aRecentStudy.com

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Paul Kinsella performed a remarkable survey that tests a person’s honesty when faced with the prospect of keeping a $0.35 wallet containing $2.10 and a $50 gift certificate or returning it to the owner using the id card contained in the wallet. Paul had the bright idea of recording hilarious conversations from many of the thieves and a few of the honest ones.

Some of the interesting results are:

• 26% of the people kept the wallets
• 86% of women and 61% of men were honest
• 56% of young people were honest, 81% of middle aged people were honest, 88% of old people were honest
• 79% of white people were honest, 57% of black people were honest
• The most honest group were white females (95%), the least honest group were young black people (40%)

The author was careful to point out that “It was not the intention of this experiment to make any particular group look bad, reinforce stereotypes nor to further a hidden agenda of any kind. The actions of a few members in a group should not, of course, be used to judge the whole group.” - I wonder why!

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The stats of the rich, if not famous, has now been revealed in a study of many of the S&P 500’s leaders. Spencer Stuart conducted this fascinating study which reveals things like:

• Since 1980, the top 100 CEOs are getting younger
• Harvard is no longer the most commonly attended school by top CEO’s
• Less than 10% of top CEOs received degrees from Ivy League schools
• 36% of all S&P 500 CEOs do not have an advanced degree
• 33% of the S&P 500 CEOs undergraduate degrees are in Engineering (only 11% in Business Administration)
• The functional role that lead to becoming CEO was most commonly Finance at 15%, followed by General Management at 9%
• Southern and Midwestern companies have the most loyal CEOs with 26%-27% having spent their entire career with the company
• The industry containing the most S&P 500 companies is “Computer & Electronic Product Manufacturing”
• CEOs of Utilities companies have the shortest company tenure at 8 years
• CEOs of Utilities companies were the most highly educated; Printing, Publishing & Related Support Activities the least educated

If I wanted to join the rat race, I think this study looks like a blueprint to become CEO. Just follow the most commonly followed paths of these CEOs and you’re sure to be a success…right?

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Naomi Oreskes published an essay which summarized her 2004 lecture on a survey she performed of 928 papers relevant to global climate change. Of these papers, 75% either explicitly or implicitly supported the theory that global climate change is man made. The other 25% of the papers took no position on whether climate change was man made, but they did not deny it. This paper is one of the primary sources cited as proof of scientific consensus on man made climate change.

This essay leaves one to wonder why papers by people like Richard Lindzen are not part of the 928 Mrs. Oreskes studied. Mr. Lindzen is clearly opposed to the theory of anthropogenic climate change, although he does accept climate change in general. Mr. Lindzen says of his criticism of the anthropogenic warming’s lack of an alternative cause, “The notion that if you’re ignorant of something and somebody comes up with a wrong answer, and you have to accept that because you don’t have another wrong answer to offer is like faith healing, it’s like quackery in medicine – if somebody says you should take jelly beans for cancer and you say that’s stupid, and he says, well can you suggest something else and you say, no, does that mean you have to go with jelly beans?”.

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According to a recent study by Krista M. C. Cline and Kenneth F. Ferraro of Purdue University, Christians tend to overeat. Jared Binder of the Dallas Observer, observes:

“There’s this thing in the Bible called gluttony. The Bible says it’s a sin. But we don’t like to talk about that particular sin. We prefer to point a pudgy finger at others and decry the evils of drugs and alcohol, pornography, abortion and homosexuality. Compared to those, gluttony is just a little sin.”

and:

“So why aren’t more pastors and churches talking about it? One reason is pretty obvious. We don’t want to risk losing church members by offending anyone.”

Honestly, the obesity problem is well known to be an American epidemic. The salient point of this study is that Christians in particular have an acute need for reducing the use of food as an indulgence to replace the indulgences reduced or eliminated in other areas of our lives.