Culture
razib | June 2, 2008A week ago I posted on the gender gap in politics; today Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science critiques a similar argument:
Via Craig Newmark, I saw a column by John Lott summarizing his 1999 paper with Lawrence Kenny, "Did women's suffrage change the size and scope of government?" Lott and Kenny conclude Yes, by comparing the spending and revenue patterns of state governments before and after women were allowed to vote. I haven't looked at the analysis carefully and would need a little more convincing that it's not just a story of coinciding time trends (they have a…
sheril | June 2, 2008As tickets are going fast for the New Kids On The Block tour, Harrison Ford is starring as Indiana Jones in the summer's first blockbuster and a movie about Batman and the Joker nears premiere. Big hair is in and we await a President named George Bush out. There's conflict in the Middle East and a Mars Lander set to explore the red planet. Paula Abdul is driving the music industry, Madonna is topping billboard charts, and J. Crew's promoting jelly shoes as the summer's hottest accessory.
Oh. And it's 2008 this time around.
Now that I'm in my late 20's looking back at the sunset of the…
razib | June 1, 2008Shrimp is my favorite food; I really like shrimp. When I was an undergrad I used to stuff myself during "shrimp night" at the cafeteria. Basically I would show up at 4:30 and hang out eating until 7:00, then I would recline for an hour because moving was going to be really, really, painfull. Once I managed to walk without discomfort I'd go and lay down on my bed in the dorm room because I was worried about my stomach exploding. I really like shrimp. So with that, check out Deep Sea News as CJ posts about sustainable seafood. To my chagrin I ordered fried shrimp when I was visiting CJ in…
razib | May 28, 2008A good critique of my posts which explored the correlates of Biblical literacy. It isn't surprising that some transformations make the relationship clearer....
razib | May 28, 2008Five years ago Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek's International Edition editor, splashed onto the public intellectual scene with The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. It's somewhat heterodox, at least for the mainstream, observation that liberal democracy is more than simple majoritarianism, earned him some notoriety. Enough so that he could receive a fawning profile in New York Magazine. But while five years ago Fareed promoted some rather academically well known but transgressive ideas about the necessity for institutional, economic and cultural supports for a…
razib | May 27, 2008My two posts on religion & IQ/education are getting a lot of attention. I didn't spend more than 30 minutes on both entries combined, so the attention to unit time invested ratio is rather out of wack. Doing some digging it's funny how interested people are in this topic, while at the same time being totally disinclined to do their own leg work. Multiple message boards have also pointed to another similar survey which shows the relationship between religiosity and IQs in international comparisons. You might be amused to find out that I wrote that up in 30 minutes 5 years ago as a joke…
razib | May 26, 2008The post below where I show that belief in the literal truth of the Biblical tends to correlate well with IQ scores from the General Social Survey on a denominational scale is getting a lot of response; enough of it is of low quality that I'll close the comment thread soon enough. As I observed the "truth" which I had extracted out of the data is rather banal; I doubt it surprised anyone that a "fundamentalist" attitude toward religious scripture tends to be associated with low cognitive ability. The correlation here is probably not one of simple causality in either direction. It seems the…
razib | May 22, 2008A few years ago a poll came out, Religious Views and Beliefs Vary Greatly by Country, According to the Latest Financial Times/Harris Poll. My title is a bit misleading insofar as the survey compared several European countries as well as the United States. Below the fold I've placed a few of the tables which I think might surprise, or not, depending on where you stand. One thing I will observe is that despite the substantive differences which lay at the heart of the rivalry between France and the United States, there are also similarities between these two "universal nations" that lead to…
cmooney | May 21, 2008My latest Science Progress column just went up--it's a reaction to this intriguing proposal, by scholar Jonathan Gottschall, to remake the ailing field of literary studies with a scientific foundation. An excerpt:
Writing in the Boston Globe ideas section, Gottschall describes in detail what his science of literature would look like, something he can do because he and his colleagues have already performed some early experiments. They've crunched data comparing Western and non-Western literatures to determine if one is more sexist than the other (in the sense of constantly describing whether…
razib | May 19, 2008Sheril and other science bloggers are talking about the fact that the top 3 in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair are female. I suppose that means we'll stop talking about gender disparities in science & engineering? Yeah, I doubt it....
At the same time, this just popped into my RSS, The freedom to say 'no': Why aren't there more women in science and engineering? Controversial new research suggests: They just aren't interested:
They have a provocative echo in the conclusions of Susan Pinker, a psychologist and columnist for the Toronto Globe and Mail. In her…
razib | May 19, 2008Via E. Klein, I found out abut a new show on PBS this fall, Spain...on the Road Again, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Mario Batali, Mark Bittman, and Claudia Bassols. Preview below the fold....
I have to admit that Batali's corpulence makes me recall a Sesame Street game...
razib | May 19, 2008I was IMing with a friend about inbreeding depression and came across a map which shows the laws regarding cousin marriage in the United States....
And here's a map of the Mississipi drainage basin....
(nothing else really jumps out at me)
Of course the whole cousin marriage issue isn't as "hot button" as same-sex marriage. I assume cousins who marry in a state where it is legal have their marriage recognized in states where it isn't? It will be interesting if gay marriage becomes much more common if cousin marriage comes up too since it is much more common internationally.
razib | May 17, 2008As Deaths Outpace Births, Cities Adjust:
This city has passed a grim demographic milestone: More people are dying here than are being born.
What demographers call a natural decrease has been occurring for years in tiny rural towns and in some retirement meccas in the South. But the phenomenon is relatively new in metropolitan areas in the Northeast, the Rust Belt of the Middle West and Appalachia.
Hospitals are closing obstetrics wards and converting them to acute care. Local governments and other social service providers are adjusting to the emergence of entire neighborhoods where the…
razib | May 14, 2008Many people are talking about David Brooks' new column, The Neural Buddhists. First, I think much respect should be given to Brooks for introducing science into his column; too much punditry today is informed by seat of the pants introspection & anecdote, as opposed to what scholars have uncovered thanks to the funding of the taxpayer. That being said, I think on the specifics there are problems with his interpretation of the literature in the area of neuroscience. Frontal Cortex, Island of Doubt and Evolution Blog have all hit the main points (though I tend to think that Jonah's…
razib | May 13, 2008When I was a child in Bangladesh one of my "charming" activities would be to give the local banana seller some unsolicited advice. As he walked down the street carrying his banana-bunch I would shout down from the balcony and tell him which cultivars my family preferred, and that he better get with the program if he wanted our business. What he had on offer was similar to the Cavendish which you encounter in American supermarkets; my family tended to prefer a smaller, sweeter, variety which was often seeded. Despite all the problems (e.g., pathogen load) associated with living in an…
vhughes | May 12, 2008Despite An Inconvenient Truth's Oscar win and Al Gore's Nobel, public opinion of global warming has changed little since the film's release in 2006.
As Matt Nisbet recently pointed out: "Conventional wisdom pegged Gore's film and media campaign as changing the nature of the debate in the public's mind, but unfortunately this interpretation doesn't hold up to the data." Even more surprising is that apparently the debate is most heated among the college educated.
What about you guys? Did the film only tell you what you already knew? Did it change your mind? Did it bore you to tears?
Click…
sheril | May 12, 2008No, this is not my leg (I plan to stay ink-free), but the appendage belongs to a favorite girlfriend and former bandmate. She's a soil scientist with a passion for the lovable preying mantis and I suspect I've just witnessed the creation of the coolest science tattoo this millennium...
Check out my full post over at Correlations for a full photo of the 8-inch fella, antennae to abdomen!
razib | May 11, 2008Pew has an excellent survey up about the state of religion and religiosity in China. There isn't a lot of good data out of China on this topic for obvious reasons. One of the phenomenon of recent years in the West has been the perception among evangelicals that China is the scene of mass conversions to Christianity. Because of the lack of data there are speculations of hundreds of millions of crypto-Christians; and some in the media repeat these claims rather uncritically (Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power is an example of the…
razib | May 10, 2008I've commented on height genetics now & then. It seems that the quantitative genetic supposition that variation on this trait was due to the cummulative effect of numerous loci of small effect is correct. Recent research has pinpointed about ~5% of the variance. In contrast, skin color variation is mostly due to polymorphism on about 6 loci; most of the variance is due to genes of large effect. This makes specific discussion of skin color easy, but height difficult.
I've been thinking about this when it comes social phenomena. Much of the verbal treatment presupposes a few large…
vhughes | May 9, 2008Where do you do science? Seed Magazine wants to know.
We've all seen the stereotypical pictures of a science lab: microscopes and petri dishes sitting atop sterile work benches; electric circuits sunk in a mess of metal wires and batteries; equations scribbled on blackboards. But we also know that plenty of world-changing science goes on in non-typical places.
Now hard at work on the next issue, Seed editors want to see the typical or not-so-typical places where you do science. For the chance to get your scientific work space featured in Seed, please send a photo of it to art@seedmediagroup.…