £15 for every 10 ounces of their bodily fluid.

The dessert is offered up in a martini glass to those daring enough to try it for £14.

It's advertised as organic, but who is monitoring their diets? And what's this about the milk being donated when the women are being paid.

Markets in Everything

Superbus!

All it needs is a road to travel on.

Legalizing polygamy

What if polygamy were legalized in a country say like Canada? What would be the result?

Polygamy is close to universally frowned upon in western countries like Canada. But not so long ago homosexuality was as well. And there is what some have called serial monogamy in the west (the great increase in divorce rates), and the liberalization of heterosexual relationships outside of marriage, or even long term relationships. It's conceivable, then that polygamy would become mainstream and operate in an open society where individuals have freedom to make their own choices.

Alternatively, what if polygamy only finds a niche where it already lives? Even though it's illegal polygamy is practiced in Canada, and the U.S. It crops up in cults and is given a religious imprimatur. And it's always polygynous marriages, one man with several wives. These are societies that close themselves off from the world and construct codes and practices that perpetuate polygyny. Like teenage boys being exiled from the community. Child brides. Denying girls an education that would make leaving more attractive. Parents, particularly fathers, determining who their daughters will marry. A system of institutions, values, brainwashing and beliefs is created to keep women in check. Add to this that men are physically stronger. It's curious of course that women in these cult societies very often defend them. I won't pretend to understand that, but we do know that many of us have a tendency to defend what we have lived especially if we have been taught that there is evil outside your community and your community is under siege. And of course by their very nature kinship ties reach across these communities.

Other things being equal women interested in monogamy gain from polygyny because it gives them greater bargaining power -- if a man can take several wives, unmarried men be competing over fewer women, and give them a better deal in life. But other things are not equal. If polygamy were to be legalized there no reason to believe that in the open society polygyny would be greater than polyandry. At the same time we can expect to see a growth in closed societies were polygyny that subjugates women is practiced.

This post was inspired by a recent article in the Globe & Mail:

a professor testified Tuesday at a landmark court case examining Canada’s ban on multiple marriages.

Shoshana Grossbard, an expert in the economics of marriage from San Diego State University, said allowing men to have multiple wives inevitably leads to a reduced supply of women, increasing demand.

But rather than making women more valuable in such communities, she said, that scarcity encourages men in polygamous societies to exert control over them to ensure they have access to the limited supply.

Addendum. The Vancouver Sun has more on Grossbard's testimony:

Economist Shoshana Grossbard admits she was naive when she did her doctoral thesis on polygamy more than 30 years ago at the University of Chicago. Then, she believed that a simple supply-and-demand analysis would explain the economics of polygamous societies. Besides, she says, "I thought it was cool to say that polygamy might be advantageous to women and repeat what Gary Becker (her thesis adviser and Nobel laureate) has said."
...
Grossbard can't prove it. But the economist says it only makes sense that wealthy, well-educated polygamists might prefer living in Canada to Nigeria or even South Africa - where the president himself has five wives.

And if there is an influx due to immigration or an increase due to inclination, Grossbard is certain there will be pressure to accept the kinds of cultural practices and institutions she has observed in other polygynous societies.

Additional practices associated with polygyny are also discussed in the article.

Why is a woman's vote more valuable?

In Afghanistan.

The Answer:

when an Afghan translator who spoke Pashtun with a local accent called the candidate and said he had 200 registration cards to sell on behalf of his village, the candidate immediately offered him $15 each.

He wanted to know how many of the cards were for female voters; those are more valuable because, out of respect for cultural sensitivities, women’s registration cards do not bear photographs, so they are easy for anyone to use. In many places, families do not allow women to leave their homes, so the men of the family normally cast their votes for them.

Read more about the Afghanistan market for votes here.

Rent-a-white-guy: Markets in everything

It's not too surprising that car companies and others with flashy products to sell hire beautiful fair-skinned women to pose with their products. Appealing to prejudice sells. There's no attempt to fool anyone into thinking the models know anything about the products.

Not so when it comes to hiring white guys to pretend to be business men. CNN reports:

For a day, a weekend, a week, up to even a month or two, Chinese companies are willing to pay high prices for fair-faced foreigners to join them as fake employees or business partners.

Some call it "White Guy Window Dressing." To others, it's known as the "White Guy in a Tie" events, "The Token White Guy Gig," or, simply, a "Face Job."

And it is, essentially, all about the age-old Chinese concept of face. To have a few foreigners hanging around means a company has prestige, money and the increasingly crucial connections -- real or not -- to businesses abroad.

Self enforcement of rape law: Markets in everything.

A doctor has invented a female condom with teeth.

Ehlers is distributing the female condoms in the various South African cities where the World Cup soccer games are taking place.

The woman inserts the latex condom like a tampon. Jagged rows of teeth-like hooks line its inside and attach on a man's penis during penetration, Ehlers said.

Once it lodges, only a doctor can remove it -- a procedure Ehlers hopes will be done with authorities on standby to make an arrest.

"It hurts, he cannot pee and walk when it's on," she said. "If he tries to remove it, it will clasp even tighter... however, it doesn't break the skin, and there's no danger of fluid exposure."

How does it deter? How do signal you are wearing one? Since it seems unlike you can signal you are wearing one, do enough females have to use the product for it to have a deterrent effect? What about the free rider problem?

With some adaptation this seems more like a variation on a chastity belt to me.

Markets in everything

The boyfriend body pillow available at Sears for $39.99 (regular price $89.99).

Product Description

Wrap yourself up in the Boyfriend Body Pillow. This pillow is a soft and cozy body pillow that looks like the torso of a man with a comforting arm that cuddles you throughout the night. Feel safe and warm in his embrace while comfortably sleeping on his chest.

The fun and cozy Boyfriend Body Pillow is excellent for people whose partner is away on military leave or work absence. Singles, who want to feel the presence of a man, without actually having to be with one, love it too. This novelty pillow makes a great gift for a friend or relative with a good sense of humor that would love to have a bit more hugging at night.

The girlfriend body pillow available at Sears for $9.95.

What accounts for the price difference? I don't think it is a cost difference -- the boyfriend is fully clothed, the girlfriend is not.

H/T Gizmodo.

Annals of outsourcing: grading writing assignments

If they choose to, UAE universities to hire lots of cheap, qualified graders to give students feedback on their writing assignments. Having students write more is a highly effective way to get students to improve their writing skills; but they need feedback (and the incentive of an accurate grade). The bottleneck is having enough skilled graders.

From Inside Higher Ed:

That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia. Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., took over. The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task—and even, the company says, to do it better than TA's can.
...
Mr. Bangari, who is based in Bangalore, India, oversees a group of assessors who work from their homes. He says his job is to see that the graders, many of them women with children who are eager to do part-time work, provide results that meet each client's standards and help students improve.

There's evidence that use of the service results in a decline in the number of students dropping a course.

Markets in everything

NYT. Putting unemployed dogs to work sniffing for bed bugs:

Increasingly, real estate lawyers are urging buyers in contract to inspect apartments before they close, and in their advertising, many pest control companies exhort would-be tenants to “inspect before you rent.” And dogs like Cruiser can inspect a room in minutes, whereas lesser mammals like human beings need hours to conduct a visual inspection.

Bedbug-sniffing dogs, adorable yet stunningly accurate — entomology researchers at the University of Florida report that well-trained dogs can detect a single live bug or egg with 96 percent accuracy — are the new and furry front line in an escalating and confounding domestic war.

While experts cite a host of reasons for the upsurge, they agree on one thing: the bugs, which were mostly eradicated in this country at midcentury by now-banned pesticides like DDT but remained a constant scourge overseas, are finding their way back to the United States through an increase in global travel.

(Oh wait, wouldn't they "find their way back" because they were never fully eradicated to begin with?)

Markets in everything

What happens to those pre-printed t-shirts for championship games, the ones where the team loses?

Our job on Saturday was to pack boxes for the Haitian relief effort – boxes of hats and shirts. We were all arrayed at our folding and packing tables, staring at a seeming mountain of broken-down boxes spewing these articles of clothing. And for some reason lost on us, every single box was labeled in huge block letters with “LOSER”.

You see – these boxes were all full of t-shirts and hats printed for major championship sporting events of the past few years. And at every one of those events, both teams are presented with boxes and boxes of celebratory gear before the game – gear proclaiming them the champions so they can wear them for television as soon as the game ends. I guess I’d never thought about all of those boxes of paraphernalia with the wrong winning team on them. It turns out they get donated to charity – like the mountain of clothing we were about to ship to Haiti.

As I worked on preparing all of this stuff, my mind wandered all over the place. I folded t-shirts proclaiming the Texas Longhorns the NCAA Football champs from the recent game in the Rose Bowl – and wondered again if the Horns would have beat Alabama if Colt McCoy could have played that whole game.

Markets in everything

Google makes 1/2 billion dollars a years off of your typos. A typosquatter might register "emiratseconomist.com" in the hope of getting visits from people who meant to type "emirateseconomist.com".

Moore and Edelman started by using common spelling mistakes to create a list of possible typo domains for the 3264 most popular .com websites, as determined by Alexa.com rankings. They estimate that each of the 3264 top sites is targeted by around 280 typo domains.

They then used software to crawl 285,000 of these 900,000-odd sites to determine what revenue the typo domains might be generating.

If the top 100,000 websites suffer the same typosquatting rate as the sites Moore and Edelman studied, up to 68 million people a day could visit a typo site, they say. They estimate that almost 60 per cent of typo sites could have adverts supplied by Google.

If the company earns as much per visitor from ads on typo sites as it reportedly does from ads alongside search results, it could potentially earn $497 million a year in revenue from typo domains, they conclude.

Moore and Edelman's papers Measuring the Perpetrators and Funders of Typosquatting and Measuring the Perpetrators and Funders of Typosquatting.

Good work if you can get it

LA Times

In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district's 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.

During our investigation, in which we obtained hundreds of documents using the California Public Records Act, we also discovered that 32 underperforming teachers were initially recommended for firing, but then secretly paid $50,000 by the district, on average, to leave without a fight.

Artificial virginity: markets in everything

Slate has uncovered more details on the wedding night deception product:

Joseph Freeman of the Associated Press reports:

The Artificial Virginity Hymen kit, distributed by the Chinese company Gigimo, costs about $30. It is intended to help newly married women fool their husbands into believing they are virgins—culturally important in a conservative Middle East where sex before marriage is considered by many to be illicit. The product leaks a blood-like substance when inserted and broken. Gigimo advertises shipping to every Arab country.

On its Web site, Gigimo explains more about the product:

Artificial Virginity Hymen is created from Kyoto, Japan at 1993. it was first introduced to the locals, then it gets famous and spread to Thailand at 1995 and now available in South East Asia, South Asia and in the Middle East countries....

Read it all.

More on the kerfuffle this has caused in Egypt.

Our previous post on the product is here.

Markets in everything: faking it

BBC:

The contraption is seen as a cheap and simple alternative to hymen repair surgery, which is carried out in secret by some clinics in the Middle East. It is produced in China and has already become available in other parts of the Arab world. The device is reported to be on sale in Syria for $15. Professor Bayoumi, a scholar at the prestigious al-Azhar University, said it undermined the moral deterrent of fornication, which he described as a crime and one of the cardinal sins in Islam. Members of parliament in Egypt have also called for banning import of the item.

Inter-sect marriages on the rise in Iraq

AP:

Muhanad Talib, a Sunni Muslim, married his Shiite bride because she was a "suitable woman" for him. It also didn't hurt that their vows made them eligible for a $2,000 payout from the government.

Talib and his wife are among more than 1,700 newlywed couples who have accepted cash from a government program that encourages Sunnis and Shiites to tie the knot.
...
As security has improved, Iraqis are returning to their homes in mixed neighborhoods and spending more time at offices, universities and other places where they meet their future spouses, said Shiite cleric Sayyid Ahmed Hirz al-Yasiri in Baghdad's Shiite stronghold of Sadr City.

"There was a time when families were reluctant to consent to such marriages because of concerns created by certain conservative people from both sects," he said. "That is over now and things are getting back to normal, like they were before the fall of Baghdad. In the past two months, I married 40 to 50 Sunnis, including 20 mixed weddings."

Thanks to Marginal Revolution for the pointer.

An idea whose time has come?

At least during Ramadan. College classes at midnight. The Chronicle of Higher Education has the story:

At a time of night when many people are hitting the sack, a number of Bunker Hill Community College students will be hitting the classroom this fall.

To accommodate working adults and open more class times for its growing student population, the Massachusetts college will offer two courses that run from 11:45 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.: “Principles of Psychology,” on Tuesdays, and “College Writing I,” on Thursdays. Both are three-credit courses.

College officials chose the midnight time slot for people who get off work late and have to be up early with their children.

Carpe Diem files this under Markets in Everything.

What recession? Colleges offer students valet parking

Inside Higher Ed:

When the concept of starting a valet parking service came up at a recent Florida Atlantic University Board of Trustees meeting, it seemed less out of place than one would think. With the number of students growing, and the number of convenient parking spaces on campus unchanged, the idea to charge students and faculty for such a convenience did not seem unreasonable.

Florida Atlantic is just talking about valet service. Other colleges have implemented it. Florida International University and Columbia University introduced valet programs this spring. The University of Southern California has had a program in place since 2008, and High Point University brought in valet at the behest of its president, Nido Qubein, to provide a better student experience. California State University at Sacramento has also begun a premium parking program.

At Florida International, valet service started this spring as a way for visitors to find convenient parking. The valet stand was set up on a busy part of campus -- one where a lot of visitors arrive, according to Bill Foster, executive director of parking and transportation. The service was meant for visitors, but students, faculty, and staff were not precluded from using the service, and commuter students had a particular demand for it.

I can see this going over very well in the UAE. University administrators, are you listening?

Family relations

Wives in Kenya has started a boycott to deny their husbands sex. Their goal is to force political change in the country. Ida Odinga, wife of Kenyan prime minister Raila Odinga, has joined the boycott.

Like any boycott, alternatives sources have to be closed off. As reported at Foreign Policy blog, "The group has also said it's willing to pay prostitutes in order to make the ban more effective."

Wives in Afghanistan can deny their husbands sex, but new law "that has drawn Western condemnation for restricting women's rights does not allow marital rape as critics claim, but lets men refuse to feed wives who deny them sex, the cleric behind it says," reports the National Post. The CBC offers more details:

"As long as the husband is not travelling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night," Article 132 of the law says.

"Unless the wife is ill or has any kind of illness that intercourse could aggravate, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband."

What if the wife is traveling?

In apparent response to protests, President Karzai has said he will review the law he signed.

Arab takes control of Israeli bread industry

The Independent:

The deal will make him the owner for one week of all bread, pasta and beer in Israel – well a huge amount of it anyway. The contract, signed for the past 12 years by the Muslim hotel food manager, is part of the traditional celebrations ahead of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

Jews are forbidden by biblical injunction to possess leavened bread, or chametz, during Passover and ironically an Arab is needed to properly observe the holiday. The agreement with Mr Hussein offers a way of complying with religious edicts without having to wastefully destroy massive quantities of food.

Through legal acrobatics, the forbidden goods belonging to the Israeli state are simply sold to Mr Hussein for the duration of Passover and then revert back to the state once the holiday is over. Like the government's adherence to the Sabbath and to dietary laws, the ceremony sets Israel apart as a Jewish state that upholds religious traditions.

I'm not sure that's what Yahweh had in mind. When my students take a legalistic view, I tell them that what matters is that they obey the intent, not the letter.

Thanks to Marginal Revolution for the pointer. Marginal Revolution is the originator of "markets in everything."