Primates in Pinstripes

This month's Wired magazine contains an interesting and fulsome article on the results of recent and ongoing experiments into the effects of testosterone and cortisol on competitive behaviour.John Coates, a senior research fellow at the University of Cambridge, has taken behavioural finance in a new direction, as a former Wall street trader turned neuroscientist. A chance meeting led to an invitation to the animal behaviour lab at Manhattan's Rockefeller University, and Coates began helping out with experiments there. His own research in the City of London recently won the 2012 Wellcome Trust Book Prize for The Hour Between Dog and Wolf. To cut a long story short it's true that women outperform men in the long-term in the financial markets - to find out why, read the article. There are also a couple more pieces relating to Coates from last year - the Guardian article also discusses the gendered nature of the US Government Report on the Financial Crisis of 2008. The Huffington Post article ends with a video clip of a Wall street trader who lost his job, couldn't tell his wife, and tried to fill the gap by robbing 10 banks until he was caught. Funnily enough, he uses exactly the same reasoning as Tom Wilkinson's character in The Full Monty. I hope all this coverage doesn't deter his research subjects from collaborating in the future.


Wired Article              

Businessweek Article

Guardian Article

Huffington Post

Wellcome Book Prize

Women in Hollywood still only shine in front of the camera

Jodie Foster may have recently won a lifetime Golden Globe for her acting and directing, but opportunities for women behind the camera remain rare in Tinseltown compared with the norms for Indie films. As the New York Post puts it..

"Between 2002 and 2012, nearly a quarter of the directors at [the] Sundance [Film Festival] were women, compared with 4.4 percent for the top 100 box office films in the same period. Including cinematographers, editors, producers and writers, women accounted for 29.8 percent of the American films at Sundance, which has become synonymous with indie film. Films directed by women were also more likely to have women in other key roles behind the camera. And breaking it down further, documentaries were rife with female talent – 34.5 percent were directed by women, compared with 16.9 percent for feature films"

Here's the full article from The Mary Sue.

Thanks to my frozen McCorrespondent North of the Border for this one.