Science

RELIGION IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS

Those looking for honest companies to invest in might want to check out businesses based in more religious communities, suggests a new paper from the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.
The study found that businesses with head offices in places with high levels of "religiosity" were less likely to experience stock price crashes as a result of not disclosing bad financial news. And it didn't matter

whether those at the top were religious or not. Just being in a town where social norms are influenced by religious codes of behavior was enough to rub off on the companies operating there.
The researchers used data from 1971 to 2000 about the number of churches and church membership in US counties from the American Religion Data Archive. They compared this with information about stock returns and accounting restatements for U.S. companies, including where those companies were headquartered.
Previous research has shown that religious managers are less likely to manipulate the flow of information and a religious setting tends to foster more whistleblowers within a corporation, raising the risk of manipulators getting caught.
The paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.

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Different Values for Boys and Girls

A study by researchers in Spain which analysed 595 toy advertisements broadcast on television at Christmas 2009, 2010 and 2011 showed that they promoted values that associate beauty with girls and strength and power with boys.
The analysis of the adverts shows that, although many of them have messages that apply to both sexes, such as fun, education, solidarity and individualism, it was more frequent to see very separate values.

In most of the publicity, cars and action heroes were associated with males, together with competitive values, individualism, power and strength. However, the female role was linked to beauty and motherhood as seen in adverts for dolls and accessories.
The researcher also found that there was evident gender segregation in the voice-overs. "Female voices predominated in adverts where girls appear and male voices where only boys appear and also when both genders are shown."
The authors conclude that, despite legal provisions, there are still toys that are very different for girls and boys.

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CHEWING GUM?
THINK

Teenagers are notorious for chewing a lot of gum. The lip smacking, bubble popping, discarded gum stuck to the sole give teachers and parents a headache.
Now, Dr Nathan Watemberg of Tel Aviv University-affiliated Meir Medical Center has found that gum-chewing teenagers, and younger children as well, are giving themselves headaches too. His findings, published in Pediatric Neurology, could help treat countless cases of migraine and tension headaches in adolescents without the need for additional testing or medication.
"Out of our 30 patients, 26 reported significant improvement, and 19 had complete headache resolution," writes Dr Watemberg. "Twenty of the improved patients later agreed to go back to chewing gum, and all of them reported an immediate relapse of symptoms."
Until now there has been little medical research on the relationship between gum chewing and headaches.
Dr. Watemberg says his findings can be put to use immediately. By advising teenagers with chronic headaches to simply stop chewing gum, doctors can provide many of them with quick and effective treatment, without the need for expensive diagnostic tests or medications.

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Dogs Recognise Familiar Faces from Images

So far the specialised skill for recognising facial features holistically has been assumed to be a quality that only humans and possibly primates possess. Although it's well known, that faces and eye contact play an important role in the communication between dogs and humans, this was the first study, where facial recognition of dogs was investigated with eye movement tracking.

The researchers, led by Professor Outi Vainio at the University of Helsinki, tested dogs' spontaneous behaviour towards images – if the dogs are not trained to recognise faces are they able to see faces in the images and do they naturally look at familiar and strange faces differently?
"Dogs were trained to lie still during the image presentation and to perform the task independently. Dogs seemed to experience the task rewarding, because they were very eager to participate" writes professor Vainio. Dogs' eye movements were measured while they watched facial images of familiar humans and dogs (e.g. dog's owner and another dog from the same family) being displayed on the computer screen. As a comparison, the dogs were shown facial images from dogs and humans that the dogs had never met.
The results indicate that dogs were able to perceive faces in the images. Dogs looked at images of dogs longer than images of humans, regardless of the familiarity of the faces presented in the images. This corresponds to a previous study by Professor Vainio's research group, where it was found that dogs prefer viewing conspecific faces over human faces.