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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Friday
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Friday
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
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’: […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good weekend.
Immune Responses During Pregnancy Linked to Schizophrenia Among Offspring. This is a known association, but the interesting point is that there may be conditionalities to the response based on genetics. That would explain the heritability.
‘Fused’ People Eager to Die and Kill for Their Group, Research Shows. I believe that an individualist-rational focus […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Elite Isolation. This is a specific instance of a general problem. The rulers as a rule are not sampled randomly from the population. Operationally democracy often seems to turn into competitions between rival elites who are making the “best offer” to segments of the electorate.
Children and Stress. The article connects childhood stress with later life […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Genetic Components and Cultural Differences: The social sensitivity hypothesis. The frequency of genes and “memes” change in very different ways. As I have long observed while memes can be passed from only one parent, genes are constricted in sexual reproduction to being inherited in part from both parents. How the two may relate (e.g., lactase […]