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 […]
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…
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 […]
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Psychological Research Conducted in ‘WEIRD’ Nations May Not Apply to Global Populations. This is the standard objection to psychological studies in terms of the representativeness of their samples; middle class university students. But more broadly they’re Western middle class university students.
The grandmother factor: Why do only humans and whales live long past menopause? Interestingly […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
North America’s First Peoples More Genetically Diverse Than Thought, Mitochondrial Genome Analysis Reveals. The paper is free to all. Remember that this is just mtDNA, the maternal lineage. This area seems a bit confused now. The standard simple model, which is barely even a ’stylized fact’ at this point, is that a group of […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
High Rates of Sexually Transmitted Infections Among Older Swingers. This goes into the “they had to do research!?!?!” category. Older swingers are a “high risk” group, like gay men and prostitutes.
Golly, Beav, We’re Historic. I really loved Leave It To Beaver when I was a kid.
Religious Extremists Will Inherit the Earth. John Derbyshire reviews the […]
First they came for Dave Weigel
Dave Weigel of The Washington Post has resigned over his juvenile postings on an e-list. Basically the postings allowed for Weigel’s mask to slip, and showed him to be a vulgar and immature young man in some contexts. That’s no different from many of us in the proper context. The e-list is now defunct because […]
Daily Data Dump – Friday
23andMe research article finally published. Dr. Dan MacArthur offers his take on a new PLoS Genetics paper which was published using 23andMe’s user base. Of course there’s already information coming out of 23andMe’s user community not getting into the academic literature, see this comment below.
Group Solidarity and Survival. For what it’s worth, I think group […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
This Doctor Does What to 6-Year-Old Girls’ Clitorises? This reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story of a pediatrician being attacked in England because a really stupid outraged person was opposed to pedophilia. Here’s a sentence for the ages: ” Because much as Savage might like it to be, the world is not yet a […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
GDP PPP inhabitant by European region. Combining Italy or the UK into one GDP number is deceptive. Lombardy has twice the GDP PPP of much of southern Italy. The regional differences are not nearly as stark in Spain, where poor regions like Andalusia and Galicia exhibit less of a gap from prosperous regions. By the […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Sexual urges overcome cultural taboo. So it turns out that the female children of immigrants from conservative societies (South Asian and Islamic) are paying for hymen restoration surgeries. The more interesting question would be if these children become sexually conservative themselves, perpetuating the life history trajectory so that their own children have to go through […]
ResearchBlogCast #9: Genetics, Fertility, And Disease
The 9th ResearchBlogCast is up. We talk about the recent paper on cystic fibrosis genetics which I blogged.
Daily Data Dump – Friday
Subprime for Students – Why does so much federal money go to for-profit schools—and what happens when the system crashes? Steve Eisman, a Cassandra of the subprime meltdown in real estate, is now focused on the student loan & grant racket in the for-profit education industry. I have nothing against competition forcing the relatively static […]