As I'm stuck a holding pattern at work, I decided to take the time to catch up on a little blog reading. Here are a few interesting links to some Deinekes' posts.

Parents take better care of pretty children
This seems to be a highly flawed study from what I can tell. It doesn't seem to take many confounding factors into consideration. For example, as far as I can tell the researchers do not take the parents attractiveness into account at all. Aren't ugly people more likely to have ugly children? In which case perhaps its not that the children are treated worse cause they're ugly but because ugly people make worse parents? Anyway, the study hardly seems rigorous but at least it's interesting.

And here are two posts on Homosexual social issues:

Gay Parents tend to have gay children
As far as I can tell they are talking about adopted children and not biological children so this seems to be due to social and cultural influence. It does not mention (at least in the Dienekes' post) whether or not the fact that homosexual children of homosexuals are more likely to be open about their orientation than homosexual children of heterosexuals is taken into account. So as far as I can tell this is not a conclusive result for the nature vs. nurture debate.

Gay men are 3.5 times- and lesbians 2.15 times more likely to be mentally ill
This is not so surprising I guess considering the amount of social stress incurred by gays and lesbians, I wonder if similar studies have been done for other minorities.