Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good Labor Day weekend!
Catholics and the Evolving Cosmos. And yet 35% of American Roman Catholics are Creationists according to the GSS.
23andMe kits at some discount, with a subscription to the “personal genome service” for at least 3 months. Normal complete edition is about $500, with the discount it’s about $300 + 3 X […]
European man, Y chromosomes & tea leaves
Sometimes in applied fields artistic license is constrained by the necessity of function to particular creative channels. Architecture comes to mind, at least before innovative technologies produced lighter and stronger materials, freeing up form from its straitjacket (whether this was a positive development is a matter of taste). But there’s only so much you can […]
Fertility by non-Hispanic white ethnic group, etc.
In my post on American fertility rates by racial group Mike Keesey asks: ‘It’d also be interesting to see what’s going on within “non-Hispanic whites”.’ One can explore this question in the GSS. Let’s look at ancestry group (e.g., German, French, etc.), religion, belief in God, political ideology, intelligence and education, for non-Hispanic whites. The […]
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 […]
Which American racial group has the lowest fertility?
Update: Also see breakdowns among non-Hispanic white ancestry groups.
The really sad events around the Discovery Channel hostage situation, and the subsequent death of James Lee, made me wonder a little bit about total fertility rates. Lee seems to have had sentiments very similar to some of the anti-humanists within the Deep Ecology movement. Unlike the […]
HapMap 3: more people ~ more genetic variation
Across the ~3 billion or so base pairs in the human genome there’s a fair amount of variation. That variation can be partitioned into different classes, somewhat artificial constructions of human categorization systems, but nevertheless mapping on to real demographic or life history events of particular importance. Some of the variation is specific to populations, […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Hello September!
Announcing PLoS Blogs. This looks to be a season of shakeups and transitions in the science blogosphere. Expect some more in the near future from what I’ve been told.
Oh, No, It’s a Girl! South Asians Flock to Sex-Selection Clinics in U.S.. There’s variation in sex ratio bias within India, and it is notable one […]
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 […]
The New World in three easy steps
One aspect of human demographic expansions seems to be the fact that we often model them as a constant diffusion process, when in reality there were likely pulses (economic historians can conceive of this as the periodic gaps between land and labor factor inputs). I don’t know much about the human movements prior to H. […]
Science with soul sells
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 […]
Open Thread – August 30th, 2010
I always forget about open threads! Anyone read any good books over the summer? Bad ones to avoid? I’ll have a review of The Tenth Parallel up soon, but after reading it, and several other books…I’m beginning to think that for most Americans they should stick to American history if they want to read history. […]
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 […]
10 Questions for Hugh Pope
I have posted a Q & A with author Hugh Pope over at Discover. Other 10 Questions can be found here.
When the ancients were wise
I picked up The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization on the run, as I was about go traveling somewhere. I didn’t look at the contents or even the jacket summary very closely. My interest specifically was to get to know a little more about the Abbassid House of Wisdom, which like […]
What do science bloggers blog about
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 […]
God’s trade
One of the issues with pre-modern trade is that international banking and communication as we understand it did not exist, and trust was a major problem across distance and time. This is why dispersed ethno-religious groups could be the vectors by which private trade occurred between civilizations, because there was a circle of trust which […]
Marc Hauser’s consequences
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, […]
Nigerians agree despite religious differences
I am currently reading Eliza Griswold’s The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. The first half of the book is about Africa, and much of that is given to religious conflict in Nigeria. Africa’s most populous nation happens to be split down the middle religiously, with a Muslim north and a […]
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 […]