Good Reads

[Sean]

Benefits Street has caused a row with several distinct yet interwoven strands. Some on the left think it's an offensive and misleading example of "poverty porn", which is just like regular porn, minus the money shots. Some on the right believe it's a damning indictment of the welfare state. And some people, brimming with unfocused rage, see it as a televised "scum zoo" full of pariahs for them to fling peanuts and hashtags at.

In order to function without exploding, to keep the Bake Off running and the trains delayed, to keep the populace tutting and sighing and drinking, experiencing a constant level of personal dissatisfaction with something and everything that never quite boils over into scenery-smashing, Hulk-like rage – to stop us from killing each other, in other words – British society seems to require a regularly-updated register of sanctioned hate figures, about whom it's OK to say more or less anything; people who form a vital pressure valve for this terrifying pent-up societal wrath, lurking beneath the surface like magma under Yellowstone.

Just one of the many reasons Charlie Brooker is a god.

 

[Laurel]

http://d1435t697bgi2o.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/toast-3.jpg

How did toast become the latest artisanal food craze? Ask a trivial question, get a profound, heartbreaking answer.

All the guy was doing was slicing inch-thick pieces of bread, putting them in a toaster, and spreading stuff on them. But what made me stare—blinking to attention in the middle of a workday morning as I waited in line at an unfamiliar cafe´—was the way he did it. He had the solemn intensity of a Ping-Pong player who keeps his game very close to the table: knees slightly bent, wrist flicking the butter knife back and forth, eyes suggesting a kind of flow state.

The coffee shop, called the Red Door, was a spare little operation tucked into the corner of a chic industrial-style art gallery and event space (clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Evernote, Google) in downtown San Francisco. There were just three employees working behind the counter: one making coffee, one taking orders, and the soulful guy making toast. In front of him, laid out in a neat row, were a few long Pullman loaves—the boxy Wonder Bread shape, like a train car, but recognizably handmade and freshly baked. And on the brief menu, toast was a standalone item—at $3 per slice.

It took me just a few seconds to digest what this meant: that toast, like the cupcake and the dill pickle before it, had been elevated to the artisanal plane. So I ordered some. It was pretty good. It tasted just like toast, but better.
[...]
Back at the Red Door one day, I asked the manager what was going on. Why all the toast? “Tip of the hipster spear,” he said.

I had two reactions to this: First, of course, I rolled my eyes. How silly; how twee; how perfectly San Francisco, this toast. And second, despite myself, I felt a little thrill of discovery. How many weeks would it be, I wondered, before artisanal toast made it to Brooklyn, or Chicago, or Los Angeles? How long before an article appears in Slate telling people all across America that they’re making toast all wrong? How long before the backlash sets in?

For whatever reason, I felt compelled to go looking for the origins of the fancy toast trend. How does such a thing get started? What determines how far it goes? I wanted to know. Maybe I thought it would help me understand the rise of all the seemingly trivial, evanescent things that start in San Francisco and then go supernova across the country—the kinds of products I am usually late to discover and slow to figure out. I’m not sure what kind of answer I expected to turn up. Certainly nothing too impressive or emotionally affecting. But what I found was more surprising and sublime than I could have possibly imagined.​

- read the full article A Toast Story (from Pacific Standard)​

 

[Aquagal]

Now I want buttery toast with grape jelly.

 

[Laurel]

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/72264000/jpg/_72264733_dscn0816.jpg

You hear the squeals of the pigs long before reaching a set of long buildings set in rolling hills in southern China.

Feeding time produces a frenzy as the animals strain against the railings around their pens. But this is no ordinary farm.

Run by a fast-growing company called BGI, this facility has become the world's largest centre for the cloning of pigs.

The technology involved is not particularly novel - but what is new is the application of mass production.

The first shed contains 90 animals in two long rows. They look perfectly normal, as one would expect, but each of them is carrying cloned embryos. Many are clones themselves.

This place produces an astonishing 500 cloned pigs a year: China is exploiting science on an industrial scale.​

- read the full article China cloning on an 'industrial scale' (from the BBC)​

 

[rosco rathbone]

"On The Phenomenon Of Bullshit Jobs"

"It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen."

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

 

[Laurel]

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/01/03/world/asia/3-barebranches-India-ink/3-barebranches-India-ink-blog480.jpg

As India grapples with what seems like a constant barrage of shocking acts of violence against women, one question is asked again and again: Why is this happening?

One answer, some experts say, is India’s gender ratio, distorted by the practice of sex selection in favor of baby boys.

A much-cited 2002 study,“A Surplus of Men, a Deficit of Peace,” by Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea den Boer, contends that a gender imbalance in Asian countries, caused by a shortage of marriageable women, results in higher rates of crime, including rape, committed by young unmarried men.

“Internal instability is heightened in nations displaying exaggerated gender inequality, leading to an altered security calculus for the state,” the authors wrote in 2002, and reiterated in a book on the subject. Their conclusions are even more true today, Ms. Hudson said in an e-mail interview.

“Certainly the situation is, if anything, worse in both India and China than it was 10 years ago,” she wrote. “Certainly violent crime against women increases as the deficit of women increases. This will constrain the life chances of females far into the future.”

Right now, the statistics are worrying. India has 37 million more men than women, as of 2011 census data, and about 17 million excess men in the age group that commits most crimes, up from 7 million in 1991.

Violent crime in India rose nearly 19 percent from 2007 to 2011, while the kidnapping of women (much of which is related to forced marriage) increased 74 percent in that time. That’s a marked increase from the five years before 2007, when violent crime actually fell by 2.8 percent, and the kidnapping of women rose by 41 percent.

If the study’s conclusions are correct, India’s problems with rape and other forms of violence against women – recently seen in the gang rape and subsequent death of a 23-year-old woman on a bus in Delhi, the gang rape of a high school student in Bihar state and the rape of a young woman in Punjab, who committed suicide afterward – may only get worse, given the trend in India’s demographics.​

- read the full article India’s Man Problem (from The New York Times)​

 

[trysail]

http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/20131203-annotated5.png?w=720&h=576

by Steve McIntyre

Like many others, I’ve been intrigued by the misadventures of the Ship of Fools. Dozens of tourist vessels visit the Antarctic without becoming trapped by ice. So it’s entirely valid to inquire into why the one tourist vessel led by a “climate scientist” became trapped by ice.

The leader of the expedition, Chris Turney (also a secondary Climategate correspondent and co-signer of Lewandowsky’s multisignatory letter in the Conversation), claimed that the incident could not have been predicted. He said that they were trapped by a sudden “breakout” of multi-year ice (“fast ice”) that had previously been part of the ice shelf and that there was no way that they could have anticipated this. Turney’s claim has been uncritically accepted by the climate community e.g. Turner of the British Antarctica Survey here.

However, like other recent claims by Turney, this claim is bogus. In fact, Turney was trapped by sea ice that had been mobile throughout December 2013. This can be easily seen by examining readily available MODIS imagery (see MODIS here) leading up to the incident, as I’ll do in today’s post.

December 3, 2013
In this first image, I’ve shown the (very clear) MODIS image for December 3, 2013 with annotations. The image has been oriented to be vertical north at 144E. The location of the Mawson Huts on Commonwealth Bay is in cyan; the Mertz Glacier (cyan label) is to its east...



​

- read the full article Ship Of Fools (from the blog Climate Audit)​

 

[Laurel]

“The Frisky Spoon”​

Lie in bed with your partner. Ask to spoon, then hold her from behind. Ignore the cat that just jumped onto the bed. Press closer to her. When she says she’s just tired and she didn’t shower today, tell her it doesn’t matter and kiss her neck. Glance at the clock and realize it actually is pretty late and you’re supposed to have a performance review tomorrow with Glenn. Debate whether or not to ask Glenn for a raise. You’ve hit about 60% of your year-end goals… is that enough? Go to sleep.?

“Enduring Sweatpants”​

Greet him in sweatpants when he arrives home. Then don’t take them off. Ever. Wear this pair of sweatpants for weeks. Don’t walk around in lingerie or a cute pair of undies—just stick with sweatpants and a messy bun. He doesn’t notice either way so why not just get comfortable?
[...]

“The Streaming Marathon”​

When the two of you are alone in bed, cuddle up and do nothing but watch Netflix. Start kissing his neck and moving your hand down further and further until he says that you should really be paying attention because Breaking Bad is a very complex show with a lot of subtleties and he’s not going to answer questions later on because you missed something. Watch Gus Fring subtly stab a man with a box cutter.

“The Subtle Hint”​

After sex, jokingly bring up how a friend of yours had a threesome and how crazy that is. When she laughs and writes Chris off as a creep, joke about how weird it would be if you two tried it! When her face gets serious, reiterate it was a joke and that you’re just saying people do lots of funny stuff. Like some people actually find a lot of value in open relationships. Ha ha! Or how some people use different names during sex so they can pretend they are with a stranger whose weird back moles they don’t have memorized. Hilarious!​

- read the full article Kama Sutra for Couples Who Have Been Dating for Over Three Years (from McSweeneys)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2014/01/6a01310f54565d970c01a3fc504589970b-800wi.png

At different stages in our lives, we require more and less of certain hygienic products: First diapers, then mostly toilet paper and menstrual maintenance items, and as bowels become more difficult to control, a different kind of diaper. It stands to reason that the relative popularity of those product categories would reflect a country's age demographics -- and the market research firm Euromonitor has given us a map to prove it.​

- read the full article How toilet paper explains the world (from the Washington Post)​

 

[crazychemgirl]

Just finished 2 books by Joe Hill.... Stephen King's son is just as good, if not better than his dad.

 

[Laurel]

http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/19/87/19878ea3-5c66-4aa5-a4c6-3e7651e8c406/10426172873_26aff9997e_z.jpg__800x600_q85_crop.jpg

Simply thinking you got better sleep makes your brain work better

You’re probably aware of the placebo effect—taking a pill of any sort can make a person feel better, even if that pill has no active ingredients. But it turns out that the placebo effect doesn't just work with gel caps. It's possible to get placebo exercise and even placebo sleep.

In this study, researchers gave participants a short lecture about how getting more and better sleep improves cognitive function. They also told them that during the normal person’s night of sleep, about 20 to 25 percent of it is REM sleep, the kind that helps the brain most. The researchers then attached sensors to the subjects and told them the sensors would measure pulse, heart rate and REM while the subjects slept. (This was a lie.) Some of the subjects were later told that they got 16.2 percent REM sleep, while the others were told they got 28.7 percent REM sleep. (This was also a lie.)

The researchers then gave their subjects a test called the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test. The test is simple enough: it asks people to add a bunch of numbers together. Eric Horowitz at the blog "Peer-reviewed by my neurons" explains the results:

Draganich and Erdal found that participants who were told they had below average sleep quality performed significantly worse on the PASAT. At the same time, self-reported sleep quality was unrelated to PASAT performance. A follow-up experiment that included additional controls and three other cognitive tests largely confirmed the initial findings. In addition, the performance of participants on a verbal fluency test called the COWAT showed that not only does telling people they had below average sleep quality lead to inferior performance, telling them they had above average sleep can lead to superior performance.​

- read the full article You Can Get Placebo Sleep (from Smithsonian Magazine)​

 

[RobDownSouth]

Just finished 2 books by Joe Hill.... Stephen King's son is just as good, if not better than his dad.

Yes yes yes! Didja like NOS4A2?

"The Wraith is coming for you..."

 

[Radiohead]

Yes yes yes! Didja like NOS4A2?

"The Wraith is coming for you..."

Stephen wrote basically a companion called Doctor Sleep.

 

[Laurel]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/01/Daniel_pearl_highres.jpg

Twelve years ago, on January 23, 2002, Danny left my home in Karachi, Pakistan, for an interview and never came back. Like so many of our peers, we had each put down roots in Pakistan to report on America’s so-called war on terror. I was on book leave from the Journal, finishing a memoir. Danny, the newspaper’s South Asia bureau chief, and his wife, Mariane, were living in Islamabad. They’d come to see me for a few days so Danny could do an interview for a story about Richard Reid, the Englishman who had packed his shoes with explosives and tried to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami three days before Christmas 2001. The plan was for Danny and Mariane to vacation in Dubai after Danny’s meeting. Mariane was five months pregnant. He had just texted me: “It’s a boy!!!!!”

That afternoon, a swarm of green parrots squawked overhead and the scent of jasmine flowers drifted through the air as Mariane and I stood outside my house on Zamzama Street and watched Danny’s cab pull away. “See you later, buddy,” I said.

We couldn’t have known that Pakistani militants would kidnap Danny. That they would keep him for days and then release strange and confusing ransom notes alternately identifying him as a CIA operative and a reporter and showing photos of him in a striped tracksuit, bound and with his head bowed beneath the barrel of a gun.

Not in our worst nightmares could we have imagined what happened after that.​

- read the full article This is Danny Pearl’s Final Story (from The Washingtonian)​

 

[Laurel]

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8036/8036969056_e065f6a98f.jpg
image courtesy Lynne Hand (Flickr)

There is one thing the guidebooks, the Francophiles, and the blissed-out romantics never tell you: The coffee in France is lousy.

Paris is a city of café culture, not a city of coffee culture. That may come as a shock to those who believe the sophisticated French palate extends across the entire food and beverage spectrum. But while the sommelier is a revered position and Paris continues to be a hub for the gastronomic elite, more often than not you’ll find the end of your meal rounded off with an overly bitter shot made from mediocre beans.

I once had a friend from Portland tell me about spending some time on the French-Italian border for work. “We crossed over to France to get our croissants and went back to get our coffee. One country can’t do coffee, and the other can’t do pastries; you would think that they could get together and work it out.” Mention the word coffee to anyone that likes caffeine and has spent time in France and you’ll immediately get an eye roll. It simply isn’t a French strong suit.

The tide is turning in the French capital, though, with a flood of new craft roasters and cafes that all believe in good coffee. The French, however, are sensitive to change, especially in a city that’s known for its deep-rooted traditions, and while this expanding coffee scene is welcomed by many, it also comes with a side of criticism. For some, local craft roast might be the sign of a city looking forward, yet for others it’s the sign of a city undergoing an irrevocable transformation in food culture.​

- read the full article Why Is Coffee in France La Merde? (from Roads & Kingdoms)​

 

[Laurel]

http://static.nautil.us/2269_51de85ddd068f0bc787691d356176df9.png

The British philosopher Derek Parfit espoused a severely reductionist view of personal identity in his seminal book, Reasons and Persons: It does not exist, at least not in the way we usually consider it. We humans, Parfit argued, are not a consistent identity moving through time, but a chain of successive selves, each tangentially linked to, and yet distinct from, the previous and subsequent ones. The boy who begins to smoke despite knowing that he may suffer from the habit decades later should not be judged harshly: “This boy does not identify with his future self,” Parfit wrote. “His attitude towards this future self is in some ways like his attitude to other people.”

Parfit’s view was controversial even among philosophers. But psychologists are beginning to understand that it may accurately describe our attitudes towards our own decision-making: It turns out that we see our future selves as strangers. Though we will inevitably share their fates, the people we will become in a decade, quarter century, or more, are unknown to us. This impedes our ability to make good choices on their—which of course is our own—behalf. That bright, shiny New Year’s resolution? If you feel perfectly justified in breaking it, it may be because it feels like it was a promise someone else made.

“It’s kind of a weird notion,” says Hal Hershfield, an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “On a psychological and emotional level we really consider that future self as if it’s another person.”

Using fMRI, Hershfield and colleagues studied brain activity changes when people imagine their future and consider their present. They homed in on two areas of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, which are more active when a subject thinks about himself than when he thinks of someone else. They found these same areas were more strongly activated when subjects thought of themselves today, than of themselves in the future. Their future self “felt” like somebody else. In fact, their neural activity when they described themselves in a decade was similar to that when they described Matt Damon or Natalie Portman. And subjects whose brain activity changed the most when they spoke about their future selves were the least likely to favor large long-term financial gains over small immediate ones.​

- read the full article Why We Procrastinate: We think of our future selves as strangers. (from Nautilus)​

 

[trysail]

...There is one thing the guidebooks, the Francophiles, and the blissed-out romantics never tell you: The coffee in France is lousy...
​

Say what ???

Somebody is deranged.

​

 

[JohnnySavage]

I've been to France many times, and each time I say I'll never come back. The only thing good about French food is the wine... and as an Italian it kills me to admit that.

The only reason some people rave about French food is because the French load it with butter and cream. A cheap trick.

 

[Laurel]

http://www.csmonitor.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/media/content/2014/0128-mexico-water-monster/17939129-1-eng-US/0128-mexico-water-monster_full_380.jpg

Mexico's salamander-like axolotl may have disappeared from its only known natural habitat in Mexico City's few remaining lakes.
[...]
Growing up to a foot long (30 centimeters), axolotls use four stubby legs to drag themselves along the bottom or thick tails to swim in Xoxhimilco's murky channels while feeding on aquatic insects, small fish and crustaceans. But the surrounding garden-islands have increasingly been converted to illicit shantytowns, with untreated sewage often running off into the water.

The Mexican Academy of Sciences said in a statement that a 1998 survey found an average of 6,000 axolotls per square kilometer, a figure that dropped to 1,000 in a 2003 study, and 100 in a 2008 survey.​

- read the full article Mexico's water monster may be extinct in the wild, researchers fear (from The Christian Science Monitor)​

 

[Laurel]

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7441/10849434083_28bb69b6b3.jpg
image courtesy David Guo (Flickr)

First Jackson got a bright green tinge, then Grant earned himself an American flag. Then Lincoln got a purple eagle, Hamilton was given the first line of the Constitution in swirly red text, and just last year, Franklin was given a color-changing bell.

But poor George Washington, the face of the $1 bill, hasn’t gotten a makeover in more than 50 years. And thanks to a spending bill passed by Congress last week, he isn’t likely to get an update anytime soon.
[...]
The Federal Reserve redesigns currency largely to prevent counterfeiting, and $1 bills are not a frequent target. Would-be criminals are more often lured by larger bills, according to information provided to the Fed by the Secret Service and other law-enforcement agencies.

The vending industry has argued that the costs of redesigning its machines to recognize the new bills would be prohibitive. The National Automatic Merchandising Association estimated in 2008 that 20 million Americans use one of the nation’s 7 million vending machines every work day.

Those concerns were instrumental in the Bush administration’s move to block the $1 bill from a makeover in the early 2000s.​

- read the full article Why the $1 bill hasn’t changed since 1929 (from Quartz)​

 

[trysail]

The Federal Reserve redesigns currency largely to prevent counterfeiting, and $1 bills are not a frequent target. Would-be criminals are more often lured by larger bills, according to information provided to the Fed by the Secret Service and other law-enforcement agencies.
​

- read the full article Why the $1 bill hasn’t changed since 1929 (from Quartz)​

Inflation has unintended consequences.


http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3116/2804678222_6df7fabe5a_o.gif

​

 

[Laurel]

http://d1435t697bgi2o.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/nightmares1.jpg

Few studies have delved into the dark details and emotions associated with nightmares, and even fewer have used dream logs as a basis for analysis.

As researchers at the University of Montreal note in a new study forthcoming in Sleep, daily logs are the so-called “gold standard” for this type of research because other evaluations, like interviews and questionnaires, can “yield inaccurate dream reports due to the fragile nature of dreams’ long-term recall as well as memory and saliency biases.”

When scientists ask a subject to recount the details of a nightmare, they’re more inclined to draw from the extreme fringes than the standard fare. “This may explain why themes of falling and of being chased are among the most frequently reported themes in studies based on questionnaire or interview data while appearing much less frequently in prospective logs,” the researchers write.

In this particular study, the psychologists asked 572 participants to record their dreams for two to five weeks. They were also asked to reflect on their emotions at the time of recording. After an analysis of “9,796 dream reports,” they whittled down the results to “253 nightmares and 431 bad dreams reported by 331 participants.” The researchers defined nightmares as dreams unpleasant enough to pull the participants out of sleep. Bad dreams were terrible, but did not cause the subjects to stir.

The main findings:

(click the article to read!)​

- read the full article What Are Nightmares Made Of? (from Pacific Standard)​

 

[Phelia]

http://images.politico.com/global/2014/01/30/140130_harrington_scan.jpg

We knew the full-body scanners didn’t work before they were even installed. Not long after the Underwear Bomber incident, all TSA officers at O’Hare were informed that training for the Rapiscan Systems full-body scanners would soon begin. The machines cost about $150,000 a pop

Our instructor was a balding middle-aged man who shrugged his shoulders after everything he said, as though in apology. At the conclusion of our crash course, one of the officers in our class asked him to tell us, off the record, what he really thought about the machines.

“They’re shit,” he said, shrugging. He said we wouldn’t be able to distinguish plastic explosives from body fat and that guns were practically invisible if they were turned sideways in a pocket.

We quickly found out the trainer was not kidding: Officers discovered that the machines were good at detecting just about everything besides cleverly hidden explosives and guns. The only thing more absurd than how poorly the full-body scanners performed was the incredible amount of time the machines wasted for everyone.

...

Just as the long-suffering American public waiting on those security lines suspected, jokes about the passengers ran rampant among my TSA colleagues: Many of the images we gawked at were of overweight people, their every fold and dimple on full awful display. Piercings of every kind were visible. Women who’d had mastectomies were easy to discern—their chests showed up on our screens as dull, pixelated regions. Hernias appeared as bulging, blistery growths in the crotch area. Passengers were often caught off-guard by the X-Ray scan and so materialized on-screen in ridiculous, blurred poses—mouths agape, à la Edvard Munch. One of us in the I.O. room would occasionally identify a passenger as female, only to have the officers out on the checkpoint floor radio back that it was actually a man. All the old, crass stereotypes about race and genitalia size thrived on our secure government radio channels.

- read the full article Dear America, I Saw You Naked: And yes, we were laughing. Confessions of an ex-TSA agent. (from Politico)
​

 

[trysail]

Man Says He Ate Birds, Turtles In 13 Months Adrift
by The Associated Press
February 04, 2014


WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — It's a story that almost defies belief: A man leaves Mexico in December 2012 for a day of shark fishing and ends up surviving 13 months on fish, birds and turtles before washing ashore on the remote Marshall Islands thousands of miles (kilometers) away.

But that's what a man identifying himself as 37-year-old Jose Salvador Alvarenga told the U.S. ambassador in the Marshall Islands and the nation's officials during a 30-minute meeting Monday before he was taken to a local hospital for monitoring. Alvarenga washed ashore on the tiny atoll of Ebon in the Pacific Ocean last week before being taken to the capital, Majuro, on Monday.

"It's hard for me to imagine someone surviving 13 months at sea," said Ambassador Tom Armbruster in Majuro. "But it's also hard to imagine how someone might arrive on Ebon out of the blue. Certainly this guy has had an ordeal, and has been at sea for some time."

Other officials were reacting cautiously to the Spanish-speaking man's story while they try to piece together more information.

If true, the man's ordeal would rank among the greatest tales ever of survival at sea...
​

- read the full article Man Says He Ate Birds, Turtles In 13 Months Adrift (from the Associated Press newswire)


​

 

[Laurel]

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02783/Frozen_2783242b.jpg

Of the 50 most successful films of 2013, those featuring female characters have brought in bigger American box office revenue than those that didn't.

Entertainment website Vocativ undertook a study of the top 50 biggest box office films in America from the previous year and applied the Bechdel Test to them. The Bechdel Test determines a level of gender equality in a film. To pass, the film must have at least two women in it who talk to each other about something other than a man.

Vocativ found 17 of the 50 films, 36 per cent, passed the test, with a further seven deemed "dubious". The remaining 26, 52 per cent of the total, failed.

However, those 24 contributed to a American box office gross of $4.22 billion, while the 26 that failed generated half that amount: $2.66 billion.​

- read the full article Bechdel Test films triumph at the box office (from The Telegraph)​