Open Thread, September 25th, 2010
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is in my “stack,” though I don’t know when I’ll get to it. A few things I’ve been wrong about in the last 10 years:
– I was more optimistic about reproducible I.Q. QTLs in 2000 than I should have been. Here’s a 1998 article on Robert Plomin’s […]
Friday Fluff – September 24th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Historical Dynamics and contingent conditions of religion
2. Weird search query of the week: “porn makes you straight.”
3. Comment of the week, in response to Swedes are not sexist or nativist:
I’ve been living in Sweden for somewhat more than a year now. I previously lived in Canada, the […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Nobel-winning brain researcher retracts two papers. Looks like there’s the typical blame-it-on-the-Asian going on here, so perhaps this won’t blow up.
In Our Time is back. This week: Imaginary Numbers.
“200 genes potentially associated with academic performance in schoolchildren”. Most genes of small effect. We’ll see. Don’t get too excited yet, you might be disappointed.
Through the […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Freshman Weight Gain: Women With Heavy Roommates Gain Less, Study Finds. I guess the model makes sense, but it really makes one wonder about the power of prior expectations about these sorts of things. There just so many plausible stories for any given set of data.
Why Does Spicy Food Taste Hot? The feeling of “heat” […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Price’s Second Equation. David B continues his technical review of the Price Equation.
Selective pressures for accurate altruism targeting: evidence from digital evolution for difficult-to-test aspects of inclusive fitness theory. “Our investigations also revealed that evolution did not increase the altruism level when all green beard altruists used the same phenotypic marker.” Read a university press […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
Summer is almost over.
What was malt liquor? The history of malt liquor, and also Pabst Blue Ribbon. No idea that malt liquor used to have an upscale association.
The Genetics & Linguistics Of Central Asia. Excellent overview from a somewhat different angle from my own. Excellent map.
Cousin marriage in the UK and genetic testing. John Hawks […]
Open Thread – September 18th, 2010
Last weekend of summer. I plan to have my reviews of The Invisible Gorilla and The Lost History of Christianity up very soon. I recommend both heartily! Next in the stack: Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain. A question was asked about the focus on extremes when it came to perceptions of the genetic influence […]
Melody Dye & Jason Goldman on BHTV
Just wanted to give a shout-out to my friend Jason Goldman who has a discussion up at bloggingheads.tv with his co-blogger at Child’s Play Melody Dye. Recommended.
Friday Fluff – September 17th, 2010
1. First, a post from the past: Why patriarchy?
2. Weird search query of the week: “pygmy porno.”
3. Comment of the week, in response to More exercise = more I.Q.?:
but how does this explain Steven Hawkings , he has a great IQ and is on a wheelchair!
4) Poll question….
(last week’s results were 75% Dawkins, 25% Gould)
5) […]
Discover Blogs, a voice for the Other 85%
Today I was curious what people thought of Wired Science Blogs. More honestly, I was really trying to see if anyone else was a little put off by the forced registration to comment. But in the process I ran into this post, In which I notice a trend. The author did some counting before talking, […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Detecting positive natural selection from genetic data. “I’ve tried to avoid the alphabet soup of acronyms for tests for selection in the above discussion.” Eminently readable.
A New Power Broker Rises in Italy. An article about the Northern League. The inclusion of Tuscany indicates a “broad church” vantage point. An indication of the mishmash of policies […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Genome-wide analysis of a long-term evolution experiment with Drosophila. Interesting: “in our sexual populations, adaptation is not associated with ‘classic’ sweeps whereby newly arising, unconditionally advantageous mutations become fixed. More parsimonious explanations include ‘incomplete’ sweep models, in which mutations have not had enough time to fix, and ‘soft’ sweep models, in which selection acts on […]
The seeds of another science blogging network
Alert! Some Big And Important And Exciting News!:
So yes, I will be working with the Scientific American editors and staff in conceptualizing, building, launching and then running a new science blogging network. How could I say No when given such a chance? To do what I love and what I think I can do well, […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Mike Castle trailing Christine O’Donnell in poll: What’s going on? I remember O’Donnell from her numerous appearances on Politically Incorrect in the late 1990s. She seemed sweet, but kind of dull. The media reports make her out to be a sociopath though. Here’s an old clip.
George C. Williams, 83, Theorist on Evolution, Dies. Nicholas Wade […]
Wired Science, a new science blogs network
The empire of the boy-king grows! Meet the New Wired Science All-Star Bloggers. David Dobbs and Brian Switek have already set up their domains, but Dr. Daniel MacArthur will be moving in the near future as well. And to think that Dr. Dan was just a commenter over at ScienceBlogs in the spring of 2006 […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
One last week of summer.
Models tell us more than hindsight. Tim Harford, the author of The Logic of Life, defends economics and modeling against a critique of a historian-turned-journalist. My main problem with economists isn’t that the field is formalized and expresses itself in equations. Rather, it’s the tendency to speak with greater force of […]
Open thread, September 11th, 2010
Well, it’s that day again. Nine years on, what’s changed? After Iraq, and the new quagmire in Afghanistan, it seems that our laser-like focus on what & who caused 9/11 is no longer with us. I can’t believe we haven’t caught Osama bin Laden yet. Look at what Eric Raymond is blogging about now vs. […]
Friday Fluff, September 10th, 2010
In the interests of “mixing it up” I’ve decided to try something different on Fridays (I’ve been blogging for eight years, but I’ll admit I haven’t been the most innovative of online content generators so far). I’m going to merge the cat pictures with other assorted potpourri. I envision regular features, so, for example, every […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Posting may be light, and/or I may skip link dumps, etc., around the Labor Day weekend. Mostly notifying you so you don’t ask if I’m still alive!
Immunity under natural selection. Focusing on three of the genes which showed signatures of selection in the HapMap 3 paper. It’s interesting to note that only a generation […]