Culture
razib | May 24, 2009
People By Nature Are Universally Optimistic, Study Shows:
Data from the Gallup World Poll drove the findings, with adults in more than 140 countries providing a representative sample of 95 percent of the world's population. The sample included more than 150,000 adults.
Eighty-nine percent of individuals worldwide expect the next five years to be as good or better than their current life, and 95 percent of individuals expected their life in five years to be as good or better than their life was five years ago.
...
At the country level, optimism is highest in Ireland, Brazil, Denmark, and New…
razib | May 22, 2009Megan McArdle posts Edmund Andrews' response to her revelation of his wife's bankruptcies. Megan concludes:
On a very broad note, I don't see this as a story about the goodness or badness of Andrews or Barreiro--and I've been dismayed by some of the nastiness about her in comments here and elsewhere. Rather, I think this matters because the story Andrews told was basically about the subprime crisis, and the book casts him as a sort of everyman, lured in by cheap credit and a likeable scoundrel of a mortgage broker. That may be what happened to many, or most people in the mortgage crisis--…
razib | May 21, 2009Most people have probably read Edmund Andrews' piece in The New York Times, My Personal Credit Crisis (expanded into the book Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown). Many raised eyebrows when reading this:
We had very different ideas about money. Patty spent little on herself, but she refused to scrimp on top-quality produce, Starbucks coffee, bottled juices, fresh cheeses and clothing for the children and for me. She regularly bought me new shirts and ties to replace the frayed and drab ones in my closet. She thought it wasn't worth agonizing over nickels and dimes. I was almost…
razib | May 21, 2009California, a Broke State, Reels as Voters Rebuff Leaders:
Direct democracy has once again upended California -- enough so that the state may finally consider another way by overhauling its Constitution for the first time in 130 years.
The problem is simple. Voters approve services through ballot measures, and reject taxes which might result in revenues to pay for those services, through simple majorities. Fair enough. But the legislature needs a 2/3 vote for tax & budget related actions. So the problem here is that the stupid electorate is complemented by a paralyzed legislature.
In the…
razib | May 20, 2009Turns out there is a new weblog which showcases some Brazilian ScienceBlogs posts, translated into English.
razib | May 20, 2009Check out this Felix Salmon's interview (video) with Gillian Tett, author of Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe (the reference to "Tribe" is a wink to Tett's background as an anthropologist). Also, she was recently on NPR.
razib | May 19, 2009400-500 years ago in the midst of the Great Dying somewhere the indigenous inhabitants of the New World suffered mortality rates on the order of 90-95%. This was almost certainly due to the facts of evolutionary history; the indigenous peoples had little defense against Eurasian pathogens. A result has been the reality that most of the New World is inhabited by European, African or mixed populations. But there are exceptions. In Mesoamerica there is still an indigenous dominated region from southern Mexico into the highlands of Guatemala. More substantially the highlands of the Andes, and…
razib | May 16, 2009I was looking up some data on obesity rates, mostly for American states, and I stumbled onto the maps below on obesity rates by nation for males & females (in that order):
You can find the source and legend here. In any case I was totally surprised at how fat Arabs are, particularly Gulf Arabs. They aren't in the NationMaster data set so I had never encountered any numbers on obesity. And the Gulf Arabs I've met in my life didn't strike me as disproportionately obese. But in hindsight I think I have an explanation: most of the Gulf Arabs I've met are upper or upper middle class males…
razib | May 16, 2009Does secularization of the USA spell social meltdown?:
That's certainly what two European sociologists, Loek Halman and Thorleif Pettersson, have concluded. Using data from the European Values Survey, they found that there was no relationship between how religious a country was (on average) and a rich it was in social capital.
For example, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have similar levels of social capital, although Slovakia is far more religious than the Czech Republic. Some of the countries with the most social capital, Sweden and Denmark, were also the least religious.
In fact, in…
razib | May 16, 2009There was a somewhat funny, if stupid, comment below in regards to minority opposition to gay marriage:
This has to be one of most ignorant and race obsessed articles I have ever read. Since you are so blinded by race you decided to leave out the most determinative factors in ones opinion concerning sexuality. The fact of the matter is black people are products of being enslaved and socialized in the bible belt. Black people are actually more tolerant of homosexuality then there white counterparts from the same cultural/geographic areas. Compare black opinions on homosexuality to Scotts-Irish…
razib | May 15, 2009
When I was reviewing the paper on skin color and ethnic ancestry a few days ago I saw a peculiar figure in a related paper which I thought I would highlight. The paper is Skin pigmentation, biogeographical ancestry and admixture mapping. The samples were 232 African and African-American individuals living in Washington, D.C., 173 British African Caribbean persons, and 187 individuals of European-American ancestry living in State College, Pa. The goal was to compare the ancestry of individuals to see how it related to their complexion. The African ancestry of these populations was:
African…
razib | May 14, 2009I heard on the radio several times in the past few weeks commentators refer to minority opposition to gay marriage, specifically the fact that New York and California have large numbers of blacks and Latinos who are voters. I was curious if Latinos really are notably more opposed to gay marriage than non-Hispanic whites. So I looked in the GSS. I limited the data to the years 2006 and 2008 for the variable MARHOMO, which asks:
Do you agree or disagree? j. Homosexual couples should have the right to marry one another.
The sample sizes for the groups are as follows:
Non-Hispanic whites = 2,292…
edyong | May 13, 2009
Image by Nicholas Conard
This sculpture may look a little bit like a roast chicken, but don't let that distract you - it's an incredibly important artistic find. This small figurine is arguably the oldest representation of the human body yet discovered.
The figure is clearly human, with short arms ending in five, carefully carved fingers, and a navel in the right position. But its most obvious features show that it depicts a woman, and very explicitly at that. She has large protruding breasts, wide hips and thighs, accentuated buttocks and pronounced vulva between her open legs. In contrast…
razib | May 13, 2009Physics, Tolkien, and the Bomb
Obesity - A new study and what it means to be a "healthy weight"
Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?
The Social Ramifications of Volcanism
Why don't we finish the human genome first?
razib | May 12, 2009You can watch the new Frontline documentary on Bernie's fraud online. If you're a Madoff-junkie, like I am, absolutely nothing new in terms of substance. But, it is really striking how much Fairfield Greenwich was run by total bullshit artists.
razib | May 11, 2009I went and watched the new Star Trek movie this weekend. It was alright. Worth the money. But there's one thing that's been getting in my craw about criticisms about the film, so I thought I would air my dissent. Since it's a spoiler, below the fold....
I liked the fact that the time travelers broke temporal continuity and that we're now veering off into an alternative timeline. Time travel was cute when Harlan Ellison came up with it in the 1960s, but it's done, overused and stale. In fact I began to feel years ago that it was a get-out-of-jail card whenever writers didn't have any new…
razib | May 10, 2009A few months ago I relayed preliminary data which suggested that Estonians are not like Finns. Now a new paper, Genetic Structure of Europeans: A View from the North-East:
Using principal component (PC) analysis, we studied the genetic constitution of 3,112 individuals from Europe as portrayed by more than 270,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) genotyped with the Illumina Infinium platform. In cohorts where the sample size was >100, one hundred randomly chosen samples were used for analysis to minimize the sample size effect, resulting in a total of 1,564 samples. This analysis…