Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: sex – Page 28

Let me start with two brief stories about social change. The first concerns changing laws and values about relationships. Only in 1967—in the aptly named case of Loving v. Virginia—did the United States Supreme Court recognize that laws prohibiting interracial marriage violated the United States Constitution. Nineteen years before, in 1948, the Supreme Court of California decided that such restrictions were unlawful. The California Supreme Court’s decision finding a constitutional right to same-sex marriage also predated the federal decision, and reflected how, to channel William Gibson, th…

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Leila has two identities, but Facebook is only supposed to know about one of them.

Leila is a sex worker. She goes to great lengths to keep separate identities for ordinary life and for sex work, to avoid stigma, arrest, professional blowback, or clients who might be stalkers (or worse).

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Adjuncting has grown as funding for public universities has fallen by more than a quarter between 1990 and 2009. Private institutions also recognize the allure of part-time professors: generally they are cheaper than full-time staff, don’t receive benefits or support for their personal research, and their hours can be carefully limited so they do not teach enough to qualify for health insurance.

Adjunct professors in America face low pay and long hours without the security of full-time faculty. Some, on the brink of homelessness, take desperate measures.

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Men and women with shorter, wider faces tend to be more sexually motivated and to have a stronger sex drive than those with faces of other dimensions. These are the findings from a study led by Steven Arnocky of Nipissing University in Canada. The research investigates the role that facial features play in sexual relationships and mate selection and is published in Springer’s journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

The study adds to a growing body of research that has previously shown that certain psychological and behavioral traits are associated with particular facial width-to-height ratios (known as FWHR). Square-faced men (who therefore have a high FWHR) tend to be perceived as more aggressive, more dominant, more unethical, and more attractive as short-term sexual partners than their thinner and longer-faced counterparts.

Researchers attributed differences in to variations in testosterone levels during particular developmental periods, such as puberty. This hormone plays a role in forming adult sexual attitudes and desires.

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Article out by Ron Bailey at Reason Magazine that discusses #transhumanism and #libertarianism:

Kai Weiss, a researcher at the Austrian Economics Center and Hayek Institute in Vienna, Austria, swiftly denounced the piece. “Transhumanism should be rejected by libertarians as an abomination of human evolution,” he wrote.

Clearly there is some disagreement.

Weiss is correct that Istvan doesn’t expend much intellectual effort linking transhumanism with libertarian thinking. Istvan largely assumes that people seeking to flourish should have the freedom to enhance their bodies and minds and those of their children without much government interference. So what abominable transhumanist technologies does Weiss denounce?

Continue reading “Transhumanism and Libertarianism Are Entirely Compatible” | >

How our ideas about sex and service influence the personalities we give machines… Consider the artificially intelligent voices you hear on a regular basis. Are any of them men? Whether it’s Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, or virtually any GPS system, chances are the computerized personalities in your life are women.

This gender imbalance is pervasive in fiction as well as reality. Films like “Her” and “Ex Machina” reflect our anxieties about what intelligent machines mean for humanity. But AI, in and of itself, is genderless and sexless. Why, then, are the majority of the personalities we construct for these machines female?

Is it about service? Assigning gender to these AI personalities may say something about the roles we expect them to play. Virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa perform functions historically given to women. They schedule appointments, look up information, and are generally designed for communication.

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There is an interdependent relationship among making money, having sex, and being physically healthy, according to new research published in the International Journal of Manpower.

The study found that workers who have sex two to three times per week earn an average of 4.5 percent more than coworkers who have sex less often. Based on a behavioral study that surveyed 7,500 individuals, researchers found that” workers with health problems who are sexually active earn 1.5 percent more than those with similar ailments who are not sexually active.”

Dr. Nick Drydakis, who led the study from Anglia Ruskin University, concluded that having a higher income results in leading a more active sex life, and that having more sex supports our efforts at the office:

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In April, Scientists based in Philadelphia unveiled an artificial womb undergoing testing on fetal lambs. With a prediction from one of the researchers that the technology could be ready for human testing in three to five years, artificial wombs suddenly became the most unexpected rage of 2017. But what sort of artificial wombs might realistically be a part of healthcare in the near future?

In this video series, the Galactic Public Archives takes bite-sized looks at a variety of terms, technologies, and ideas that are likely to be prominent in the future. Terms are regularly changing and being redefined with the passing of time. With constant breakthroughs and the development of new technology and other resources, we seek to define what these things are and how they will impact our future.

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A collaborative team of scientists and physicians from the Oxford University, Cambridge University, Imperial College London, University College London and King’s College London have made a remarkable progress towards curing patients with HIV infection.

Of 50 patients taking part in NHS funded revolutionary clinical trial, a 44-year-old British man is the first to complete the trial. He showed no sign of the virus in his blood following treatment.

HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus, is a retrovirus found in body fluids of infected person. These can be semen, vaginal and anal fluids, blood, and breast milk. It can be easily transmitted through unprotected sex or simply sharing infected needles. An infected mother can also transmit HIV to her child during pregnancy, delivery, or breastfeeding.

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Therapist and author Esther Perel explores our ‘existential aloneness’ in this film. Much as technology continues to open new doors for connection, the rapid cultural changes of the past 100 years allow us to choose the sort of life we wish to live. We make our most important connections by choice instead of having them mandated to us by tradition. But as is the case with technology, sometimes it isn’t clear if we are primed to use these new opportunities to build more fulfilling lives or simply to frustrate ourselves, building a world where more people feel alone.

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