Culture
razib | March 12, 2009I made a comment to the effect that political moderation tends to correlate with lower intelligence when looking over survey data on attitudes toward unpopular speech. This assertion didn't come out of a vacuum, when mining the GSS there were repeated indications that moderates were somewhat stupider than they should be. But here's the WORDSUM scores for whites separated into moderate vs. non-moderate classes (liberals & conservatives aggregated in the second).
But of course you want to control for education!
As you can see, even controlling for graduate degree or high school…
razib | March 11, 2009
p-ter has a post up which he illustrates with a photograph of a rather ghoulish prosimian. I've read that some of the Victorians found chimpanzees & gorillas almost obscene because of their simultaneous resemblance to humanity and manifest inhumanity. I somewhat feel the same about prosimians, especially tarsiers. No doubt this is due to my relative familiarity with immature chimpanzees on television shows. In any case, there is a new paper out which demonstrates that the genetic architecture of blue eyes in two species of lemurs is not similar to that in humans. Contrast this to…
razib | March 11, 2009Nine Mouths to Feed:
This was no simple task. Henry, 30, a former N.F.L. running back who played for three teams from 2001 to 2007, has nine children -- each by a different mother, some born as closely as a few months apart.
Reports of Henry's prolific procreating, generated by child-support disputes, have highlighted how futile the N.F.L.'s attempts can be at educating its players about making wise choices. The disputes have even eclipsed the attention he received after he was indicted on charges of cocaine trafficking.
Talk about a diverse genetic portfolio! So has there been a lot of…
razib | March 11, 2009The Center For American Progress has a new report out profiling the ideological disposition of the American populace. It simply repeats the old finding that the United States prefers Left-liberal policies a la carte to a far greater extent than the label liberal. This is natural, the electorate tends to favor lower taxes and greater spending simultaneously. I can't but notice the similarity with atheism here; many more Americans adhere to the atheist position than are willing to call themselves atheists. But in the younger cohorts this disjunction seems less noticeable, so I wonder if much…
sheril | March 11, 2009
The blogosphere is buzzing over the new middle school aged Dora The Explorer because of her recently released silhouette.
Over at Packaging Girlhood, Lynn and Sharon suggest:
If the original Dora grew up, she wouldn't be a fashion icon or a shopaholic. She'd develop her map reading skills and imagine the places she could go. She'd capitalize on those problem solving skills to design new ways to bring fresh water to communities in need around the world. Maybe she'd become a world class runner or follow her love of animals and become a wildlife preservationist or biologist.
Wait... what?! We'…
sheril | March 11, 2009I've been fascinated by the Romanovs for decades hoping that perhaps, just perhaps... Anastasia had somehow escaped. Unfortunately, new research published in PLoS ONE finally provides grim evidence of what happened to the family's youngest children in 1918:
One of the greatest mysteries for most of the twentieth century was the fate of the Romanov family, the last Russian monarchy. Following the abdication of Tsar NicholasII, he and his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were eventually exiled to the city of Yekaterinburg. The family, along with four loyal members of their staff, was…
razib | March 11, 2009In my post below where I show that different groups accept free speech to different extents some asked if the fact that those with better vocabularies supported free speech could just be that they were college educated. To some extent this seems to be true. Here is the chart again of support for a racist being allowed to speak by vocabulary test score (0 out of 10 on the left, 10 out of 10 on the right).
Less than High School:
High School:
Some College:
College:
Graduate School:
There aren't too many with college & graduate educations who have vocab scores below 5 out of 10, ergo,…
razib | March 10, 2009The Next Targets in the Madoff Case:
One source said that eventually, many members of Madoff's family will either be indicted by the US attorney's office for the Southern District of New York or cop a plea. "You have to look at the fact that Peter and [his daughter] Shana were compliance officers; they were supposed to look at all the statements to see if they were right," the source said. "Either they asked no questions, turned a blind eye, or they could not help but see the falsified trade tickets of blue-chip companies sent to clients."
razib | March 10, 2009One of the issues that often comes up when I report data which show that the young are more secular (or liberal) than the old is that people change with time. And age is presumed to correlate with greater religiosity and conservatism. I'll take politics off the table. The Inductivist suggests that the GSS doesn't indicate that the young become anymore religious with age. In other words, religiosity at age X is a very good predictor of religiosity at age X + n.
Christian Fundamentalist pollster George Barna observes the same in his surveys:
The research data showed that one pattern emerged…
amillikan | March 10, 2009Pictures from the Building_Space_With_Words event:
The maze.
The venue.
The interface.
The Seed stand.
______
Photos by Sheila Prakash.
sheril | March 10, 2009The Guardian:
Human pollution is turning the seas into acid so quickly that the coming decades will recreate conditions not seen on Earth since the time of the dinosaurs, scientists will warn today.
Say what?! Look, ocean acidification is a VERY real threat to our planet. That said, the seas are not turning to acid! (But gee, way to scare folks into envisioning the demise of the wicked witch!) This demonstrates a lack of taking the time to explore and understand what ocean acidification means--the term is used to describe the way the pH of oceans is becoming less basic as they absorb…
cmooney | March 10, 2009Over a year ago, we had an idea: We were doing a book that discusses the work of the British physicist-novelist C.P. Snow, and the 50 year anniversary of his world famous "two cultures" argument was coming up--May 7, 2009. Precisely 50 years earlier, Snow had delivered a lecture at Cambridge University lamenting the gap between scientists and humanists, or as he called them then, "literary intellectuals," and suggesting it was a grave threat to policymaking and to the future.
We believe this is still a deeply important and resonant argument, and so we got in touch with the New York Academy of…
razib | March 10, 2009There are several questions regarding speech which which have huge sample sizes in the GSS:
SPKRAC (Allow Racist to Speak), SPKHOMO (Allow Homosexual to Speak), SPKCOM (Allow Communist to Speak) and SPKATH (Allow Anti-Religionist to Speak) all have sample sizes of 53,000. This means that one can look for trends at a relatively granular scale. I decided to check how people lined up as a function of Age, belief in God, political views and intelligence (vocabulary). Lots of charts below.
A key:
1) Age goes from 18-89, left to right.
2) God goes from (left to right) atheist, to agnostic, to…
sheril | March 10, 2009Chris and I have been hard at work planning something big... Check back at 11 for details!
razib | March 10, 2009Vanity Fair has a long profile of Walter Noel's clan up right now. Noel, if you don't know, is the head of Fairfield Greenwich, which funneled billions into Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme. One of Noel's daughters has this precious quote:
Lawyers for aggrieved clients are hell-bent on finding and seizing whatever's left of the Noels' fortune. "I've been poor before. I can be poor again," Marisa said to a friend.
This is what she is referring to:
As they grew up, her daughters helped her with it. The eldest four--Corina, Lisina, Ariane, and Alix--went to public and private schools. They spent…
razib | March 9, 2009The American Religious Identification Survey 2008 is out. It is complementary to the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, and seems to confirm its findings. But its main advantage is that there was a survey in 1990 and 2001, so you have three points in time from which to observe trends.
As you can see, the number of atheists & agnostics tracks the general increase in the number with no religion, it's doubled in the past generation. But, though only 2% of the population identifies as atheist & agnostic, around ~10% of the population holds to beliefs which are atheistic or agnostic.…
sheril | March 9, 2009I'm off to the city for a panel in recognition of International Women's Day. Given the theme, I'd like to point readers to a recent piece from The Guardian asking 'Where are the books by women with big ideas?'
Books like Freakonomics, defining significant cultural or economic trends with a punchy title, never seem to be produced by women. But why?
As you can imagine, I have much to say on the topic coming soon, but am first interested in your reaction to the article. Here's an excerpt to get us started:
Julia Cheiffetz, blogging at publishing website HarperStudio, dubs the genre "big think…
sheril | March 7, 2009Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy posted this terrific piece that started off my Saturday with a smile. It reads like The Onion, though I also can't find the original source. Take a look and see if you agree that author Michael Haber might be onto something...
Emboldened by their success in declaring Pluto not a
planet, the International Astronomical Union determined this week by a
close vote that February is too short to be considered a true month. It
has, however, been granted the newly created status of "dwarf month."
It shares this dubious distinction with several other calendar time…
razib | March 6, 2009Some have argued that the Culture Wars are in abatement. Out of curiosity I checked the attitudes toward abortion on demand and homosexuality in the GSS broken down by age & political orientation. The ABANY and HOMOSEX variables. Below are the percentages who agree with abortion on demand as well as the contention that there is nothing wrong with homosexual relations.
Yes To Abortion On Demand
Extremely Liberal
Liberal
Slightly Liberal
Moderate
Slightly Conservative
Conservative
Extremely Conservative
65 or older
57
50
34
32
32…