Open thread – August 8th, 2010
Didn’t get to looking into papers from last week’s open thread…but I will. But as usual, comments, links, etc. While I have your attention, my twitter feed is here. I don’t post what I’m eating or anything, but it’s …
Google Wave is dead
Did you notice that Google Wave was put out of its misery? I didn’t. I guess that says something about Wave’s impact. By the end of last year my main association with Wave was that it was a way for people I was trying to avoid in other ways to recontact me. So what’s happening […]
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 […]
Republicans, the middle class party
In my post below I refuted the contention that the Democrats are the party of the rich. As I noted there is some evidence that the super-rich may tilt Democrat. There are some economic and social sectors which lean Democratic because of their social liberalism, but there is no preponderance that I have seen in […]
Republicans still the party of the rich
I notice that Roger L. Simon has an uninformed post up, The Party of the Rich, where he says:
Back when I was a kid, we used to assume the Republicans were the party of the rich. It was a given — all those plutocrats with chauffeurs shuttling them between the penthouse in Sutton Place and […]
Information explosion & transparent society
No anonymity on future web says Google CEO:
“There was five exabytes [five billion gigabytes] of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,” he said. “But that much information is now created every two days, and the pace is increasing… People aren’t ready for the technology revolution that’s going to happen to them.
…
The bulk […]
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 […]
Social science isn’t “science”?
Update: The title is way too strong as a reflection of my opinion. I’ve added a question mark.
A friend once observed that you can’t have engineering without science, making the whole concept of “social engineering” somewhat farcical. Jim Manzi has an article in City Journal which reviews the checkered history of scientific methods as […]
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 […]
Koreans, not quite the purest race?
PLoS One has a paper out on Korean (South) population genetics and phylogeography, Gene Flow between the Korean Peninsula and Its Neighboring Countries:
SNP markers provide the primary data for population structure analysis. In this study, we employed whole-genome autosomal SNPs as a marker set (54,836 SNP markers) and tested their possible effects on genetic ancestry […]
Finland, still going its own way
Dienekes points to a new paper which highlights genetic variation in Fenno-Scandinavia (or in this case, Finland, Sweden and Denmark). A two-dimensional plot with the variation is pretty illustrative of what you’d expect:
Finns are genetic outliers in Europe, to some extent even in comparison to Estonians, who speak a very similar language. But, I wonder […]
Reader survey results: politics
Since the reader survey is topping out in response, I though I’d report some of the results. Since I’ve been doing these surveys my readership has exhibited a few patterns, and I was curious as to any changes since moving to Discover. Not too much has shifted. Instead of 15% female, as was the case […]
ResearchBlogCast #11
ResearchBlogCast #11: Using The Genome To Identify Species. Check out Kevin Zelnio for more details. We also talk about the ScienceBlogs kerfuffle a bit at the beginning.
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 […]
The Anglo Revolutions
Over my lifetime in the United States there has been a shift toward a set of values which emphasize diversity, understood as being expressed along a few particular parameters: racial, sexual and ethnic. Part of the project is obviously concrete: increased representation of various segments within American society at the commanding heights of institutions and […]
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 […]
Investing in a nanny state for social returns
Jonah Lehrer has a post up, How Preschool Changes the Brain over at Frontal Cortex. He reports on a paper, Investing in our young people, which has been around for about 5 years. The top line of it is this, an investment in a $2,500/year (inflation adjusted) pre-school program in the early 1960s seems to […]
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 […]