Author: Razib Khan
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Reader Survey, summer 2010
So that reader survey that I mentioned last week is done. I’m mostly interested in seeing the changes since I’ve moved to Discover from ScienceBlogs. I assume that the standard 85% male readership has shifted somewhat toward more balance, but I don’t know. Many of the basic demographic questions (sex, race, age, etc.) are the…
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Reader survey results: Science vs. social science vs. humanities
About six months ago I did a survey of the readership of my two Gene Expression blogs (before moving to Discover). The N was around 600. You can view the raw frequency results here. One of the issues which I was curious about: did the disciplinary background of readers have any major correlates with responses?…
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Linguistic diversity, other views
Readers might find these responses of interest. Mostly I just laughed, though some of you may be a bit more serious than I, so if anthro-gibberish drives you crazy, don’t follow the links. As I told “ana” below a lot of the discussion we had was basically just talking past each other. I kept telling…
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10,000 years ago there were no “Southeast Asians”
Mexico: Ancient woman suggests diverse migration: A scientific reconstruction of one of the oldest sets of human remains found in the Americas appears to support theories that the first people who came to the hemisphere migrated from a broader area than once thought, researchers say. Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History on Thursday released…
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Open Thread – July 23rd, 2010
I was travelling on Monday so couldn’t post the open thread and then forgot. But now that I think about I think Friday would be better in any case, because I don’t post much on the weekends. So again, questions, links, what you’re reading. You know my motto, “Don’t be stupid” (fwiw, posting links to…
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Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good weekend. Ancestry-Shift Refinement Mapping of the C6orf97-ESR1 Breast Cancer Susceptibility Locus. Many single nucelotide polymorphisms associated with a risk factor may actually not be the causal agent in a mechanistic sense. It’s just very close to and tightly associated with the real genetic cause. If the tightness of that association varies by…
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Katz
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Personal genomics & the state
Dr. Daniel MacAthur & Dan Vorhaus offer their takes on the recent hearings in Congress on the direct-to-consumer genomics industry, A sad day for personal genomics & “From Gulf Oil to Snake Oil”: Congress Takes Aim at DTC Genetic Testing. I guess I lean toward light regulation. I don’t think that DTC personal genomics will…
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One principal component to rule them all?
Despite the reality that I’ve cautioned against taking PCA plots too literally as Truth, unvarnished and without any interpretive juice needed, papers which rely on them are almost magnetically attractive to me. They transform complex patterns of variation which you are not privy to via your gestalt psychology into a two or at most three…
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Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Kele’s Science Blog. Undergrad who is a double major in biology and history. Attempting to produce content, as opposed to simply opining. Yes, We Should Clone Neanderthals. Even if modern humanity decides to not do something like this (though at some point in the medium-term future I assume the technological feasibility will be a low…
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Readership survey soon (again)
Since I’ve moved to Discover Blogs I suspect my readership has changed a bit. I have the results of a previous survey from early in 2010, back when I was at ScienceBlogs, but haven’t posted on it in detail. I’ll try and do that in the next few days, but I also will put up…
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Dave Appell: remember the messenger
David Dobbs has a long measured response up to David Appell’s strange argument that Pepsi’s “free speech” rights were violated during the recent ScienceBlogs kerfuffle, by way of which he casts some aspersions on the character and agenda of specific bloggers. Here’s the thing about Appell, he has a long history of confused and surly…
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Disease as a byproduct of adaptation
How we perceive nature and describe its shape are a matter of values and preferences. Nature does not take notice of our distinctions; they exist only as instruments which aid in our comprehension. I’ve brought this up in relation to issues such as categorization of recessive vs. dominant traits. The offspring of people of […]
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Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Association of Trypanolytic ApoL1 Variants with Kidney Disease in African-Americans. Same subject as a paper I linked to a few days ago. The fact that they came out around the same date and overlap so much in topicality is a window into the competitive aspect of science. Polyandry increases offspring viability and mother productivity but…
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The Price of Altruism
A week ago I reviewed The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness. As I noted in the review, many individuals who are of interest to the core readership of this weblog make significant appearances in The Price of Altruism, John Maynard Smith and W. D. Hamilton most prominently.…
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Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Patrimony and the Evolution of Risk-Taking. Possible reason that organisms “mix it up” in behavioral morphs. John Zogby’s Cri de Coeur. Creative destruction in the polling business. What is bad for producers is often good for consumers. ‘More poor’ in India than Africa. Concentrated in the “Deep North”. The social underdevelopment of the subcontinent as…
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Knowledge is not value-free
This isn’t The New Yorker, and I’m not writing twenty page essays which flesh out all the nooks and crannies of my thought. When I posted “Linguistic diversity = poverty” I did mean to provoke, make people challenge their presuppositions, and think about what they’re saying when they say something. I think knowledge of many…
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ScienceBlogs has good blogs
I don’t have real value to add on the ScienceBlogs controversy. The only thing I want to mention is that there are some nascent superstar weblogs on that network which aren’t big names, yet, but perhaps will be. You can miss them coming in via the front page because they don’t crank out 10-15 posts…
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Daily Data Dump – Monday
A Farewell to Scienceblogs: the Changing Science Blogging Ecosystem. Bora Zivkovic is leaving ScienceBlogs, and has a very long retrospective. The only portion I would take some issue with is the ambivalence toward the introduction of bloggers who focused mostly on science and less on politics. Bora says: “In this effort to dilute politico-religious content…
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Genome-wide association for newbies
It looks like Genomes Unzipped has their own Mortimer Adler, with an excellent posting, How to read a genome-wide association study. For those outside the biz I suspect that #4, replication, is going to be the easiest. In the early 2000s a biologist who’d been in the business for a while cautioned about reading too…