Coronavirus and the experts
Trust the experts. Believe in science. These are literal mantras that are in the air today. But I have to be frank and admit that I do not trust the […]
Vital stats in South Asia
A bunch of vital stats from South Asia from Google Data Explorer. Since Zach and I started looking at these data since the early 2000s Pakistan and Bangladesh have diverged, unfortunately. I don’t understand what’s going on with Bangladesh’s anomalously high adolescent fertility though. This could be a function of variation among women as they …
No more “observational studies”!!!!
We’ve all been burned too often. Vitamin D and moderate alcohol consumption may not do anything special. Correlations and observations. Correlations and observations. Now, Red Meat Increases Risk of Dying From 9 Diseases: “This is an observational study,” said the lead author, Arash Etemadi, an epidemiologist with the National Cancer Institute, “and we can’t determine […]
The power of false positives in behavior genetics
Genomes Unzipped, Size matters, and other lessons from medical genetics: …Smaller studies, which had no power to detect these small effects, were essentially random p-value generators. Sometimes the p-values were “significant” and sometimes not, without any correlation to whether a variant was truly associated. Additionally, since investigators were often looking at only a few variants […]
Of association & evolution
Two of the main avenues of research which I track rather closely in this space are genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which attempt to establish a connection between a trait/disease and particular genetic markers, and inquiries into the evolutionary parameters which shape the structure of variation within the human genome. Often with specific relation to a particular […]
Asian Buddhists are not atheists
In response to my two posts below on atheism statistics, people in the comments and around the web (e.g., Facebook) have pointed out that Buddhism is necessarily/can be atheistic, and that Buddhism, is not/not necessarily a religion, and therefore that explains the statistics. Some of these people are lazy/stupid judging by the way the argument […]