The girls are all right, they accept human evolution
One of the trends that makes me less pessimistic about the inevitability of an idiocratic end-point to technological civilization is that it seems young Americans are more likely to accept evolution than earlier age cohorts. The EVOLVED variable asks whether one believes that “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of […]
Genomes Unzipped
If you haven’t, checked out the new weblog Genomes Unzipped. Familiar names & faces. The first posts are already must-reads, Testing for traces of Neanderthal in your own genome, and Personal genomics: the importance of sequencing.
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 […]
The Price of Altruism
Sometimes in a narrative you have secondary characters who you want to revisit. What do to do after the story is complete? An convenient “work-around” to this problem is to find the story rewritten from the perspective of the secondary character. In broad strokes the picture is unchanged, but in the finer grained shadings different […]
Genomic liftoff
The firm GenomeQuest has a blog, and on that blog they have a post, Implications of exponential growth of global whole genome sequencing capacity. In that post there are some bullet points with numbers. Here they are:
* 2001-2009: A Human Genome
* 2010: 1,000 Genomes – Learning the Ropes
* 2011: 50,000 Genomes – Clinical Flirtation
* 2012: […]
Do liberals and conservatives know what they are?
Matthew Yglesias says:
I only wish the same level of scrutiny were applied to assertions about whether the public is “liberal” or “conservative” where I believe there’s strong circumstantial evidence that many people just don’t understand these terms in the way political and media professionals understand them. For example, when you break these things out by […]
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 […]