Culture
razib | August 13, 2009The 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 years, beginning with Sam Harris's The End of Faith, published in 2004. But American's attitudes to evolution have been relatively unchanged (with 40+% denying it) for twenty-five years. This means two things.
This is true to a first approximation, and rather depressing. So I thought I would…
razib | August 12, 2009Last 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 couldn't get a job:
Trina Thompson's alma mater, Monroe College, is well-known to New York City commuters, thanks to glossy ads that festoon the insides (and sometimes the outside) of many subway cars. It has less of a presence, however, outside the New York public transit system. You will not find it…
razib | August 12, 2009So 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 realized their preferences through voting.
razib | August 12, 2009I 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 specialize in Surgery or anesthesiology/pathology/radiology, or currently or previously being married significantly... increased the likelihood that a student self-identified as very conservative or conservative. Disagreement or strong disagreement with the statements, "I'm glad I chose to become a…
razib | 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. DiPascali said. "It was all fake. It was all fictitious. It was wrong, and I knew it was wrong at the time."
He said he used data from the Internet to create fake trade blotters, sent out fraudulent account statements to clients and carried out wire transfers between Mr. Madoff's London and New York…
razib | August 10, 2009Last 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 programme says that the risk-free test could be the standard method of detecting babies with some genetic conditions inherited from the father within two to three years and those with Down's syndrome within five - and in the process save the lives of an estimated 265 mostly normal babies a year.
The life-…
razib | August 10, 2009Pew 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 additional one-in-ten Mormon converts are Hispanic, and just 72% are white; by contrast, 91% of lifelong Mormons are white. Converts are also more than three times as likely as lifelong members to be immigrants to the U.S. (14% vs. 4%).
The sample size may be small, so the 1 in 10 figure could be a…
eklemetti | August 10, 2009Some more volcano news for the day ...
UPDATE 10:40AM Eastern: It has been pointed out to me that both of these articles are old. They apparently made it into my Google News feed thanks to a glitch in the magic interweb tubes somewhere. Just goes to show that blogging before coffee on a Monday after traveling across the country = bad idea. Sorry for any confusion.
A summit dome at Kelud during the 2007 eruption.
OLD NEWS ABOUT SARYCHEV PEAK IN JUNE 2009. An unnamed Russian volcano in Kamchatka is disrupting flights from Canada to Asia. No ID in the article on which volcano, and I couldn't…
eklemetti | August 9, 2009Does anyone else feel like this has been a rather quiet summer, volcano-wise? Maybe I've been too preoccupied by my move to Ohio, but I feel like beyond a few relatively minor events (Shiveluch comes to mind), the volcano news has been pretty slow compared to the spring of this year. Go figure.
The sulfur dioxide plume from the 2008 eruption of Kasatochi spreading over the northern Pacific Ocean.
Anyway, a few tidbits to tide us over:
Over eighteen years after the eruption, Mt. Pinatubo is still causing fatalities from the copious amounts of tephra deposited during the 1991 event. Five…
razib | August 7, 2009A 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 social science data showing that American women tend to be more religiously conservative & "orthodox" as a whole than men (in contrast to female ministers or rabbis, who are more likely to be progressive than their male counterparts from what I gather). But I decided to see how textually "…
razib | August 7, 2009On 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 that women are more religious than men, and it holds for the United States. But how does it break down across demographics?
Know God Exists
Male
Female
Difference
Proportional Difference
All
55.3
70.7
15.4
28%
Whites
52.4
67.8
15.4
29%
Blacks
73.7
86.6
12.9
18%
College+
44.7
58.9…
razib | August 6, 2009Calculated 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....
razib | August 6, 2009Stories 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 well among minorities (Latinos and Asians as well as African Americans), even beyond the Democrats' usual strength among these groups; yes, the Democrats made new inroads among the most affluent voters. But no, working-class whites did not run away from Obama; and no, Obama did not redraw the…
razib | August 6, 2009Genetic 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 guiding the activities a child engages in based on those predictions. Here's the thing, though: this only makes sense if the predictions are both accurate and relevant, and right now the predictions from genetics regarding complex traits are neither. Parents should save their money for more useful ways…
razib | August 4, 2009Olivia Judson has an interesting column up, Dawn at the Museum. Worth checking out since it talks about DNA extraction from specimens long deceased.
razib | August 4, 2009Dienekes points me to a new paper, Demographic history of Canary Islands male gene-pool: replacement of native lineages by European (PDF). Here are the results:
Autochthonous (E-M81) and prominent (E-M78 and J-M267) Berber Y-chromosome lineages were detected in the indigenous remains, confirming a North West African origin for their ancestors which confirms previous mitochondrial DNA results. However, in contrast with their female lineages, which have survived in the present-day population since the conquest with only a moderate decline, the male indigenous lineages have dropped constantly…
ejohnson | August 3, 2009
In this week's episode of Science Saturday, John Horgan and George Johnson address the controversy over last week's episode, which featured creationist Paul Nelson and science historian Ron Numbers. Also in this week's episode, John and George take a stab at explaining rising health-case costs, John critiques Chris Mooney's contention that we need more scientists in the public eye, and George previews his upcoming lightning-chasing adventures.
razib | August 3, 2009Half Sigma has pointed me to two stories that I think are of some interest, and illustrates a general trend. JOBLESS GRAD SUES COLLEGE FOR 70G TUITION:
The Monroe College grad wants the $70,000 she spent on tuition because she hasn't found gainful employment since earning her bachelor's degree in April, according to a suit filed in Bronx Supreme Court on July 24.
The 27-year-old alleges the business-oriented Bronx school hasn't lived up to its end of the bargain, and has not done enough to find her a job.
The information-technology student blames Monroe's Office of Career Advancement for not…