Category Archives: Blog

The Democrats’ New Normal. It’s looking real bad. On the other hand, the Dems passed Health Care Reform. What’s the point of being in power if nothing is achieved? I’m sure the Republicans would have lost bigger if they’d passed Social Security Reform, but they would have achieved a big goal of their party.
Guardian science […]

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Vivienne Raper who analyzed the Wikio Top 100 Science Blogs left a comment below:
I’m now curious to find out why there are no ‘popular’ blogs in certain subjects. Do working condensed matter physicists who want to engage with the public write about astrophysics? Or are astrophysicists the only physicists who want to blog for the […]

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Hope you had a good weekend! Winter is not quite coming…but summer is ending.
Phoneme Inventory Size and Demography. Some original data analysis in this post! Turns out that phoneme segment length is positively correlated with population density. Too often culture is viewed as something we can only have a qualitative understanding of, but these sorts […]

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What do science bloggers blog about? My study of the Wikio Top 100:
As a former scientist, I like evidence-based blogging so I needed a dataset to test my theory that ‘all top bloggers are biologists’. To get a randomish sample of big science bloggers, I did a dodgy analysis of the blogs in the Wikio […]

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Update: Results so far….
Too harsh – 3.0%
About right – 15.0%
Not harsh enough, though he shouldn’t be ostracized – 26.0%
He should be ostracized from science – 56.0%
The editor of Cognition believes that Marc Hauser was guilty of fabrication in light of what he’s seen in the Harvard report on Hauser’s misconduct. Marc Hauser is on on leave, […]

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Have a good weekend.
The ratio of human X chromosome to autosome diversity is positively correlated with genetic distance from genes. This is in my RSS, but not on the Nature site, so here’s the snip I have: “The ratio of X-linked to autosomal diversity was estimated from an analysis of six human genome sequences […]

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Essential Science Fiction Movies. People always put Metropolis on the list, or bemoan the fact that they haven’t seen it. What do you think of it? I quite enjoyed, but much of the greatness of the film seems to be that it prefigured so much of what was to come.
The Real Estate Collapse. Jonah Lehrer […]

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Welcome (and Welcome Back) to FiveThirtyEight. Nate Silver moves to The New York Times. Now if only we could get rid of those stupid made up “trend stories.”
Image of inflation adjusted home prices 1890-2006. Crazy! Classic case of a bubble, but it really hasn’t popped. And the government will try and make sure it doesn’t.

Moderate […]

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Glenn Beck Wrong on Darwin: How Evolution Affirms the Oneness of Humankind. I can see where the individual is coming from, but I think more people should just come out say that evolution is just science, and has no deeper moral implications besides those which humans impute to it. No one cares about the […]

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I began blogging in April 2002 (I once had a graduate student approach me and tell me that she was a big fan of my blog back in high school!). Derek Lowe is the only science blogger I can think of off the top of my head who was around before I was, is still […]

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I hope you had a good weekend.
Why is Israel So Poor? Israel is a nation with a high level of human capital and moderate wealth. The author points out that Israel is a “low trust” society. It is not often remembered that Israel is arguably the most ethnically diverse developed society in the world, because […]

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I found out this week that the idea of the “Noble Savage” is erroneously attributed to Jean Jacques Rosseau. I haven’t read much Rosseau myself, so I’m familiar with the general shape of his ideas through the filters of later interpreters. But even if I’d consumed the great man’s oeuvre in totality I wonder if […]

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Have a good weekend.
More Evidence for Hauser’s Scientific Misconduct. Stuff like this keeps bubbling up from anonymous “sources.”
Excessive regulation of DTC genomics will come at a cost. Sometimes the cost is tangible in terms of slower innovation, but sometimes it is straightforward in monetary terms as increased prices to jump through regulatory hurdles. Not that […]

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[View with PicLens]

Clean

Face Off

Delicious

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Just noticed that there’s a new site, scienceblogging, at scienceblogging.org. It’s basically an aggregator. One-stop-shopping I guess.

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Which population is most genetically distant from Africans?. Dienekes argues that Amerindians are the furthest not due to bottlenecks, but because of isolation from gene flow. He points to particular markers which span Africa and Eurasia. I know of the one he’s talking about. I need to rethink whether the first approximation of no […]

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Overweight American Children and Adolescents Becoming Fatter. Reports that the increases in obesity are not equally distributed across socioeconomic segments. So not only is there is a change in the mean, it looks the variance is increasing.
News from the west: Ancient DNA from a French megalithic burial chamber. Another paper which indicates we might need […]

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How much of the genome is transcribed? Or, the utility of a good genome browser. One of the issues with science today are the necessary capital inputs which make it such a narrow and focused vocation. But there are lots of things you as an individual can discern by poking around the public tools.
‘Mitochondrial Eve’: […]

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Dogs’ Family Status Depends on Family’s Locale. “People who think of their pets as their children often re-evaluate this thought when they have human children of their own.”
The Politics of Ideas : Hauser Gone Wild. “Must read” post on “Hausergate.”
Low Loan Repayment Is Seen at For-Profit Schools. They attract weak students. No wonder they don’t […]

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300/358
Razib Khan