If you’re like me you have friends and acquaintances who want to go to law school. I often respond sarcastically that “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.” There have long been “law school scam” blogs, but it seems that right now there’s a veritable bubble in media reports on exactly how law schools are screwing their students. Remember, law school debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy.

First, an article in The New Republic, Served: How law schools completely misrepresent their job numbers:

When we take temporary employment into account, it appears that approximately 45 percent of 2010 graduates of this particular top-50 law school had real legal jobs nine months after graduation. And the overall number is likely lower, since it seems probable that the temporary employment figures for the graduates of almost any top 50 school would be better than the average outcome for the graduates of the 198 ABA-accredited law schools as a whole.

Even this grim figure, however, may be unduly optimistic. All these statistics are based on self-reporting, and neither law schools nor NALP audit the data they publish. In the course of my research, I audited a representative sample of individual graduate responses and found several instances of people describing themselves as employed permanently or full-time, when in fact they had temporary or part-time jobs (I found no instances of inaccuracies running in the other direction). Perhaps some graduates exaggerate their employment status out of embarrassment, or for strategic reasons, but, whatever their reasons might be, this apparently not uncommon practice suggests that the true employment rate should be lowered even further.

This is old news. The New York Times now has a piece up with a new twist, Law Students Lose the Grant Game as Schools Win:

(more…)

A few months ago I exchanged some emails with Milford H. Wolpoff and Chris Stringer. These are the two figures who have loomed large in paleoanthropology and the origins of modernity human for a generation, and they were keen in making sure that their perspectives were represented accurately in the media. To further that they sent me some documents which would lay out their perspective, in their own words, and away from the public glare (as in, they’re academic publications).

(more…)

Over at the Less Wrong blog there is a post, So You’ve Changed Your Mind. This portion caught my attention:

So you’ve changed your mind. Given up your sacred belief, the one that defined so much of who you are for so long.

You are probably feeling pretty scared right now.

I reflected and realized that the various issues where I’ve held relatively strong opinions and then changed my mind were generally cases where I relied on received wisdom, looked more closely, and felt that there was some misrepresentation among the orthodox gatekeepers of wisdom. But there’s one “big” issue that I guess I have changed my mind: I used to view all utility calculations on the scale of the individual, and accepted that all entities above or below the scale of the individual were useful only as a means toward individual well being. I probably wouldn’t defend this position anymore, though I think it has a logical coherency and may still be viable in some places and times. I’m not a “communitarian” or anything like that, rather, I have an impulse to just disavow these sorts of formal constructions of how best to attain and maintain human happiness in a time and space invariant sense.

Individual and social life are often best optimized by both forethought, and a simple process of trial and error through living. Those who accept the power of a priori in matters societal are often younger from what I have experienced.

Years ago I took a course on Tudor and Stuart England. Its primary focus was more on social and cultural aspects of British society at the time, rather than diplomatic history. Later I took an interest in the England of the Civil War era. One thing that struck me was the unquestioned acceptance of monarchy in the minds of the people, from high nobility to low commoner. Like the Romans before the Visigothic sack in the early 5th century these were a people who could not imagine a world any different than the one they had known. That is one of the things which made the execution of Charles I so shocking to many contemporaries. Myself, I was tacitly indoctrinated in American republicanism as a child. Films like the The Patriot grow in the rich soil of the same cultural environment which gave rise to the phenomenon of the antagonists in Roman era films speaking with British accents while the protagonists had robust American drawls. As I spent my formative years on the fringes of of New England there was particular pride taken in that region’s early role in the rebellion whenever we addressed the American Revolutionary War. Clearly I have little reverence and respect for the institution of monarchy as a matter of upbringing and expectation. Not to make too explosive an analogy, but in the past I viewed monarchy as somewhat like slavery, an cultural artifact once universal which would inevitably melt away under the harsh glare of the objective forces of justice for all.

(more…)

I haven’t had these for a while. Following a request from the new year I’ve been mulling how to write up Population Structure and Eigenanalysis in an intelligible manner to the general readership. Still kind of at an impasse. On a logistical note, my email address is really getting on way too many mailing lists. If you want a prompt response from me twitter might be best, at least until I get overwhelmed by the noise on that service and move on to something else….

Over the past few days some friends have started receiving their results from 23andMe’s last sale (others have put me on notice to inform them of the next discount window). This brings me to thinking about direct-to-consumer genetic testing, and the legal and technological framework in which we live. In relation to the former thanks to Daniel Vorhaus the F.D.A. has reopened the public docket on this issue, until May 2nd. So Monday. The best way to submit is online: http://www.regulations.gov, and reference docket ID FDA-2011-N-0066. I believe this direct link to the submission page should work as well. You obviously know my opinion. Here are some sample submissions. You can also see the submissions so far at this address. Some of them are quite succinct: “FDA let people access their genetic information since it’s one of basic right of human being.”

Dr. Daniel MacArthur has more sage commentary, as usual.

Have a good weekend!

In the wake of the post from earlier this week on the inbreeding within the House of Windsor (and current lack thereof), Luke Jostins, a subject of the British monarch, has a nice informative post up, Inbreeding, Genetic Disease and the Royal Wedding. This tidbit is of particular interest:

In fact, eleventh cousins is a pretty low degree of relatedness, by the standard of these things. A study of inbreeding in European populations found that couples from the UK are, on average, as genetically related as 6th cousins (the study looked at inbreeding in Scots, and in children of one Orkadian and one non-Orkadian. No English people, but I would be very suprised if we differed significantly). 6th cousins share about 0.006% of their DNA, and thus have about a 0.06% chance of developing a genetic disease via a common ancestor. Giving that the Royal Family are better than most at genealogy, we can probably conclude that the royal couple are less closely related than the average UK couple, and thus their children are less likely than most to suffer from a genetic disease. Good news for them, bad news for geneticists, perhaps?

(more…)

1) First, a post from the past: Taste & behavior genetics.

(more…)

In the wake of yesterday’s review of a paper on heritable variance in trait preferences realized in romantic partners I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this new study out of PLoS ONE, Evolutionary History of Hunter-Gatherer Marriage Practices. It’s actually a pretty thin piece of work in all honesty from what I can tell. They wanted to query ancestral ranges of marriage patterns by mapping the cultural variation in customs onto a phylogenetic tree. To generate that tree they took mtDNA sequences, which to me seems kind of old school. Using the cultural patterns present in living hunter-gatherer groups they presumed they could infer the ancestral state.

So combining these two sources of data they generated this:

They conclude:

(more…)

Zack Ajmal has posted his K = 11 Reference 3 results including Harappa Ancestry Project participants. Below are the results sorted by the East Asian, South Asian, and Onge. I limited it to those who had 5% or more East Asian. All caps = reference populations. The rest are individuals from HAP:

That’s my parents at 12 and 11 percent East Asian. Using the new reference population Zack estimates that my “Ancestral South Indian” (ASI) is ~43%. That makes more sense to me that Dodecad’s estimate of ~34%. I think that Dodecad method was confused because I do have genuine East Asian admixture, and the estimate of “Ancestral North India” (ANI) vs. ASI is confounded by other components. I suspect that the estimates of Onge are probably less valid for groups like the Khasi because of bleeding over from the East Asian component (in other words, the regression which Zack used to predict ASI is fitted to South Asian populations without East Asian admixture, and isn’t fully transferable to those that have it). But the geographical breakdown of the East Asian element is pretty striking, if expected. The Bengalis have more East Asian than other Indians, as you’d expect. Here are all the HAP individuals + reference populations as points on a two dimensional plot:

(more…)

The Case for Cursive:

For centuries, cursive handwriting has been an art. To a growing number of young people, it is a mystery.

The sinuous letters of the cursive alphabet, swirled on countless love letters, credit card slips and banners above elementary school chalk boards are going the way of the quill and inkwell. With computer keyboards and smartphones increasingly occupying young fingers, the gradual death of the fancier ABC’s is revealing some unforeseen challenges.

Not too surprising. But here’s a question: does anyone out there have problems writing by hand, period? I do so little on pen/pencil & paper* that I have been noticing some strangeness in my non-signature writing. Usually when I have to send a letter where I have to write out the address, or perhaps to write something on a card. A lot of our day to day tasks are implicit/subconscious. Our “reflexes” emerge through repetition. But what happens when “basic” tasks become exceptional events? I’ve probably gotten much better at typing with my fingers on my smartphone’s screen at this point than printing out letters. As for cursive, don’t even go there….

* Supermarket shopping lists are now a constantly updated Google Doc which I access in my smart phone.

My friend Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection is going solo and joining the crew at Wired Science Blogs. Since I have other friends there the RSS addition will be natural. They better take care of her there. I know from first hand experience that the editors in these digs pay attention to the needs of the bloggers. In any case, Sheril has been someone with whom I’ve had extremely positive interactions with every since we shared space on ScienceBlogs, so I’m definitely excited for her and will keep an eye on what she’s up to. You should too!

I’m more a connoisseur of the trailers of summer films than a viewer of them. But I notice that a new Conan film is coming out, after years of delays which I was blissfully ignorant of. But honestly this is not a franchise I’d have thought would be up for a “reboot,” but here we are. I have never read more than one of Robert E. Howard’s stories, but the two 1980s films which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger I’ve watched half a dozen times each. They’re campy and silly, but generally fun if your tastes run toward juvenile, or, you are a juvenile. But the trailer for the new edition makes it seem overly serious, without the budgetary sizzle to render it palatable. Below is the trailer for the 2011 film, along with those for the two earlier ones.

(more…)

Judging by some of the amusing search queries I find every Friday people have a wide range of tastes and fetishes when it comes to pornography. From what I can tell the realized phenotypic interval in mate choice is less varied and eye-opening, but exists nonetheless. Why? Is there a rhyme or reason, or is it simply random chance and the necessity of the biological clock ticking? These are not issues which aren’t discussed or mooted thoroughly regularly. The popular science literature is littered with hypotheses from social and evolutionary psychology. How else could you have a books such as The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature and Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. This is sexy science by definition. Not Physics Letters.

There are three broad issues which have interested me in the domain of attraction and evolution. First, what is the character of cultural universals of beauty rooted in biological preferences? Second, what is the character of cultural variation in beauty rooted in contingencies or local conditions? And third, what are the genetic and non-genetic factors in individual mate preference? In this post I’ll focus on the last. Not to put a fine point on it: are you born with a “type,” or is your “type” a matter of chance and necessity after you are born? An interesting twist on the second issue is that one phenomenon which falls into the “not born” but biological category is the process of sexual imprinting. For example, you may exhibit attraction to individuals who resemble your opposite sex parent.* The clear connection to the presumed “Oedipus complex” of this probably explains it prominence.

A new paper in The American Naturalist aims to examine the question of realized variation individual preferences with a huge sample of twins, monozygotic and dizygotic. By realized, I mean that they focus on the people with whom you actually pair up, not your ideal avowed preference. Variation in human mate choice: simultaneously investigating heritability, parental influence, sexual imprinting, and assortative mating:

(more…)

Mr. James Winters at A Replicated Typo pointed me to a short hypothesis paper, Neanderthal-human Hybrids. This paper argues that selective mating of Neandertal males with females of human populations which had left Africa more recently, combined with Haldane’s rule, explains three facts:

- The lack of Neandertal Y chromosomal lineages in modern humans.

- The lack of Neandertal mtDNA lineages in modern humans.

- The probable existence of Neandertal autosomal ancestry in modern humans.

If you don’t know, Haldane’s rule basically suggests that there’s going to be some sort of breakdown in the heterogametic sex. In humans females are homogametic, XX, and males are heterogametic, XY. The breakdown need not be death (or spontaneous abortion). It could be sterility (e.g., some mutation or genetic incompatibility which results in the malfunctioning of the flagella of sperm would do it).

So you have a scenario where only Neandertal males are interbreeding with the intrusive groups from the south. The hybrids from these pairings would then lack Neandertal mtDNA, since mtDNA is passed only from mothers. But the male offspring would have Neandertal Y chromosomes. This is where Haldane’s rule kicks in: these males in their turn would not reproduce. Therefore only the female hybrids would pass on their genes. These females obviously don’t pass on a Y chromosome. And, they would pass on their non-Neandertal mother’s mtDNA.

(more…)