Daily Data Dump – Thursday
The Gender/Math Gap. Ziel takes a closer look at the SAT gender gap.
Ticking Biological Clock Increases Women’s Libido, New Research Shows. The study is from David Buss’ group, which is known for this sort of sensationalist stuff. That being said, it seems like you could turn this into a book titled “The Dirty Thirties.”
Genetic Ancestry […]
The short life expectancy of longevity genes (?)
When I first heard in the media there was a new study of longevity which had produced a model based on your SNP profile that was “77% accurate” as to whether you’d live to the age of 100 or not, I assumed this was confusion or distortion (perhaps The Daily Mail had broken embargo first […]
The ScienceBlogs hegira
I was going to post a set of links for the weblogs from ScienceBlogs who have left for new digs, but Skull in the Stars is tracking it. Probably best to check in this weekend if you’re really curious, some people are still in wait-and-see mode.
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Case-Control Analysis of SNPs in GLUT4, RBP4 and STRA6: Association of SNPs in STRA6 with Type 2 Diabetes in a South Indian Population. Nice to see this sort of stuff. If Reich et al. are correct that there are many population-specific disease patterns in South Asia then this level of granularity is necessary.
Huffington Post Is […]
Don’t genetically profile yourself just yet…perhaps
Newsweek has a long piece up which reviews some major issues with the new study of centenarians that’s been all over the media right now. Ed Yong already covered the paper, but I’m going to look at the details myself. Here’s a update from the Newsweek post:
Within an hour of this story’s publication, the Science […]
Liberal Creationists Are Not Very Intelligent
A comment below about intelligent people who believe in dumb ideas made me want to revisit the Creationism demographics in the GSS. More on point I wanted to look at the relationship between IQ and Creationism crossed with demographic variables. I used the WORDSUM variable as a proxy for IQ (the correlation is ~0.70). WORDSUM […]
Malnutrition now, arthritis later?
Of Moose and Men: 50-Year Study Into Moose Arthritis Reveals Link With Early Malnutrition:
“As the study entered its second decade there was increasing evidence of Osteoarthritis (OA) in the moose population,” said lead author Rolf Peterson from Michigan Technological University. “OA is a crippling disease and is identical to that found in humans. It is […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Poutine. It sounds gross, and it looks gross. Apparently Canadians eat it.
More on Tibet, demography and selection. John Hawks posts an exchange with Rasmus Nielsen, who did a lot of the statistical analysis on the recent Tibet & altitude papers. Read the whole thing, but this part was funny: “I certainly now understand why politicians […]
Diplomacy among the aliens
One of the structural difficulties with any systematic study of civilizations is that the sample size of the category is rather small, as is clear in the few attempts to examine their progression (see Arnold Toynbee). Additionally, there’s always the problem with how one generates a typology for something as fluid as civilization. Where does antiquity […]
How Lost Should Have Ended
So I’ve never watched an episode of Lost. And I probably never will as people keep saying that the finale made following all those seasons kind of pointless. But could someone interpret the following video? I don’t get what’s so amusi…
Sometimes it just tastes good Felix
The more you know, the better it tastes:
People like LaForge don’t want altitude information on their coffee because they prefer 1700m coffee to 1400m coffee. Instead, Intelligentsia is supplying something much more important and valuable: a unique narrative. It’s the same thing that’s going on in the wine world….
I agree that the “story” or our […]
The Human Edge (on NPR)
NPR has a series on Morning Edition titled “The Human Edge,” which explores human evolution and genetics. The first episode is up, Finding Our Inner Fish. They focus on Neil Shubin’s work (also, some reporting on what fish can tell us about human skin color on All Things Considered).
As a constructive criticism, I wonder if […]
Authenticity and the Fermi paradox
I know that the simplest explanation for the Fermi paradox is that we’re the first intelligent technological life form in the universe. But thinking about Paul Bloom’s thesis that a sense of “authenticity” is necessary for pleasure made me wonder a bit more about the possibility that once intelligent life forms get to the point […]
7/5/2010 Open Thread
I think it is probably best to have a weekly open thread for links and what not of interest. So I’ll just do this every week (in fact, I’m going to schedule a bunch ahead), and leave links or pointers. I suppose people could ask questions too, as a lot of my blog posts which […]
Who are you….
Edmund Yong has rebooted the “Who are you?” meme. I’ll quote him:
So let’s do it again. In the comments below, tell me who you are, what your background is and what you do. What’s your interest in science and your involvement with it? How did you come to this blog, how long have you been […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
Noting rejection rates for journals across disciplines (from 1967). A review of an old paper which shows that the natural sciences have higher acceptance rates of papers than softer fields. How does this align with the finding that softer fields have more “positive” results? I think part of the issue is that in more ideological […]
British multiculturalism in action
Family of ‘Harry Potter’ actress charged with threatening to kill her over boyfriend:
The strict Muslim father and brother of “Harry Potter” actress Afshan Azad have been charged with threatening to kill her because she has a boyfriend.
Azad, 22, fled the suburban English home she shared with her father, Abdul, 54, mother, Nilofar, and three brothers […]
This time it’s different
I’ve been hearing about structural adjustment due to technology and gains to productivity from people since the early 1990s. The sort of dynamic which motivated the original Luddites. But this chart from Calculated Risk makes me lean toward the proposition that the time is nigh. In relation to previous post-World War II recessions the big […]
Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good 4th for those who live in the States.
Fast selection in high altitude, but how fast? I’m not surprised that John Hawks has serious reservations about the population history of the model in the paper I reviewed below.
Epigenetics and the Importance of a Nurturing Society. I don’t mind the normatively directed focus on […]
Why Tibetans breathe so easy up high
I said yesterday I would say a bit more about the new paper on rapid recent high altitude adaptation among the Tibetans when I’d read the paper. Well, I’ve read it now. Sequencing of 50 Human Exomes Reveals Adaptation to High Altitude:
Residents of the Tibetan Plateau show heritable adaptations to extreme altitude. We sequenced […]