Culture
razib | July 18, 2009Tom Rees has a blog post, Religion and marital infidelity, which shows that religious attendance, but not belief, correlate with a tendency to not have affairs. I think the critical point here is that religion is a complex phenomenon, and we condense many separate dimensions or parameters into one term. For example, there seems to be a tendency with higher socioeconomic status to be positively associated with religious attendance and affiliation, but negatively associated with religious beliefs.
eklemetti | July 17, 2009Some of the articles you might have missed this week ...
A lava flow from Kilauea breaks local traffic laws in the Royal Gardens subdivision, Hawai'i
The Mayon Watch continues in the Philippines. No eruption yet, but some of the local newspapers are printing stories talking about "odd animal behavior" and other local "myths" about predicting the volcano, such as the wells drying up. Now, this is not to say that these things might have some predictive value (especially changes in the water table near the volcano as it inflates/deflates), but so far there are no robust scientific studies that…
razib | July 15, 2009FuturePundit points me to an article about an older woman who had IVF treatment who has died, Spanish woman who gave birth through IVF at 66 dies:
A Spanish woman who became the world's oldest mother at the age of 66 has died of cancer just two-and-a-half years after giving birth to twins, raising fresh questions about the ethics of fertility treatment for women past natural childbearing age.
Some of the aspects of this case are sui generis, obviously. But as people have children later and later, I wonder as to the probabilities of larger proportions of individuals having their parents die…
razib | July 15, 2009Sunday Function
Imaging a Superior Mnemonist
The Last 100 Years: 1998 and the accelerating Universe!
Swearing increases pain tolerance
Swoopo
razib | July 14, 2009Wired had a long piece on Facebook's attempt to challenge Google. The gist seems to be that just as Google revolutionized the way search was done via PageRank, so Facebook will revolutionize search though results generated via one's personal "Social Graph." I'm generally skeptical of this idea in relation to Facebook, though my skepticism has more to do with the assumption that the value of a social network declines as it becomes less exclusive. In the Wired piece the author suggests that Facebook has reached the penetration at which positive feeback loops begin to occur. Perhaps. But it…
razib | July 13, 2009Anil Dash has an essay up, Google's Microsoft Moment, (H/T, Charles Iliya Krempeaux) which will be roughly correct at some point in the future if not now. Organizations go through changes in a predictable manner, and Google is unlikely to defy the inevitable laws of corporate evolution. On a related note, Bing Delivers Credibility to Microsoft. Bing is OK, but I wonder how much of the relative openness to it is conditional upon the reality that Microsoft's star is in relative decline in the firmament of technology companies, and so there isn't a reflexive hostility engendered by genuine fear…
razib | July 13, 2009Interesting Q & A on the "shadow banking" system over at The Atlantic. The last answer is illustrative of a major distinction between physical and social systems:
I use the term "Credit Insurer of Last Resort." And here's the idea: The Bagehot Rule - lend freely, at a high rate, in a crisis - dates from 1873. That was a good enough rule for the 19th century British economy, an economy that ran on short term commercial bills of exchange, 90-day paper. You can see for the new capital markets banking system we have a problem. We have 30-year mortgages that are the underlying asset that are…
razib | July 11, 2009Onion News, really funny. Below the fold....
New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time
razib | July 10, 2009Yesterday in my review of the recent Pew survey comparing attitudes of scientists and the general public I emphasized the fact that scientists are disproportionately godless liberals. But there are some issues where it seems that the Left is on the forefront of science-skepticism. There has been talk here on ScienceBlogs about the disproportionate Lefty orientation of anti-vaccination activists. From what I can tell this is true, but anti-vaccination sentiment is too shallow of a sentiment for it be starkly political, at least according to these data (there's little party difference). On the…
razib | July 9, 2009Pew has a new survey out, Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media. Lots of interesting facts, though most are not too surprising. Scientists accept evolution at a far greater rate, are less religious and more liberal, than the general public. This is all known. But the report is worth reading, there's a lot of data. One point which might surprise some, young scientists are much more God-believing than older ones. I think one explanation for this might be that older scientists are selection biased.We know that NAS members are far more godless than the general scientariat, so I…
razib | July 9, 2009Over at Accidental Blogger a remembrance of travels in Xinjiang/East Turkestan. I think the best model for what's going on in China right now is a race riot catalyzed by economic resentment. Uighurs seem to be attacking Hui as well as Han, the Hui being Chinese speakers who are of Muslim background (and by and large are physically indistinguishable from the Han, for example, the Vice Premier of China is a Hui).. Though China is still a poor country much of it is lurching toward modernity; the Uighurs of Xinjiang are an exception to this trend.
Related: Post from last year.
razib | July 9, 2009Tom Rees of Epiphenom has a new paper out, Is Personal Insecurity a Cause of Cross-National Differences in the Intensity of Religious Belief?. The abstract:
Previous research has shown an apparent relationship between "societal health" and religiosity, with nations that exhibit higher mean personal religiosity also tending to provide worse social environments. A possible cause is that exposure to stressful situations (i.e. personal insecurity) increases personal religiosity. To test this hypothesis, income inequality, a widely available proxy for personal insecurity, was compared with other…
razib | July 8, 2009Over at Secular Right I break down attitudes toward a host of issues as a function of class and party identification. It is interesting to see the issues where class matters more than party, and those where party matters more than class, and where one segment is an outlier. Below the fold are a few questions of possible specific interest to ScienceBlogs readers.
Lower = No high school to some college
Higher = Bachelor's degree or higher
Repub or lean Repub
Dem or lean Dem
Lower
Higher
Lower
Higher
Humans evolved from animals
29.7
47.1
43.7
79.6
Will not eat genetically…
razib | July 8, 2009Sunday Function
The subsidiary patient
Pavlov's Dogs: Proving the Null With Bayesianism
UK House of Lords report on genomic medicine: implications for DTC genetic testing
More fuss over Enceladus
razib | July 7, 2009Blogger Thomas Mailund is an author on a new paper, Ancestral Population Genomics: The Coalescent Hidden Markov Model Approach:
With incomplete lineage sorting (ILS), the genealogy of closely related species differs along their genomes. The amount of ILS depends on population parameters such as the ancestral effective population sizes and the recombination rate, but also on the number of generations between speciation events. We use a hidden Markov model parametrized according to coalescent theory in order to infer the genealogy along a four-species genome alignment of closely related species…
razib | July 4, 2009Palin's Move Shocks G.O.P. and Leaves Future Unclear:
Many Republican strategists have argued that it would be difficult for someone to run for governor in 2010 and turn around immediately, while running a state, and run for president in 2012. Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota announced last month that he would not seek re-election when his term expired in 2010, as he considers a race for president.
George W. Bush was reelected in Texas in 1998 and ran for president in 2000. Is that so exceptional? Or are there other variables at play? And if so, why is this variable so important? (I've seen…
razib | July 2, 2009Excellent chart via Calculated Risk. It looks like we're in a whole different territory of anti-superlatives in terms of length & depth in regards to the employment drought....
razib | July 2, 2009Lots of chatter about The Blogosphere 2.0, a post which has 7 bullet points:
- The A-List Doesn't Matter Anymore
- It's all about niche blogs
- Blogger Burn Out
- Reader burn out
- MSM yawns
- Huffington Post.
- Twitter and Facebook
Not much I'd disagree with in the generality. Multiple times that politics/general interest weblogs have linked to me it is noted that I'm a "specialist/technical weblog," but I really think everyone is focused on a specific area at this point. It's just that political and policy weblogs seem to think everyone has a general interest in their topic. Also, I do…
razib | July 2, 2009First Genetic Insight into Libyan Tuaregs: A Maternal Perspective:
The Tuaregs are a semi-nomadic pastoralist people of northwest Africa. Their origins are still a matter of debate due to the scarcity of genetic and historical data. Here we report the first data on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genetic characterization of a Tuareg sample from Fezzan (Libyan Sahara). A total of 129 individuals from two villages in the Acacus region were genetically analysed. Both the hypervariable regions and the coding region of mtDNA were investigated. Phylogeographic investigation was carried out in order…