To
become official, "hella" would have to jump through quite a few
bureaucratic hoops. It would have to pass through the Consultative
Committee for Units (CCU), one of 10 advisory committees of the
International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM). If the CCU
recommends it the CIPM, that board must then decide whether to advance
the cause to the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM), the
official authority that can make changes to the SI system.
That international organization, based in France, includes members from 81 countries.
"I
think that for a number of reasons it's a long shot," said Ben Stein, a
spokesperson for the National Institute of Standards and Technology,
the U.S. organization that handles measurements. "The types of things
they would consider are is it needed, does it add or reduce confusion,
are the names consistent with other names associated with the prefixes?"
Sendek
argues that the name would honor the scientific contributions of
Northern Californians, who have famously popularized the phrase "hella"
to mean "a whole lot."
thinkahol * on 13 Sep 11In what may feel like a flashback to the porn wars of the '60s, a new study investigates the link between a country's relative gender equality and the degree of female "empowerment" in the X-rated entertainment it consumes. Researchers at the University of Hawaii focused on three countries in particular: Norway, the United States and Japan, which are respectively ranked 1st, 15th and (yikes) 54th on the United Nations' Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). To simplify their analysis, their library of smut was limited to explicit photographs of women "from mainstream pornographic magazines and Internet websites, as well as from the portfolios of the most popular porn stars from each nation." Then they set out to evaluate each image on both a disempowerment and an empowerment scale, using respective measures like whether the woman is "bound and dominated" by "leashes, collars, gags, or handcuffs" or "whether she has a natural looking body." Their hypothesis was that societies with greater gender equity will consume pornography that has more representations of "empowered women" and less of "disempowered women." It turned out the former was true, but, contradictory as it may sound, the latter was not. "While Norwegian pornography offers a wider variety of body types -- conforming less to a societal ideal that is disempowering to the average woman -- there are still many images that do not promote a healthy respect for women," the researchers explain. In other words, Norwegian porn showed more signs of female empowerment, but X-rated images in all three countries equally depicted women in demeaning positions and scenarios. This, the researchers surmise, "suggests that empowerment and disempowerment within pornography are potentially different constructs." So, gender equality is accompanied by sexual interest in a broader range of beauty types but not a decrease in porn's infantilization of females, use of dominating fetish gear on women or any of the other characteristics th
