Open thread – July 12th, 2010
Any interesting papers? Questions?
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 […]
“Unzipped,” not the film about Isaac Mizrahi
Just got notice of a new weblog, Unzipped, which I have added to my RSS feed. One of the primary contributors is Dr. Daniel MacArthur of Genetic Future (no, he’s not leaving ScienceBlogs!). Another is the always impressive Luke Jostins. Here’s their raison d’etre:
Welcome to Genomes Unzipped, a new group blog bringing together experts in […]
India’s life expectancy gap
Poking around some data sets, I randomly stumbled onto to this factoid:
According to World Bank estimates India’s life expectancy is now below that of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal’s! Now, I am aware that these data and analyses are somewhat an art, and that there’s a lot of subterfuge (hello Greece!). Additionally, it does seem strange […]
Singularity Summit 2010
The Singularity Summit is going to happen in about a month in San Francisco (August 14th-15th). Registration here. Yes, Ray Kurzweil will be there, but also Irene Pepperberg, James Randi and John Tooby. If you want to meet the ladies, probably not your scene (perhaps more accurately the lady, or two). But if you want […]
The inevitable intelligence
I think about Luke Jostin’s analysis of the growth in cranial capacity in the hominin lineage from last spring a fair amount. In particular, in the comments he notes: The data above includes all known Homo skulls, but none of the results change if you exclude the 24 Neandertals. In fact, you see the same […]
Lost lines from the Star-Spangled Banner
Here are the original lyrics. The military context is obvious.
Dispute over longevity research getting more coverage
Earlier this week I pointed to the controversy which has erupted around the widely reported new paper, Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans. Newsweek did the most thorough early reporting, but now The New York Times has published a follow up story covering the scientific criticisms to the original paper’s methodology. There’s nothing new […]
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 […]
To catch a predator: familial DNA
I already blogged this general issue, but the ‘grim sleeper’ murderer was caught because of a match of old samples with those of us his son. If I had to bet money I think this sort of result (California and Colorado are the two American states which have a system in place to allow for […]
Using the General Social Survey
I’ve mentioned this before, but I thought it would be useful to repeat again. Many of my social science related posts use Berkeley’s web interface with the General Social Survey. Regularly people ask me in the comments details as to the variables, or a more explicit elaboration of the methods. First, this is a weblog, […]
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 […]
The short life expectancy of longevity genes (?)
When I first heard in the media there was a new study of longevity which had produced a model based on your SNP profile that was “77% accurate” as to whether you’d live to the age of 100 or not, I assumed this was confusion or distortion (perhaps The Daily Mail had broken embargo first […]
The ScienceBlogs hegira
I was going to post a set of links for the weblogs from ScienceBlogs who have left for new digs, but Skull in the Stars is tracking it. Probably best to check in this weekend if you’re really curious, some people are still in wait-and-see mode.
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 […]
Don’t genetically profile yourself just yet…perhaps
Newsweek has a long piece up which reviews some major issues with the new study of centenarians that’s been all over the media right now. Ed Yong already covered the paper, but I’m going to look at the details myself. Here’s a update from the Newsweek post:
Within an hour of this story’s publication, the Science […]
Liberal Creationists Are Not Very Intelligent
A comment below about intelligent people who believe in dumb ideas made me want to revisit the Creationism demographics in the GSS. More on point I wanted to look at the relationship between IQ and Creationism crossed with demographic variables. I used the WORDSUM variable as a proxy for IQ (the correlation is ~0.70). WORDSUM […]
Malnutrition now, arthritis later?
Of Moose and Men: 50-Year Study Into Moose Arthritis Reveals Link With Early Malnutrition:
“As the study entered its second decade there was increasing evidence of Osteoarthritis (OA) in the moose population,” said lead author Rolf Peterson from Michigan Technological University. “OA is a crippling disease and is identical to that found in humans. It 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 […]