razib
Posts by this author
February 14, 2009
I decided to look at the GSS and see if there was anything interesting about fertility of white Americans of various ethnicities. There's a big wide range, with the lowest numbers for national-origin groups dominated by Jews in the United States (e.g., Russia, Lithuania) and southern Europe (Italy…
February 14, 2009
Arnold Kling is skeptical that New York City will ever be as important as it was over the past decade because of the prominence of finance. He is responding to Richard Florida's new piece in The Atlantic, How the Crash Will Reshape America. Kling declares:
But I think that a lot of my attitude is…
February 14, 2009
ScienceDaily has a report on a presentation Mark Shriver gave at AAAS meething this year:
"We started with 22 landmarks on the faces that could be accurately located in all the images," said Shriver.
These landmarks might be the tip of the nose, the tip of the chin, the outer corner of the eye or…
February 13, 2009
ScienceDaily highlights an angle on the paper I blogged a few days ago, Chromosome And Surname Study Challenges Infidelity 'Myth':
"People often quote a figure of one in ten for the number of people born illegitimately," says Professor Jobling. "Our study shows that this is likely to be an…
February 12, 2009
The Neandertal genome story is in the air. See The New York Times and Wired. Watch the press conference here.
February 12, 2009
Extended Haplotypes in the Growth Hormone Releasing Hormone Receptor Gene (GHRHR) Are Associated with Normal Variation in Height. Here's the important bit:
In the VB cohort the height of individuals carrying the associated haplotypes were 3.8 cm and 2.5 cm shorter for males and females,…
February 11, 2009
A burst of segmental duplications in the genome of the African great ape ancestor:
It is generally accepted that the extent of phenotypic change between human and great apes is dissonant with the rate of molecular change...Between these two groups, proteins are virtually identical...cytogenetically…
February 11, 2009
Daughter blames dad's death on Madoff scheme:
"He used to go to a wound clinic for bedsores," she told NJJN. "After he found out [about his financial losses], he wouldn't go. Then he developed double pneumonia. He needed 24-hour care. It took at least $200,000 a year just to keep him alive."
Pretty…
February 11, 2009
Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down:
Sofia, a 34-year-old Frenchwoman, moved here a year ago to take a job in advertising, so confident about Dubai's fast-growing economy that she bought an apartment for almost $300,000 with a 15-year mortgage.
Now, like many of the foreign workers who…
February 10, 2009
Dienekes points me to a paper, Founders, drift and infidelity: the relationship between Y chromosome diversity and patrilineal surnames:
Most heritable surnames, like Y chromosomes, are passed from father to son. These unique cultural markers of coancestry might therefore have a genetic correlate…
February 9, 2009
Nick Wade's Darwin, Ahead of His Time, Is Still Influential is a good complement to the strained Darwin-skepticism I pointed to earlier. From the perspective of this weblog this comment was interesting:
Darwin is still far from being fully accepted in sciences outside biology. "People say natural…
February 9, 2009
Chad is complaining that The Best American Science Writing 2008 is too focused on biomedical science. He finds it especially lame that there's no physics when this was the year of the LHC. Here's what I found in the contents....
Amy Harmon, Facing Life with a Lethal Gene
Richard Preston, An Error…
February 9, 2009
Carl Safina has a provocative essay in The New York Times, Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live. I'm sure others will jump all over this, so I'm not going to go exegetic on the essay. Though I disagree with the overly broad assertions, it is elegantly written and points to a reality:…
February 9, 2009
Jacob Weisberg has a good corrective to anti-banking hysteria, The Case for Bankers. My post below, Kill the traders!, was an indictment of a small minority who have an outsized effect on the majority. We're talking a power law distribution, most of the havoc is due to a few. Weisberg notes:
If…
February 9, 2009
Below I semi-seriously mooted the possibility of killing individuals who destroy enormous amounts of wealth through risk-taking which inevitably results in particular instances losses. The main issue is that the upside to risk is unbounded, but the downside is constrained (i.e., bankruptcy, etc…
February 9, 2009
Two articles of note, The evolution of Darwin's theory & They Don't Make Homo Sapiens Like They Used To. John Hawks gets a lot of face time....
February 9, 2009
One of the things that really irritates me is when people throw around numbers without normalization. This is a major behavioral economic issue, Robert Shiller suggests that the inability to tell the difference between nominal & real values is one of the major reasons the American public was…
February 9, 2009
If you have problems getting Ubuntu Hardy Heron to work properly, I strongly recommend you check out Intrepid Ibex, the newest release. I'm having way fewer issues with it on my Toshiba Satellite notebook (if you are fine on Hardy Heron perhaps "upgrading" will mess you up). The UI also seems…
February 8, 2009
Conor Clarke observes that in Animal Spirits George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller point to the popularity of Texas hold 'em as symptomatic of the speculative fever of the past decade. I've been reading a fair amount of financial history from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Skeptics of Shiller…
February 7, 2009
FuturePundit points out that Sweden might not phase out nuclear power:
The decision has angered the Swedish opposition as well as environmentalists around the world. "To rely on nuclear power to reduce CO2 emissions," Greenpeace spokeswoman Martina Kruger said, "is like smoking to lose weight. It's…
February 7, 2009
Just for those curious, there's a new website, Islam in China, which might be interesting to some. The site points out that there are more Muslims in China than there are in Saudi Arabia. In fact, if the Muslims of China were a nation unto themselves they would be equivalent to Iraq in population…
February 5, 2009
Octuplets' mother wanted 'huge family' for feeling of connection:
The mother of octuplets born last week in Bellflower told NBC News she wanted to have a "huge family" because she longed for personal connections she felt she lacked in her childhood.
"I just longed for certain connections and…
February 5, 2009
Japan's Big-Works Stimulus Is Lesson for U.S.. I'll be honest, some of the glowing projections about the multiplier effect I see on some blogs are giving me flashbacks (I was blogging by Spring of 2002).
February 5, 2009
I recently finished The Hero of Ages, which concludes the Mistborn trilogy. The author, Brandon Sanderson, has been selected to finish Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. Sanderson is a Mormon, so I was curious if anyone else thought that the resolution to the series resembled a very distinctive…
February 5, 2009
Via Dienekes, Interactions Between HERC2, OCA2 and MC1R May Influence Human Pigmentation Phenotype:
Human pigmentation is a polygenic trait which may be shaped by different kinds of gene-gene interactions. Recent studies have revealed that interactive effects between HERC2 and OCA2 may be…
February 4, 2009
Recently I've been having an on-and-off discussion with a friend about the bioethical implications of neo-eugenics. I brought up one particular issue as a thought experiment: how about selective abortion of dark-skinned fetuses among South Asians? The light and dark variants of SLC24A5 segregate…
February 4, 2009
If you read my previous post on CEO salary cap, check out Jim Manzi's thoughts. Also, Felix Salmon and Megan Barnett debate the pay cap (he is in favor, she against). After Salmon presented his case I'm inclined to be less charitable to Barnett than I was before. But this post by Bob Sutton…
February 4, 2009
John Hawks notes that Neandertal genome in one week's time? I saw Svante Paabo speak in the fall and he said he was trying to get this out early in 2009, but he didn't clue us in to any surprises. Rather, he seemed to indicate that there would simply be greater precision on what he already had…
February 4, 2009
Obama Calls for 'Common Sense' on Executive Pay:
resident Obama announced on Wednesday a salary cap of $500,000 for top executives at companies that receive the largest amounts of money under the $700 billion federal bailout, calling the step an expression not only of fairness but of "basic common…