razib | March 6, 2010Iceland Voters Set to Reject Debt Deal:
After the dust began to settle last year -- after the banks failed, the currency collapsed, the stock market crashed and the government fell -- the dazed inhabitants of Iceland woke up to another unpleasant problem: They owed, it seemed, some $5.3 billion to more than 300,000 angry people in the Netherlands and Britain.
These were the customers of Icesave, a now notorious online retail branch of the Icelandic bank Landsbanki, which went bankrupt in October 2008 along with 85 percent of Iceland's banking system. The British and Dutch governments…
razib | March 5, 2010It has been known for years that interracial marriages have higher than expected divorce rates. But I did not know that the rates varied quite a bit contingent on the combination of race & sex. Gori Girl* has a post up, Interracial Divorce in the U.S. - Statistics and How Much They Matter:
- Marriages that do not cross a race barrier, but do have different ethnicities (i.e. white/Hispanic white) have a rate of divorce just a little higher than white/white marriages.
- Interracial marriages that have one white person and one person of another race mostly only show higher divorce rates when…
razib | March 4, 2010Over the history of this weblog I have blogged about pigmentation a fair amount. The major reason is that that's where the money is; unlike height, let alone intelligence, the genetic architecture and evolutionary history of pigmentation has been elucidated with relative clarity. That is, we know roughly the number and nature of the genes which control much of the between population variation in pigmentation. And, we also have some sense of whether the variation is due to natural selection, as well the historical trajectory of the between population differences.
For example, consider the…
razib | March 4, 2010A new paper in PLoS, Rapid Assessment of Genetic Ancestry in Populations of Unknown Origin by Genome-Wide Genotyping of Pooled Samples:
Many association studies have been published looking for genetic variants contributing to a variety of human traits such as obesity, diabetes, and height. Because the frequency of genetic variants can differ across populations, it is important to have estimates of genetic ancestry in the individuals being studied. In this study, we were able to measure genetic ancestry in populations of mixed ancestry by genotyping pooled, rather than individual, DNA samples…
razib | March 4, 2010Fantasy-nerd in-chief at The New York Times, Ross Douthat points me to an essay, Why is there no Jewish Narnia? As others have pointed out there are plenty of Jewish fantasy writers, including perhaps the most prominent mainstream fantasist today, Neil Gaiman. But this part caught my attention:
...and whether it is called Perelandra, Earthsea, Amber, or Oz, this world must be a truly alien place. As Ursula K. Leguin says: "The point about Elfland is that you are not at home there. It's not Poughkeepsie."
Amber refers to Roger Zelazny's Amber series. Roger Zelazny's father was an immigrant…
razib | March 4, 2010National Geographic has a coverage of the Kanzawa paper. The title: Liberals, Atheists Are More Highly Evolved? I get what's going on with terms like "highly evolved," but I think it's really problematic when media which serves as an interface with the public in regards to evolutionary ideas uses this sort of terminology, as it reinforces misleading perceptions. For whatever reason people default to a great chain of being model in relation to evolution, and to really communicate the science as opposed to intuition you need to break people of these tendencies. This is why I have qualms with…
razib | March 4, 2010My posts below on IQ, politics & religion resulted in a fair amount of blogospheric response, and weird comments. A few quick points
1) I think results on standardized tests are informative and correlate reasonably with a host of life outcomes. If you don't think they do, that's fine, I don't particularly care. But just do note that your dismissal of IQ carries no weight with me. Additionally, though I believe IQ to be substantially heritable, even that's not necessarily important in this case (since I am not focusing on evolution). Rather, realized test scores correlate with other…
razib | March 3, 2010I'm hearing about rumblings at 23andMe, and not in a good way. The company made a big splash a few years ago, and came highly recommended by friends (e.g., "They know their science, and have a bottomless pool of money"). This story at BNET got my attention though, and confirmed what many have been hinting at, or just telling me straight-up. Let's start the from the beginning. Back in late 2008 23andMe seemed absolutely untouchable. Here's Andrew Yates of Think Gene from then:
People, 23andMe isn't going anywhere. They are the Bill & Melinda Gates Sergey & Anne Brin Foundation,…
razib | March 3, 2010Since Canadians seem to have an obsession with American health care policy (a nation of Ezra Kleins?), I thought I would pass along this weird Intrade screenshot:
OK, I assume my liberal readers have cleaned themselves up after seeing that screenshot. I check Intrade as part of my "morning reads" and I really don 't know what's going on here, the health care prices have been between 20 and 50 for all of 2010, and usually between 30 and 40. Perhaps a speculative bubble driven by the magic of Obama's voice? Or Democratic staffers with "inside knowledge" starting buy up shares because they knew…
razib | March 2, 2010Last spring I posted a review of Scitable at Nature. Since then Scitable seems to have expanded a bit, and I have given some more thought on its possible role in the ecology of the infosphere. Back in 2004 when I began to use Wikipedia regularly I was very impressed by the quality of the technical articles, but now that it's 2010 I have to say that far too often the Wikipedia entries are a bit thin in some domains. I suspect that my own expectations have started to outrun what is possible with Wikipedia, and probably I notice the "lack" because I've stopped going to Google as the first option…
razib | March 2, 2010'Hero of Ukraine' Splits Nation, Inside and Out:
Half a century after his death at the hands of the K.G.B., Stepan Bandera, a World War II partisan, has not lost his ability to rally Ukrainians against Russia -- and against each other.
Monuments to Mr. Bandera have sprung up across western Ukraine, his fight for the country's independence glowingly recounted to schoolchildren on field trips, as if he were the George Washington of Ukrainian nationalism. But in eastern Ukraine and as far away as Moscow and Brussels, Mr. Bandera is reviled as a Nazi puppet.
This disputed legacy has ensured him a…
razib | March 2, 2010As you know lactase persistence (LP), which confers the ability to digest lactose sugar as an adult, is an evolutionarily recent development. On the order of 1/3 of the human population exhibits LP, due to a variety of genetic mutations which seem to arise in the cultural background of the domestication of cattle. Some have asked about the possible associations between LP & height & weight before. A new paper in Human Molecular Genetics looks at just that, European lactase persistence genotype shows evidence of association with increase in body mass index:
The global prevalence of…
razib | March 1, 2010Update: Also see follow up post.
My previous post where I point to Satoshi Kanazawa's finding that liberals & atheists are smarter than conservatives & the religious was a little drop in the bucket in the blogospheric debate. I made it rather obvious that I wasn't too interested in the evolutionary psychological model of why these patterns exist, rather, I was curious about the patterns themselves. The reason is the one Tom Rees elucidates:
What's got people talking is the correlation between atheism and intelligence, although that isn't what the paper is actually about. It's already…
razib | March 1, 2010I have pointed to the fact that mtDNA genetics has suggested that the polar bear is actually a derived lineage of brown bears. And, more specifically, that some extant lineages of brown bears share a more recent common ancestor with polar bears than other brown bears. In other words, brown bears are paraphyletic. Apparently there has been dispute of when the polar bear morph emerged from the brown bears. Luckily polar bears have been resident in a region where the likelihood of preservation of ancient DNA is relatively high. PNAS has a new paper which reports on the extraction of genetic…
razib | March 1, 2010A few days ago I pointed to a paper which suggests the possible utility of looking at selection on standing genetic variation on quantitative traits to get a sense of the role of adaptation in the human genome. We humans like to think we're a complex species, so I see no a priori reason why our evolutionary history should be easily reducible to spare compact dynamics. Granted, we can start with the assumption that on the order of 50,000 years before the present there was a rapid demographic expansion of anatomically modern humans out of the continent of Africa. This story is simple, and is…
razib | February 28, 2010And more productive. FiveThirtyEight has a nice meme-buster post, US Manufacturing Is Not Dead. This was known to me, but Tom Schaller has all the charts put together nice.
Here's industrial output:
The labor force engaged in producing durable goods:
And per hour productivity:
The manufacturing sector is still robust, it is simply manufacturing jobs which are not.
razib | February 27, 2010Ends today. Last Chance to Contribute to 2010 Singularity Research Challenge!:
Thanks to generous contributions by our donors, we are only $11,840 away from fulfilling our $100,000 goal for the 2010 Singularity Research Challenge. For every dollar you contribute to SIAI, another dollar is contributed by our matching donors, who have pledged to match all contributions made before February 28th up to $100,000. That means that this Sunday is your final chance to donate for maximum impact.
Since ~1/3 of readers of GNXP are sympathetic to transhumanism I thought it might be worthwhile to post this…