Actually, I researched most of this well over a year ago and dismissed the topic as not particularly interesting to anyone. It’d be a nice sociology paper, printed, read by all of four people, and subsequently forgotten forever, but I’m not doing that sort of thing academically anymore.

Recently, however, I had the occasion to publicly refer to this conclusion again, so why not.

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A short piece on military bronies on a sociology website:

Masculinity, Marines and My Little Pony

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I promised some kind of summary post for my Points of Canon series, and since Season 8 is rapidly approaching, I guess I’m running out of time to say whatever it is that I have to say. I will, of course, continue the series, and it’s kind of silly to write any kind of conclusion when it’s so obviously incomplete, that I’m in a middle of a season.

Especially the unkind words.

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For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet, Facebook recently published a study they did on their users’ emotional states in 2012. They randomly generated two groups of about 700,000 users, then used an automated system to manipulate their news feeds. For one group, they culled news posts containing more positive language and smiling, happy faces; for another, they culled posts containing more negative language and unhappy faces. They then measured the users’ own news posts over the course

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I learned something interesting this evening, and I thought I'd share.

Some time ago, a few psychology professors decided to run an experiment to determine whether or not making people aware of bias would lessen in. They had two groups of people; they told one group that bias against women was rare, and told the other group that bias against women was common. Afterwards, they asked the two groups about their perceptions of women.

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