Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good weekend.
DNA Dilemma, Day Five: Time to Decide. Mary Carmichael of Newsweek is going to get a personal genomics kit. I predict it will confirm that she is a female of European descent.
Diabetes or Not, Dietary Habits of Aftrican-Americans Are Similar. Remember that there’s variance in white ancestry among African Americans. People with […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Why Do Foreigners Like Fanta So Much? I arrived in the USA as a pre-schooler, but the disappearance of Fanta from my life is actually something I wondered about back then. I had no idea that it was a Nazi-origin drink.
Chew on This: Six Dental Myths Debunked. You probably know some of these. But did […]
Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good weekend.
Death of A Language. Since I started being more pro-active about my general lack of respect for modern American cultural anthropology I’ve gotten a lot of response. On the specific question of whether linguistic diversity is inversely proportional to economic growth, I’ve gotten some mixed-responses, and find all the conclusions inconclusive (I’ve […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
If you are a regular reader, and have not done so, please take the Summer 2010 Gene Expression survey. N = 300, so I’ll stop buggin’ now and start posting results in the next day or so.
Ancient iceman’s gene map underway. Does anyone have any inside dirt on Otzi? His mtDNA was an outgroup to […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Another reminder, if you are a regular reader, and have not done so, please take the Summer 2010 Gene Expression survey.
Assortative mating, regression and all that: offspring IQ vs parental midpoint. Very sad: “For n = 3 (parental midpoint of 145) the mean for the kids would be 127 and the probability of exceeding 145 […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
First, if you are a regular reader, and have not done so, please take the Summer 2010 Gene Expression survey.
A horse is a horse, of course of course. Horses, like dogs, may be able to “read” human cues. In general intelligence dogs are less intelligent than wolves, but geniuses at this. In fact before this […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
Hope the heat is treating you well (if you live in the northern hemisphere). If you are a regular reader and haven’t taken the summer 2010 reader survey, click here.
Cultural Diversity, Economic Development and Societal Instability. A post which addresses some of the issues emerging out of my comment about the relationship between linguistic diversity […]
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 population, […]
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 enough […]
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 does […]
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 a whole […]
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Brain Size Associated With Longevity in Mammals. Doesn’t necessarily entail causation in one particular direction.
A Model for Transgenerational Imprinting Variation in Complex Traits. Easy to conceive of how these sorts of scientific models could be leveraged in public policy discussions.
The Evolutionary Case For Monogamy? Ctd One issue with eliding the distinction between the is and […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
In Defense of Difference. If Eyak language was so awesome, why wasn’t the article written in Eyak? I find the paeans to linguistic and cultural diversity tiresome and knee-jerk. In 1820 there was a relatively wide range of diversity of views in regards to slavery. No longer today. Today the diversity in attitudes toward legal […]
Daily Data Dump – Tuesday
Old Males Rule the Roost Even as Sex Drive Fades. Seems like older roosters, whose sperm are more likely to carry deleterious mutations, can still be more reproductively fit because they can expend capital earned through their life history of social dominance. This is the revenge of the vehicle against the replicator.
Personal genomics: the importance […]
Daily Data Dump – Monday
The Ethics and Etiquette of Statistical Discrimination: A Critique of Readers’ Comments. This isn’t an abstract issue of course. Insurance companies engage in statistical discrimination based on group traits, unless there are legal constraints. So, for example, the recent health care legislation eliminated by fiat the differential in premiums between males and females in […]
Daily Data Dump – Friday
Wealth and Obesity: A Bolivian Perspective. Inverted correlations of socioeconomic status and obesity in one country.
World Recovery Continues, But Risks Increase, Says IMF. Interesting how volatile economic “projections” can be as you move across a window of time.
Erotic or Disgusting? Basically making gay and straight men watch regular (including “girl-girl” bracketed) and gay porn. I’m […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
The Gender/Math Gap. Ziel takes a closer look at the SAT gender gap.
Ticking Biological Clock Increases Women’s Libido, New Research Shows. The study is from David Buss’ group, which is known for this sort of sensationalist stuff. That being said, it seems like you could turn this into a book titled “The Dirty Thirties.”
Genetic Ancestry […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Case-Control Analysis of SNPs in GLUT4, RBP4 and STRA6: Association of SNPs in STRA6 with Type 2 Diabetes in a South Indian Population. Nice to see this sort of stuff. If Reich et al. are correct that there are many population-specific disease patterns in South Asia then this level of granularity is necessary.
Huffington Post Is […]
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 […]