razib | February 15, 2010Ed Yong reviews a new paper:
The social interactions that come naturally to most people are difficult for people with autism and Asperger syndrome. Simple matters like making eye contact, reading expressions and working out what someone else is thinking can be big challenges, even for "high-functioning" and intelligent individuals. Now, a preliminary study of 13 people suggests that some of these social difficulties could be temporarily relieved by inhaling a hormone called oxytocin.
Only 13 individuals. That being said, since we're a medicated nation we might as well consider all…
razib | February 15, 2010Another instance of a really dumb plagiarist, from The New York Times Corrections:
In a number of business articles in The Times over the past year, and in posts on the DealBook blog on NYTimes.com, a Times reporter appears to have improperly appropriated wording and passages published by other news organizations.
The reporter, Zachery Kouwe, reused language from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other sources without attribution or acknowledgment.
You work for The New York Times, and you plagiarize from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, etc.? Seriously. Dude even paid for J-school. Am I…
razib | February 15, 2010This comment by Lassi Hippeläinen deserves notice:
Sorry if I sound pedantic - I worked many years as a system architect in computer secutiry - but this argument will not go anywhere, unless its basic terminology is clear. More specifically, there are two concepts that are getting mixed up all the time: anonymity and pseudonymity.
Pseudonyms are stable, used by the same person(s) all the time. They have Internet credibility, even if the real name is not publicly known. Therefore even pseudonymous writers tend to behave civilly. "Anonymous" bloggers are in fact pseudonymous.
Anonyms are…
razib | February 15, 2010It just gets weirder. Ipswich neighbors recall confrontations with Amy Bishop:
Bishop once stopped a local ice cream truck from coming into their neighborhood. According to WBZ-1030 radio, she said it because her own kids were lactose intolerant, and she didn't think it was fair that her kids couldn't have ice cream.
"That's who it was!" Lafoe said. "When we were younger the ice cream truck just stopped coming around. That's strange."
Bishop & her husband both seem to have a history of self-centered anti-social behavior. There seems a precedent of many actions aimed at optimizing their…
razib | February 14, 2010Wait Ends as Canada Wins Gold at Home:
Three men stood in the sea of red at Cypress Mountain on Sunday, their chests bare except for paint. Euphoria surrounded them, men and women, young and old, who waved Canadian flags and clanged cowbells and danced to the Black Eyed Peas.
Minutes earlier, Canada had secured its first gold medal of these Winter Olympics, a men's moguls triumph from Alexandre Bilodeau in the last event on the second day of competition. It was also the first gold medal won by a Canadian in an Olympics in Canada.
As Bilodeau raised his arms, his nation followed suit.
"This is…
razib | February 14, 2010A few weeks ago I remarked on the relatively high current defense spending for the United States. In hindsight I think this was somewhat unfair, the proportion of the budget that the United States spends on defense is rather small in a world-historical context. I was reminded of this by a datum in The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China (highly recommended by the way), even this exceedingly civilian dynasty allocated ~80% of its budgetary outlays toward military expenses. Historical surveys of the Roman Empire also infer that most of the expenditure was directed toward…
razib | February 14, 2010Dr. Daniel MacArthur returns from hiatus, and observes that deCODE is now in the advanced stages of corporate death. Pointers to a Newsweek article and other bloggers at Dr. MacArthur's post. Over at Gene Expression Classic p-ter points out that Small genetic effects do not preclude drug development (one of the rationales given for why deCODE couldn't translate associations in $$$).
Also, for historical perspective, check out this 2002 article about deCODE.
razib | February 14, 2010One of the interesting aspects ensuing from the rise of molecular phylogenetics is that the trees are generally concordant in broad strokes with older research which was based on morphology. This is not too surprising, as nature does tend to show some intelligible patterns which can be cross-checked with different methods (e.g., the fact of evolutionary change in the tree of life is evident in both the paleontological record and analysis of molecular genetic variation). Additionally, the cladistic revolution has produced a general uniformity of underlying logic when it comes to systematic…
razib | February 13, 2010I have pointed before to dating research which shows a stronger race-bias from women than men, correcting for physical appearance. In other words, if a man found a woman attractive the extra bonus for being of the same race was relatively marginal compared to the inverse. Well, it seems that this strong element of race-consciousness in the fairer sex might manifest in an even more evolutionarily relevant context. Race Bias Tracks Conception Risk Across the Menstrual Cycle:
Although a considerable body of research explores alterations in women's mating-relevant preferences across the menstrual…
razib | February 12, 2010Critics Say Google Invades Privacy With New Service:
When Google introduced Buzz -- its answer to Facebook and Twitter -- it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically selected by the company based on the people that each user communicated with most frequently through Google's e-mail and chat services.
But what Google viewed as an obvious shortcut stirred up a beehive of angry critics. Many users bristled at what they considered an invasion of privacy, and they…
razib | February 12, 2010Over at Slate Jack Shafer talks about Gerald Posner's plagiarism. Weirdly Posner seems to be positing an "efficient markets" model of why he couldn't be a plagiarist:
Clearly, if I were a serial plagiarizer, I would have scanned my own drafts with such [plagiarism detection] software before submitting to the Beast.
The Ben Domenech case actually shows that yes, internet-age plagiarists can be pathologically dumb. There are plenty of cases of small-time plagiarists; my friend Randall Parker of FuturePundit was pointed to another blogger who was copying his posts almost verbatim. Small potatoes…
razib | February 11, 2010Genome-Wide Association Study in Asian Populations Identifies Variants in ETS1 and WDFY4 Associated with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus:
In this study, we first conducted a genome-wide association study in a Hong Kong Chinese population, followed by replication in three other cohorts from Mainland China and a cohort from Thailand, which totaled 3,300 Asian patients and 4,200 ethnically and geographically matched controls. We identified novel variants in ETS1 and WDFY4 associated with SLE with genome-wide significance and confirmed the association of HLA locus, STAT4, BLK, IRF5, BANK1, TNFSF,…
razib | February 11, 2010The End of the Space Age:
It's important to recognize, though, that the decision in question belongs to all of us, and not just to Barack Obama. The administration wouldn't be cutting the manned spaceflight program if Americans were still enthusiastic about going to the stars -- if space exploration still occupied a privileged place in our imagination, if our jocks still wanted to be astronauts and our nerds still wanted to build rockets. Obama is simply bowing to our culture's priorities: Our geeks want to build a better XBox, and our jocks want to buy it to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare…
razib | February 11, 2010Breeding Ancient Cattle Back from Extinction:
The only place to see an aurochs in nature these days? A cave painting. The enormous wild cattle that once roamed the European plains have been extinct since 1627, when the last survivor died in a Polish nature reserve. But this could soon change thanks to the work of European preservationists who are hoping they can make the great beast walk again. If they succeed -- through a combination of modern genetic expertise and old-fashioned breeding -- it would be the first time an animal has been brought back from extinction and released into the wild…
razib | February 10, 2010By now, you probably know that there is a specter haunting Europe, and that specter is Argentina. Greece's debt crisis is putting the spotlight on the PIIGS nations of the Eurozone, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.
One thing to note is that besides mismanaging their fiscal situation, 4 of he 5 PIIGS are more ethical than the Swedes. Sweden's total fertility rate per woman is ~1.67.
Ireland = 1.85
Greece = 1.51
Spain = 1.39
Italy = 1.41
Portugal = 1.49
Ireland is the bad seed here, being profligate and unethical. The downside to being ethical is that it makes the welfare state…
razib | February 10, 2010What do you think? I think the probability is lower that it will flop like Wave in terms of widespread use because I can recognize what the application is trying to do. It seems to be pushing into a recognizable niche of social content aggregation and organization, though since it hooks into stuff you already use like Gmail it's got a definite advantage out of the gates. The only major caution is that a lot of the comments I'm seeing in Buzz are like the initial ones in Wave. "So, what do we do with this?" "Hey everyone!" "I'm here...."
razib | February 10, 2010The Spiritual Brain: Selective Cortical Lesions Modulate Human Self-Transcendence:
The predisposition of human beings toward spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors is measured by a supposedly stable personality trait called self-transcendence. Although a few neuroimaging studies suggest that neural activation of a large fronto-parieto-temporal network may underpin a variety of spiritual experiences, information on the causative link between such a network and spirituality is lacking. Combining pre- and post-neurosurgery personality assessment with advanced brain-lesion mapping techniques…
razib | February 10, 2010Interesting that I just pointed to Neandertal DNA, a really big story just came out on ancient Greenlander genetics, Whole Genome of Ancient Human Is Decoded:
The genome of a man who lived on the western coast of Greenland some 4,000 years ago has been decoded, thanks to the surprisingly good preservation of DNA in a swatch of his hair so thick it was originally thought to be from a bear.
This is the first time the whole genome of an ancient human has been analyzed, and it joins the list of just eight whole genomes of living people that have been decoded so far. It also sheds new light on the…
razib | February 10, 2010Archaeology has a very interesting piece up, Should We Clone Neanderthals?. It begins with the nitty-gritty of ancient DNA extraction & sequencing, moves to the possible avenues of cloning, and of course the bioethical conundrums that we might be placed in. I know that there is an expectation that a neo-Neandertal will be some sort of "ape-man," but we should remember that the ancient Neandertals had greater cranial capacities than modern humans. I suspect thought that the biggest issue for a neo-Neandertal might be disease; "savages" brought back to Europe invariably died from Illnesses…