The residual of the genes & geography correlation
David of the Eurogenes Genetic Ancestry Project has a cautionary post up, When is a genetic map also a geographic map? Always and never. In it, he uses a specific peculiar pattern as a launching point into a broader exploration of the relationship betw…
Around the Web – February 28th, 2011
February always goes by so fast….
Should you go to an Ivy League School, Part II. I think the value of an Ivy League degree will be more, not less, important in the future. It seems possible that we’re nearing the end of the age when the wa…
My parents, looking east and west
Yesterday Michelle decided to put up a post with her own analysis of her ADMIXTURE results. With that in mind, I thought I’d revisit some results from my parents. After many runs of ADMIXTURE, both by myself and Zack, some consistent differences …
“Content farms” and the media Precambrian
I’ve only become aware of “content farms” in any significant way over the past few days. Yes, I’m aware of Associated Content and eHow. I use Google! But I’ve always ignored them. But with Google’s turn against these…
The changing face of fame
Long time reader Dragon Horse has been generating and collecting (top row images are from Dienekes) composite image of various classes of individuals for a while now. It’s really fun to just skim through and make your own assessments (the “…
Friday Fluff – February 25th, 2011
1) First, a post from the past: “Black” & white twins again.
2) Weird search query of the week: “buff chimpanzee.”
3) Comment of the week, in response to The evolution of man is no cartoon:
I think the confounding notion here is …
Brazilians, more European than not?
Credit: Dragon Horse
The Pith: Brazil is often portrayed as the second largest black nation in the world, after Nigeria. But it turns out that the majority of the ancestors for non-white Brazilians are European.
One of the more popular sources of se…
Run as fast as you can!
Since his move to Wired I swear that Dr. Daniel MacArthur has gotten a bit more pugnacious. In any case, today he has a post up which smacks-down the A.M.A.’s attempt to expand the long arm of its regulatory capture:
The American Medical Associat…
A mental map of the world
One of the major issues in our world today is that we’re a people of specialties. This means that we don’t have basic interpretative frameworks in which to place novel facts. Because of the abstruse and formal nature of the discipline, this…
Better comprehension through visualization
Zack has started to improve on static R plots with Google powered charts. Check it out. Alas, I can’t inject script tags into the body of my posts, so that’s not feasible for me. Notice on Zack’s plot that I’m more East Asian th…
Sweeping through a fly’s genome
Credit: Karl Magnacca
The Pith: In this post I review some findings of patterns of natural selection within the Drosophila fruit fly genome. I relate them to very similar findings, though in the opposite direction, in human genomics. Different forms o…
Visualizing “typical” Eurasians
A few weeks ago I started looking at the 23andMe raw files of some of my friends and integrating them into HGDP and HapMap population data sets. One of the first things I did is remove the African populations from my total data. The reasons is as you c…
The evolution of man is no cartoon
I was semi-offline for much of last week, so I only randomly heard from someone about the “Science paper” on which Molly Przeworski is an author. Finally having a chance to read it front to back it seems rather a complement to other papers…
Tea leaves and population substructure
Image credit: Wikimol
Over the past few months I’ve been encouraging people to pull down ADMIXTURE, and push the public data sets through it. Additionally, you can also convert your 23andMe raw file into pedigree format pretty easily and integ…
The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do
Short comment: “Behavior genetics” you can use. Every potential parent should read this book.
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
Short comment: An often forgotten gem in Steven Pinker’s oeuvre. More technical than The Blank Slate.
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Short comment: Every college student should read this book. It’s a modern classic.
The 2007 crash in genome sequencing costs
Dr. Daniel MacArthur suggests:
Now, we don’t want everyone working in genomics to start using the same blue-on-grey slide to illustrate the impending datapocalypse; so I’d encourage people to download the raw data (warning: Excel file) and make th…
Personal genome in the public domain
Image credit: Vikrum Lexicon
Manu Sporny reflects on one week of being in the public domain in terms of personal genomics. I already pulled down his data, as has Zack. The whole post is fascinating, but this is really interesting: “I found out …