razib
Posts by this author
August 17, 2009
Matthew Stewart in The Big Money, How To Become a Management Guru in Five Easy Steps:
The industry that Tom Peters founded succeeded largely by sticking to the formula devised by America's pioneering preachers. In a sense, Peters brought management theory back home, by reuniting it with a much…
August 17, 2009
Below I repeated the contention that while schizophrenia is a genuine biologically rooted behavioral disease which can not be cured through will, many forms of addiction are not. That is why the genetics of schizophrenia are of such great interest, if the biological pathways of the pathology can be…
August 16, 2009
Recently I listened to the author of Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, Gene M. Heyman, interviewed on the Tom Ashbrook show. A lot of the discussion revolved around the term "disease", which I can't really comment on, but a great deal of Heyman's thesis is grounded in rather conventional behavior…
August 16, 2009
A very thorough paper in PLoS Genetics on the "obesity gene," FTO, A Mouse Model for the Metabolic Effects of the Human Fat Mass and Obesity Associated FTO Gene:
Geneticists have identified many gene regions that cause human disease by using multiple genetic markers in large populations to find…
August 15, 2009
I hear that a Muslim Bollywood star was detained at an American airport, Shah Rukh Khan (there is some confusion here, and a possibility that this is a publicity stunt related to a film about profiling which he is promoting). Out of curiosity I checked out Khan's bio on Wikipedia, and found out…
August 14, 2009
p-ter reports on a fascinating new paper, The Transcriptional Repressor DEC2 Regulates Sleep Length in Mammals:
Sleep deprivation can impair human health and performance. Habitual total sleep time and homeostatic sleep response to sleep deprivation are quantitative traits in humans. Genetic loci…
August 14, 2009
Over at Why Evolution Is True Greg Mayer wonders:
I also recalled that the percentage of religiously unaffiliated had gone up noticeably from 1990 to 2008, and that another survey found the percentage was higher among young people. What could have happened so that younger people, growing up in the…
August 13, 2009
Woman Tells of Affair With Madoff in New Book:
Hadassah, the Jewish volunteer organization, knew it had invested $40 million with Bernard L. Madoff by the late 1990s. It also knew it had taken more than $130 million from its Madoff accounts and still had millions on the books when the vast Ponzi…
August 13, 2009
Below I pointed to the rise in acceptance of evolution among the young, in particular the 18-30 cohort. There were some natural questions about other correlated demographic variables (I did point to data suggesting that this is not simply a byproduct of increased secularity of the young). Naturally…
August 13, 2009
Taking a much needed break from vocational productivity, Dan MacArthur of Genetic Future has been on something of a blogging tear this week. Check out his emergence from hibernation.
August 13, 2009
A helpful invasive species?:
Introduced species can wreak havoc on the ecosystems they invade. But what happens after they've been established for centuries? A new study in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society suggests that, in one case, an introduced species has actually become an important…
August 13, 2009
The use of the word "Darwinist" is to catch the attention of Creationists, normally I'm not too warm to its usage in a scientific (as opposed to philosophical or historical) context. In any case, Jerry Coyne has a post up where he states:
The "new atheists" have been on the scene for exactly five…
August 12, 2009
Last week I pointed to the fact there seem to be a set of private educational institutions whose raison d'être is to feed at the trough of government-backed student loans. Mark Gimein has a follow-up at The Big Money. Here are some bits about the "college" which was sued by the graduate who…
August 12, 2009
So says the data according to Andrew Gelman. I think there is some serious issues with self-reports of whether someone is a conservative or liberal which don't occur with political parties. People know whether they are Republican or Democrat in a more concrete manner because they have often…
August 12, 2009
I was a bit surprised by these data, Political Self-characterization of U.S. Medical Students:
Among these medical students, 5% self-characterized as politically very conservative, 21% conservative, 33% moderate, 31% liberal, and 9% as very liberal." Being male, white, Protestant, intending to…
August 11, 2009
'It Was All Fake,' Madoff Aide Tells Court:
Frank DiPascali was an 18-year-old "kid from Queens" with a high school education when he landed a job with a rising star on Wall Street named Bernard L. Madoff.
...
"No purchases or sales of securities were actually taking place in their accounts," Mr.…
August 11, 2009
Dan MacArthur has the details. What, no bailout from the government of Iceland?
August 10, 2009
Heather Mac Donald reviews Robert Wright's The Evolution of God.
August 10, 2009
Last spring there was a false alarm about a noninvasive form of prenatal testing, in particular for Down syndrome. But if The Guardian is right then the British NHS is pushing forward on a more general program in this direction:
The early signs are so promising that the professor leading the…
August 10, 2009
Pew has a new report, A Portrait of Mormons in the U.S.. Most of it is is unsurprising, but this caught my eye:
Converts are more likely than lifelong members to come from minority racial and ethnic groups. One-in-ten converts to Mormonism are black, and nearly all black Mormons are converts. An…
August 7, 2009
A comment below asks:
Well, good for you for getting me to click through by using an interesting post title. But how do you know women who "know god exists" aren't assuming a female god?
In a vacuum of all knowledge about this sort of topic this is a reasonable question. But there's plenty of…
August 7, 2009
On another weblog someone alluded to the sex difference in religious belief among black Americans, to the effect that it was more pronounced than among whites. Is this true? I decided to check the GSS, and found something interesting, though not too surprising. It's a robust cross-cultural finding…
August 6, 2009
Calculated Risk points out that you can look up foreclosure status on Google Maps. Pretty weird. Had no idea that a house 2 blocks away was being foreclosed on....
August 6, 2009
Stories and Stats: The truth about Obama's victory wasn't in the papers:
Our story of the 2008 campaign confirms some parts of the journalistic narrative and refutes others. Yes, the economy was important; yes, young voters swung to Obama and the Congressional Democrats; yes, Obama did particularly…
August 6, 2009
Genetic Future says basically what I was going to say about report about genetic testing for abilities in China. Dan MacArthur notes:
Unlike a lot of commentators on this story, I've got nothing fundamentally against the idea of using genetics to make predictions about a child's future, and on…
August 5, 2009
New rankings of Wikio Top Blogs for Science are up....
1
Wired Science - Wired Blog
11
Next Generation Science
2
Watts Up With That?
12
RealClimate
3
Climate Progress
13
FuturePundit
4
Environmental Capital
14
A Blog Around The Clock
5
Dispatches from the Culture Wars
15
Greg Laden's Blog…
August 4, 2009
Olivia Judson has an interesting column up, Dawn at the Museum. Worth checking out since it talks about DNA extraction from specimens long deceased.