Culture
razib | September 12, 2009Keep reading stuff like this, A Year After a Cataclysm, Little Change on Wall St.:
Simon Johnson, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, said that the seeds of another collapse had already sprouted. If major banks are allowed to keep making bets that are ultimately backed by taxpayer guarantees, they will return to the practices that led them to underwrite trillions of dollars in bad loans, Professor Johnson said.
This isn't really an ideological issue. Arnold Kling (who opposed…
razib | September 10, 2009I don't usually say much about September 11th because I don't have much original to say. Bu I realized recently that to a great extent September 11th was one of the reasons I got into blogging in the spring of 2002. Obviously I don't talk much about foreign policy or politics in any substantive manner, but in the wake of those events in September the media ecosystem seemed ill-equipped to respond to the changes in the story fast enough, and so non-tech related weblogs arose to fill the vacuum. And arguably that is why you are reading this right now (I actually had a blog for 1 week in the…
razib | September 10, 2009She seems to have liked it, with caveats and reservations. It's a narrative film, not a scientific biography, so appropriate shifts in emphases are to be expected.
razib | September 9, 2009Will Wilkinson points me to an interesting paper with some interesting figures, Income, Health and Wellbeing Around the World: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll:
razib | September 7, 2009I stumbled onto some peculiar survey data of American Roman Catholic priests:
A somewhat larger percentage of participants (57 percent) believe that the sacraments of the Church are necessary for salvation, and relatively few (17 percent) agree that "all great religions are equally good and true."
Yes, 17% of respondents is a minority. But for me the key is that these are not men who are exhibiting some level of ecumenicalism, accepting that salvation might take place outside of the sacraments of the church. They believe that all other religions are as good and true as their own religion. A…
razib | September 7, 2009Religious Attendance Relates to Generosity Worldwide:
Gallup data reveal that adherents of all the major world religions who attended religious services (attenders) in the past week have higher rates of generosity than do their coreligionists who did not attend services (non-attenders). Even for individuals who do not affiliate with any religious tradition, those who said they attended religious services in the past week exhibited more generous behaviors.
These findings are based on Gallup surveys conducted from 2005-2009 in 145 countries, which asked individuals about whether they in the…
razib | September 7, 2009His two primary reasons:
1) Robert Wright publicly said that this was foolish, apologized for the poor editorial oversight that led to it, and says they're going to try never to do this again. This looks sincere to me, and given that it's sincere, people really ought to be allowed more chance than this to recover from their mistakes.
2) Bloggingheads.TV has given me a forum to debate accomodationist atheists who are insufficiently condemning of religion - for example my diavlog with Adam Frank, author of "The Constant Fire". Adam Frank argues that, while of course we now know that God…
razib | September 6, 2009This article about Redbox is quaint and suggests some recent trends. First, other stuff I've read about Redbox pretty much indicates that it's a boon for downscale and techphobic consumers who aren't utilizing services like Netflix, and so pay a higher per unit price for rentals than otherwise would be the case. So though Redbox is putting downward pressure on the DVD sales & rental market, this seems a case where the studios want to maintain "cash cows" in the form of consumers who simply aren't making recourse to the internet for various reasons (25% of Americans are not on the internet…
razib | September 6, 2009I was doing some digging around on the genetics of Central Asia and stumbled upon the data that 7% of the mtDNA lineages of the Hui, Muslims who speak Chinese, are West Eurasian. This is opposed 0% for the Han, and 40-50% for the Uyghur. No surprises. But then I thought, what sort of exogamy rates would result in the Hui becoming, operationally, 90% Han during their stay in China? I think 10% is a conservative proportion for how much total genome content they have that is West Eurasian because the historical records suggest a male bias in the migration (so mtDNA would underestimate the…
razib | September 6, 2009Global Health Magazine has some data up on the "% of women who believe it is OK for husbands to beat them." If you click through the original data, the question is more extensive:
% of girls and women aged 15-49 who responded that a husband or partner is justified in hitting or beating his wife under certain circumstances (2001-2007)
I was going to cross-reference the data with the World Values Survey (which has a similar question), but I don't have time right now, so I'll simply pass on the raw data sorted by country. There's a rather large gap.
Jordan
90
Guinea
85.6
Zambia
85.4…
edyong | September 6, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Everybody, apparently, needs good neighbours, but in many parts of the world, your neighbours can be your worst enemy. In the past century, more than 100 million people have lost their lives to violent conflicts. Most of these were fought between groups of people living physically side by side, but separated by culture or ethnicity.
Now, May Lim and colleagues from the New England Complex Systems Institute have developed a mathematical model that can predict where such conflicts by looking at how…
razib | September 5, 2009Matt Springer of Built on Facts has a post up where he defends the potential of nuclear power. Regular readers of this weblog will know that I am broadly sympathetic. I understand that the "atomic age" is not going to be a utopia by any means nor will it solve all our problems, I do have a suspicion that much of the opposition is driven by the wisdom of repugnance.
I've surveyed attitudes toward nuclear power in the GSS before, the NUKEGEN and NUKEFAM variables asked people in the early 1990s how dangerous they thought nuclear power was to their family or the environment. There were five…
razib | September 5, 2009Sean Carroll points out that physics and math degree holders have the highest LSAT scores. There's the classic chicken or egg issue implied here: does physics make you smart, or do only smart people manage to complete a degree in physics? I think it is more the latter. How individuals in various disciplines do on standardized tests is strongly predicted by mathphobia in said disciplines.
LSAT scores by degree below....
1 Physics/Math 160.0
2 Economics 157.4
3 Philosophy/Theology 157.4
4 International Relations 156.5
5 Engineering 156.2
6 Government /Service 156.1
7 Chemistry 156.1
8 History…
razib | September 4, 2009The New York Times has a strange article up, For Your Health, Froot Loops, which profiles the controversy around a new health food guideline/endorsement organized by industry which seems somewhat fishy. This part made me laugh out loud:
Dr. Kennedy, who is not paid for her work on the program, defended the products endorsed by the program, including sweet cereals. She said Froot Loops was better than other things parents could choose for their children.
"You're rushing around, you're trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal," Dr…
edyong | September 3, 2009When it comes to encouraging people to work together for the greater good, carrots work better than sticks. That's the message from a new study showing that rewarding people for good behaviour is better at promoting cooperation than punishing them for offences.
David Rand from Harvard University asked teams of volunteers to play "public goods games", where they could cheat or cooperate with each other for real money. After many rounds of play, the players were more likely to work together if they could reward each other for good behaviour or punish each other for offences. But of these two…
razib | August 31, 2009Carl Zimmer is rather mild-mannered, but has expressed rather strong sentiments about what recently happened on bloggingheads.tv. Sean Carroll, not surprisingly, has stronger opinions. But they're now both proactively dissociating themselves from bloggingheads.tv. The McWhorter & Behe discussion is now back online. The issue is really simple. John McWhorter played up Michael Behe's ideas as awesome, mind-blowing and revolutionary for an hour. Most scientists don't consider Behe's ideas controversial, they consider them crankery.
razib | August 31, 2009Mike the Mad Biologist points out that Massachusetts, New Jersey, Minnesota and New Hampshire do better on math scores for elementary age students than most of Europe, and are competitive with Asia. Here are Mike's factors for why this might be:
-Low child poverty rates as measured by school lunch subsidies (a common proxy for poverty).
-Low divorce rates.
-Effective public health departments. MA, NJ, and MN have very good public health systems, and NH has some excellent programs (e.g., electronic syndromic surveillance)
-High incomes. Overall, these are healthy state economies (as good as…
razib | August 30, 2009A few months ago I pointed out that minorities don't oppose gay marriage, blacks do. Specifically, there are sometimes assumptions that Hispanics are extremely religious Roman Catholics characterized by very socially conservative views. From what I have seen the data are of much more modest magnitude than what characterizations would suggest, but I thought it would be useful to put some numbers from the General Social Survey up. The years are from 2000-2008, when the "Hispanic" variable was being collected. First I separated into three categories, Non-Hispanics who were not black, which was a…
razib | August 30, 2009
I saw Thirst this weekend, a Korean film about a Catholic priest turned vampire. I was expecting strangeness, but it was really strange. The female lead, Kim Ok-bin gave a pretty good performance that I found very memorable. My friend who I watched the film with wondered if Asians produced really strange films, but my own suspicion is that there's a selection bias in terms of the types of "foreign films" which arrive to American shores. After all, what's the comparative advantage of sappy Korean melodramas when we have so many of our own? In regards to special effects driven movies I doubt…
razib | August 30, 2009From page 55 of Empires of the Silk Road:
...Archaeology has shown that every location in Eurasia where Indo-European daughter languages have come to be spoken, modern humans had already settled there long beforehand, with the sole exception of the Tarim Basin, the final destination of the people who are known to us as the Tokharians.
I've alluded to this before, the unique hybrid aspect of Uighurs probably is due to the fact that the Tarim basin was only recently settled from both the west and east of Eurasia, closing a gap of settlement which might have existed since the Last Glacial…