Hasta La Gadget!

Launch, climb, refuel, fly-low, attack a ground target, lob virtual missiles at Flankers, then do some intense night combat training, it all happens in this fantastic Armée de l’Air video showcasing the Dassault Rafale’s deadly capabilities . Just seeing a glimpse of the Rafale’s cutting-edge avionics and pilot interface in action is worth the price of admission!

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Couldn’t make it to Las Vegas this weekend to check out the first PlayStation Experience? Well, we’ve got you covered with a livestream of the event right after the break. If the official image above is any indication, we can expect to hear quite a b…

Sitting in elementary sex ed, I saw an image that would stay planted in my mind for years, inspiring endless curiosity and eventually leading to my sex writing career: a medical sketch of a man with an erection. When the teacher described erections as often pleasurable, I was stunned. I also wondered what wacky shift in my own body would bring similar pleasure. Something good must happen to females, right?

Finally, a woman appeared on the screen! Then… tampons. Maxi pads. Facts about the cramps, bleeding and bloating I would experience for one-quarter of my fertile life. It seemed unfair, and it was. Throughout the remainder of my sex education, female sexual pleasure was never explored — a far too common scenario. 

On my sexuality radio show and podcast, I often ask guests and listeners what they learned about sex early on. Most women tell me they either learned nothing or that sex is dirty, sinful and “slutty.” One woman told me she stopped trying to orgasm because she’d tried and “failed.” Lots of women don’t, she said, so what’s the big deal? We learn about sexual pleasure through experience, but typically not until we’ve learned myths that can hinder it.

Images of sex better suited to mainstream porn are splashed about the media, suggesting that we must look and act unrealistic ways to feel and appear sexy, while actual porn promotes unrealistic notions of sex commonly perceived as fact. While guys think with their penises, we’re taught, many gals would rather fake an orgasm to get sex over with or cry “headache!” to bypass it. When we have sex, there’s a significant chance we won’t experience orgasm. That’s what many headlines suggest, after all. So it must be true, right?

Thankfully, no.

Many headlines and statistics cited throughout the media regarding female sexuality, I’ve learned, derive from myths or studies that are outdated, misinterpreted or blown way out of proportion. Here are just a few common examples.

MYTH: Orgasms elude most women.

The Big O could stand for omitted, as far as many women are concerned — at least that’s what many headlines suggest. A popular ABC report from September 2009 touting the header, “Sex Study Says Female Orgasm Eludes Majority of Women” explores data collected nearly a century ago — one of the least empowering eras for women, when Sigmund Freud’s beliefs, such as that women are “mutilated and must learn to accept their lack of a penis,” were considered fact. Is it any wonder, then, that participants were struggling with sexual “frigidity” — or the inability to orgasm?

The other study cited analyzed 100 females within the last 80 years, 11 of whom reported never having climaxed. Based on participants’ commentary versus physiology, the study didn’t account for the fact that women are significantly less likely to discuss or understand their sexuality than men. The article concluded that 11 percent (or 10 to 15 percent) of women never orgasm — a statistic commonly used to convey low orgasm rates among women.

MYTH: Women peak sexually in their 30s.

This idea derives from one small study published in 1953 — when making the perfect pot roast rather ranked high among female expectations. Researcher Alfred Kinsey determined that female participants in their 30s were more likely to orgasm than younger women. I don’t know about you, but my 20s weren’t exactly my most confident — which seems to play a huge role in female sexual pleasure.

A recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine analyzed the sexual lives and beliefs regarding sex of over 600 women ages 40 to 65 for eight years, and found that women who have positive attitudes about sex are three times more likely to stay pleasurably sexually active during middle-age than other women — regardless of physical factors linked with low libido, such as menopause.

MYTH: Women are less “visual” than men.

If men were “hardwired” to lust after lithe yet large-busted women, Barbie’s physique would commonly occur, sans starvation diets and plastic surgery. Instead, men are taught and expected to look and lust over such imagery of which the media provides an endless overt supply.

While we gals may not find that same supply enticing (and may find it a turn off), we’re no less visual than men. Recent research, including studies conducted by Meredith Chivers PhD, an associate professor at Queens University, show that women and men are equally physically aroused by visual stimuli, but women aren’t as likely to recognize or discuss it. 

A Difficult Science

Not only are studies on female sexuality limited and often misconstrued within the public, but it’s incredibly difficult to accurately assess factors like arousal when doing so either requires volunteers (who likely already have positive sexual attitudes, or why would they volunteer?) or surveys, which require women to share openly what society suggests they stay silent or shameful about. As far as we’ve come in many ways regarding sexuality in our culture, we have such a long way to go.

Keeping it in Perspective

All studies on female sexuality, even those with limitations, are valuable. But in a world in which few people read beyond the headline, misleading titles and statistics can sway people’s views unnecessarily and end up cited elsewhere — and we all know how the game Telephone pans out.

As the study I mentioned early illustrates, our beliefs about sexuality play a major role in how healthy and happy our intimate lives — arguably, our entire lives — will be. I don’t know about you, but I say we make the most of them. Read the articles, but don’t let them feed or cultivate negative attitudes you hold about your body or sexuality. And if you have a question about information you’ve learned or long believed, ask it. Challenge it. Explore it. You may not end up making a career out of your curiosity, but I’m almost sure you’ll gain your just rewards.

Need something to lord over your friends? How about a royal-sounding title in front of your name?

The HuffPost Weird News team became real Lords and Ladies this week, and all it took was buying a square-foot plot in Scotland for $50. Stephen Rossiter of Highland Titles sat down for the HuffPost Weird News Podcast — which you can download, subscribe to and rate on iTunes — to promise that his program isn’t as intangible as the International Star Registry, because your cash goes toward a real plot of land that you can go stand on.

We now own a plot on the Glencoe Wood Nature Reserve (though we can’t build any permanent structures there, sadly) and we invite you to do the same. Lords and Ladies of Weird, let’s take over Scotland. Listen to our podcast below to find out how, and get your titles here.

And unlike most of the do-nothing, inbred royals you read about in celebrity rags, you can be a lord or lady who actually does something. All proceeds go to protect Scotland’s famed countryside.

From now on, please refer to me by the titled bestowed upon me by God and Scotland: Lord Andy Campbell pic.twitter.com/UE7icu61Ls

— Andy Campbell (@AndyBCampbell) December 2, 2014

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“In a startup, no business plan survives first contact with customers.” – Steve Blank

It’s becoming clear that lean startup practices are not just for young tech ventures anymore. Almost every large company understands that it needs to deal with ever-increasing external threats by continually innovating. To ensure their survival and growth, corporations need to keep inventing new business models. This challenge requires entirely new organizational structures and skills. The lean startup approach has arrived just in time to help existing companies deal with the forces of continual disruption with tactics to help them meet it head-on, innovate rapidly and transform business as we know it.

The lean startup framework and methodology was first proposed by Eric Ries. This framework and methodology is largely credited to the work and theories developed by Stanford professor, bestselling author and entrepreneur Steve Blank, who mentored Eric Ries. In 2012 the Harvard Business Review listed Blank as one of the “Masters of Innovation.” The lean startup framework favors experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over traditional “big design up front” development. Despite the methodology’s name, in the long term some of its biggest payoffs may be gained by the large companies that embrace it, something that Blank discovered last year when he was asked by Harvard Business Review to write about how the lean startup would impact corporations.

Steve Blank – (Twitter: @sgblank)

Blank discovered that the nature of the corporation had changed dramatically in the last 15 years. Every large company is dealing with “continuous disruption”, so companies are now looking to startups to do continuous innovation. For the first time ever a number of large corporations are realizing that in order to survive, they need to innovate at a speed that they have never had to before. The real conundrum lies in the dilemma that the tools, strategies, policies and procedures needed to innovate are the antithesis of the execution tools that corporations have spent the last century building, something that Clayton Christensen articulated brilliantly in the Innovators Dilemma. “Everything that corporations do from the HR manual, to the comp plan for sales, to the branding guidelines puts a roadblock into innovation that startups don’t face, and that’s the irony. That’s why startups move so fast,” says Blank who believes that corporations can look to the tactics of lean startups to start to articulate what the actual tools are that they would use to solve this problem.

“The company that consistently makes and implements decisions rapidly gains a tremendous, often decisive, competitive advantage.” – Steve Blank

We are seeing some of these lean tactics being taken into large companies and Blank feels that the companies that master continuous innovation, like Amazon and Apple, by continuously coming out with process improvements, business model improvements or disruptive innovations will have a 30 or 50 year trajectory.

3 Ways Corporations Can Accelerate Continuous Innovation

1. Sketch out your hypotheses – One of the critical differences between a startup and an existing corporation is that while existing companies execute a business model, startups look for one. This distinction is at the heart of the lean startup approach. It shapes the lean definition of a startup: a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Rather than engaging in months of planning and research, entrepreneurs accept that all they have on day one is a series of untested hypotheses–basically, good guesses. So instead of writing an intricate business plan, founders summarize their hypotheses in a framework called a business model canvas.

“This evidence-based entrepreneurship is not just based on guessing, it’s based on the fact that we are now talking to a ton of people,” says Blank. When Blank teaches this lean process at Stanford, Columbia and NYU in a class which has also been adopted by the U.S. National Science Foundation Innovation Corps as an important foundation for technology transfer between the federal government and the private sector, students go out and talk to hundreds of customers in an incredibly short period of time, and they’ve basically tested hypotheses and validated or invalidated them and have a ton of data points about all the components of a business model canvas.

2. Listen to customers – Lean startups use a “get out of the building” approach called customer development to test their hypotheses. They go out and ask potential users, purchasers and partners for feedback on all elements of the business model, including product features, pricing, distribution channels and affordable customer acquisition strategies. The emphasis is on nimbleness and speed: New ventures rapidly assemble minimum viable products and immediately elicit customer feedback. Then, using customers’ input to revise their assumptions, they start the cycle over again, testing redesigned offerings and making further small adjustments (iterations) or more substantive ones (pivots) to ideas that aren’t working.

“Entrepreneurship isn’t a career choice it’s a passion and obsession.” – Steve Blank

Blank says that when you get out of the building and talk to people, you will likely find that your initial hypotheses are wrong. “We now know that startups and new ventures go from failure to failure. What we want to do is make that failure learning and make a change to the business model canvas, which is called the pivot.” A pivot is a substantive change to any component of the business model canvas, based on customer data and real evidence. Not one data point, but a bunch of experiments. The combination of talking to people (incremental prototypes) and iterative experiments (iterative prototypes), is called minimum viable products and there is not just one, there is a serious of them and they change over time.

3. Adopt an agile development process – Lean startups practice something called agile development, which originated in the software industry. Agile development works hand-in-hand with customer development. Unlike typical year long product development cycles that presuppose knowledge of customers’ problems and product needs, agile development eliminates wasted time and resources by developing the product incrementally and through iteration. It’s the process by which startups create the minimum viable products they test through iterative prototypes.

“What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile.” – Steve Blank

“We use this agile engineering model, but we couple it with this customer development philosophy and the business model canvas so that we are actually using agile engineering to test all of the hypothesis of the business,” says Blank.

In closing, Blank gives the following advice to corporations looking to utilize these lean startup tactics: “If I was in a corporate organization, I would really be thinking about not lean or any of this stuff. Those are just buzzwords. I would be thinking about what the competition looks like, asking if we have the infrastructure to be responsive and looking at how to apply those innovation tools from early-stage ventures.”

You can watch the full interview with Steve Blank here. Please join me and Michael Krigsman every Friday at 3PM EST as we host CXOTalk – connecting with thought leaders and innovative executives who are pushing the boundaries within their companies and their fields.