A map of genome blogging participants
Both Eurogenes and Harappa now have map interfaces where you can drop in the origin of your location if you’re a participant. If you have submitted your data you should add your information in. We’re at a point where data is relatively plen…
Where people use their information appliances
In the U.S., Tablets are TV Buddies while eReaders Make Great Bedfellows:
Fast Company has a write up of the survey, concluding:
What can we learn from this data? Smart gadgets are pervasive. They’re already changing long-held habits, and doing …
Adam was African, but perhaps barely
The figure to the left comes from a short paper in The American Journal of Human Genetics, A Revised Root for the Human Y Chromosomal Phylogenetic Tree: The Origin of Patrilineal Diversity in Africa. The paper is interesting because of two factors: 1) …
Don’t buy AIBioTech Sports X Factor kit!
I’ve been pretty vocal about the impending specter of genetic paternalism in relation to personal genomics, which I believe to be futile in the long term, and likely to squelch innovation in the United States in the short term. Like any new produ…
Friday Fluff – May 20th, 2011
1) First, a post from the past: Pentecostals are stupid? Unitarians are smart?.
2) Weird search query of the week: “aki kaurismaki”
3) Comment of the week, in response to “Fixing science, in part”:
In one of Ben Goldacre’s …
Organismic complexity is just duct tape
The Pith: Biological complexity may be a particular evolutionary path taken due to to random acts of nature, not because there is a selective advantage to complexity.
The title above basically describes the message of evolutionary biologist Mike Lynch …
Kindle books outsell print books on Amazon
Amazon: Kindle books outselling all print books. This is more something I’d put on pinboard, but this requires noting more prominently. The figure itself isn’t important, but it is a marker for a silent transition occurring as we shift med…
Fixing science, in part
The GiveWell Blog has some suggestions for “Suggestions for the Social Sciences”. Here is the big one:
Our single biggest concern when examining research is publication bias, broadly construed. We wonder both (a) how many studies are done,…
Fashionable bipedalism
There’s a new story blowing up in the media about the origins of bipedalism through male-male competition. The hook is good enough that the headlines write themselves. For example, io9 has a sober and skeptical review of the paper, but the title …
Be “cool” while you can
Blaine Bettinger, who released his genotypes into the “public domain,” has a post up, My Genome Online – A Challenge To You:
I’ve already done a fair amount of analysis myself, including the Promethease reports above (and see here), and…
Anglosphere comparisons
The most interesting chart below is infant mortality rate over time.
Sheril Kirshenbaum’s Convergence
Her new blog is live over at Wired, Convergence:
Convergence is a forum to explore all sorts of topics, but the primary focus will be the interdisciplinary nature of understanding our world. For example, if we aspire to protect biodiversity, we must ad…
A map of charismatic canid genomic variation
The Pith: Wolves and coyotes exhibit geographic population structure. The red wolf may “only” be a coyote with a minor admixture of wolf, instead of a “real species.”
I like dogs. For various structural reasons I am not able to …
Do you live near a food desert?
I really like visualization of statistical information, but sometimes you need a reality check. People with local information really can add value. For example, I apparently live a few blocks away from the edge of a “food desert” according …
Make money first, then find your church
The New York Times has a weird article up, Is Your Religion Your Financial Destiny?, which digests the Pew Religious Landscape Survey descriptive statistics on the demographics of American religious denominations. It’s kind of a strange piece be…
There was scale and structure before history
Until relatively recently the spread of agriculture in Europe, and to some extent the whole world, was pigeon-holed into two maximalist models: cultural or demographic diffusionist. Neither of these models were maximalist in that they denied the impac…
The genetic complexity of prehistoric Sweden
Thanks to the fact that northern Europe is cool and archaeological research is rather well developed in the region due to quirks of history, there are lots of findings from ancient DNA which are answering long-standing questions. In particular Scandin…
The Atlantic features “headless fattie”
I was browsing the front page of The Atlantic and I noticed that it featured a “headless fattie.” This is the standard illustration of obese people in the American media which omits their heads, and tends to focus on their mid-section. You …
Saudi Arabia, where monkey became man?
As late as the 1980s it is reputed that prominent Saudi clerics were making the case for geocentrism. Of course presumably most Saudis are not geocentrists, but their religious establishment is so calcified that medieval science still retains some hold…
An Assyrian genotype for the taking (and more)
When my friend offered to allow me to throw his 1,000,000 marker genotype out into the public domain last week I did understand that this would be of marginal utility in and of itself. After all there are many Ashkenazi genotypes out there, and he didn…