I am not doing daily link round ups right now because I’m not reading the web as much, but I certainly have enough material to put up one link round-up/pointer per week.
David Burbridge of GNXP has completed five posts on the Price equation. One more to go (focusing on group selection). Highly recommended.
Vitamin D Deficit Doubles Risk of Stroke in Whites, but Not in Blacks, Study Finds. There has been other stuff about different healthy basal levels of micronutrients by population. This is an important one to keep an eye on, and should make us reflect on the importance of personalized medicine. A friend of mine who is a doctor observed that one reason that more well educated and higher socioeconomic status patients get better diagnoses and treatment is because they do so much leg-work and are so assertive as advocates for their own health.
Questionable Science Behind Academic Rankings. It’s long been known that academic rankings (like lists of all sorts) are 1) voodoo in terms of adding any real value beyond what you know, 2) crack in terms of profitability. US News & World Report wouldn’t even exist at this point if it wasn’t for their yearly rankings, and if the weekly folds I’m sure that their rankings could be spun-off as a profitable annual publication.
The Way the Future Blogs. Frederik Pohl’s memories. One of the things I really enjoyed about The Price of Altruism is that it gave me a wider lens on George Price the man, who I knew primarily through the recollections of W. D. Hamilton. Pohl does the same for the luminaries of the “Golden Age of Science Fiction.” I especially enjoy the stuff on Isaac Asimov.
Thoughtful Animal. A blog worth reading.
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Might not post these every day for a few weeks as I’ll be busy, and not on the net as much. So no more “Daily” Data Dump until I’m more assured of my schedule.
In Icy Tip of Afghanistan, War Seems Remote. Profiles the people of the Wakhan Corridor, which is part of Afghanistan mostly because of the 19th century “Great Game” between Russia and the United Kingdom. The most striking aspect for the journalist seems to have been that the local Nizari Ismaili population of ethnic Kirghiz do not have their women don the burqa, except in the major town where ~50% of the population are Sunni Muslims. The Nizari Muslims are led by the Aga Khan, who holds the position of imam for this sect. Interestingly the current holder of the title is half-English, one-fourth Italian, and one-fourth Persian. He is married to an Englishwoman. Even the Sunni Kirghiz are generally not as punctilious about adhering to the normative Islam of Central Asia, so I don’t think we should chalk up all the differences to religion.
Debt Collectors Face a Hazard: Writer’s Cramp. I suspect many readers have had to deal with debt-collectors who keep calling for other people at their phone number, and won’t stop calling. Just the tip of the iceberg.
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A very special note: I endorse Christie Wilcox for 2010 Blogging Scholarship.
A map of human genome variation from population-scale sequencing. This paper is getting a lot of play. A taste of things to come from the 1000 Genomes Project. It’s OA, so check it out.
Difficulties in Defining Errors in Case Against Harvard Researcher. I think Marc Hauser will be an emeritus professor by the time the case involving his alleged misconduct is resolved.
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In Mideast House of Cards, U.S. Views Lebanon as Shaky. Some of the problems here are structural demographics. The institutions of Lebanon’s democracy were formed when Maronite Christians were the plural majority, followed by Sunni Muslims, then Shia Muslims, and finally minorities such as the Greek Orthodox and Druze. Today the likely plural majority are the Shia, followed by the Sunnis and Maronites. Add on top of this the fact that the Shia tend to be poorer, and, have an invested international backer in Iran. The connection between the Iranian Shia and the Lebanese Shia has traditionally been closer than between the Iranian Shia and the Iraqi Shia.
Saudi Border With Yemen Is Still Inviting for Al Qaeda. Interesting coincidence that I posted on this issue last week. I think my libertarian friends such as Will Wilkinson and Bryan Caplan will get their wish for relatively open borders in the 21st century as a matter of pure probable prediction (there will be exceptions, I suspect Japan may be one). The future will be something more like the United Arab Emirates, though I hope we’ll be able to effect some humanitarianism on the margins, as well as mitigate the popularity of ugly modernist mega-structures.
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Just a heads up, I might be posting less later in the week and into the weekend. So might skip these at some point.
Are Democrats Overachieving in the Senate? Is Nate Silver is having a downward pressure on other political coverage? I don’t even bother checking the other analytical stuff in The New York Times; they’re just going to basically do souped-up trend stories with cherry-picked quotes from “experts” attempting a bit of man-bites-dog to product-differentiate. The basic outlines of what’s going to happen at the mid-terms is known, as well as the uncertainty. Beyond that most people are guessing and spinning. On the specific issue at hand, I’m not too versed in politics but I had assumed that the Senate was a less volatile institution in election-to-election change in party proportions because only 1/3 of it was up for election in a given year, vs. 100% of the House of Representatives. Silver points out that if the whole Senate was up for reelection we might be looking at filibuster-proof Republican majority, and an outside shot at veto-proof majority.
The Myth of Charter Schools. It’s basically a review of the problems with Waiting for “Superman”. I think this current educational enthusiasm is at a bubble-point, I noticed a few weeks back The New York Times published a downbeat assessment of Geoffrey Canada’s results with the Harlem Children’s Zone.
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Detailed admixture analysis of West Eurasian populations (+ GenomesUnzipped individuals). Dienekes looks at the Genomes Unzipped guys in the context of Eurasian variation. He explains why he prefers bar plots of inferred ancestral quanta over PCA and MDS charts.
A World Upside Down for Greeks. “In Greece, small businesses — defined as stores or workshops employing fewer than 10 people, though many are one-person operations — account for 96 percent of all enterprises and employ around two million of Greece’s five million-strong work force.” Part of this is presumably familialism. Greeks don’t trust each other, so private sector activity is always on a small scale. And part of it is probably the constricted regulatory framework of the Greek economy which prevents the emergence of corporations with some economies of scale. But either way it seems that this is too strong of a bias to be an efficient allocation of labor.
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My DonorsChoose page. Compared to previous years I’m kind of under-performing. I haven’t done any PBS-like incentives before, but perhaps I should. For example, anyone who gives $250 is owed a post from me on a topic of their choice of at least 2,000 words excluding quotations within the next 3 months. Those are just stray numbers thrown out there, but anyone interested? You’d have to rely on my good faith obviously, as I’m the final arbiter as to whether I’m gaming the metrics, but I’m an honest person about these sorts of things. It would probably be reasonable to do a graduated scale above a minimum threshold too.
Achievement gap achieved household status a decade ago. Seems like the rise of high-stakes testing means that “the gap” is now in widespread circulation as a meme…but I doubt most people know the quantitative details. According to the The Journal of Black Education in 2006 ~48,000 whites scored above a 700 on the Verbal SAT, while ~1,200 blacks did. For the math the figures were ~55,500 and ~1,100. A 700 is about at the 25th percentile of a Harvard undergraduate.
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Use Cash, Not Cards, To Buy Better Food? Another of the upsides of the “pain of paying.” I wonder if the effect will be transferred to debit cards as we move away from cash? Or, perhaps the effect is tied to the concreteness of a currency, and cash is just more concrete than debit cards. If you had gold ingots would there be more pain? And barter?
Intelligence Makes People Think Like Economists. The preprint has been around forever, I had forgotten that Bryan Caplan was going to publish it somewhere. Whether is redounds to the reputation of the intelligent or not is your call.
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Elitism in the Senate. Harvard Law School:Tokyo University::Congress:Diet. Perusing The Almanac of American Politics makes it pretty clear that Harvard Law is way overrepresented.
Barbara Billingsley Dies. All icons shall pass.
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As you can see, I got the DonorsChoose widget to work. Here’s the Discover Blogs leader board. Sean Carroll et al. are “beating” me by an order of magnitude right now. Not that that’s the point….
It’s a Jersey Thing. New South Park episode. I noticed a bunch of references to The Lord of The Rings which don’t seem to have made it into the Wikipedia summary of the episode. The depiction of “Snooki” was very funny.
How Worrysome is Habitat Loss? In relation to bidoversity I’ve argued that biologists sometimes confuse their normative with their scientific concerns, and this muddles the message. Environmental activists don’t have this problem because they’re plainly engaging in activism.
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Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex. Is gay male sexual promiscuity a myth? “…in fact we found that just 2% of gay people have had 23% of the total reported gay sex, which is pretty crazy.”
Bloggers that deserve a wider readership. I second Andrew Gelman.
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Incumbents Polling Below 50 Percent Often Win Re-Election, Despite Conventional Wisdom. ‘By the way, the theory espoused by Mr. Kraushaar and others isn’t coming out of nowhere: there is solid evidence that it used to be true, 20 or 25 years ago. Back then, the undecideds in a race usually could be counted upon to break toward the challenger: the name given to this phenomenon was the “incumbent rule.”’ CW is a lagging indicator.
New Mongoose-Like Carnivorous Mammal Discovered in Madagascar. Crazy that we’re discovering mammals which are not the size of mice.
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Good morning WWW.
Richard Dawkins publicized the “We Are All Africans” t-shirt on Bill Maher’s show, which resulted in a major backlog of orders. The shirt is factually true. But the “Out of Africa” model is not as clean or simple as it would have been 10 years ago. Ironically Dawkins himself tipped his hand as to the complexity of his own thinking in The Ancestor’s Tale by promoting Alan Templeton’s “Out of Africa again and again” hypothesis. Dawkins in the past has shown a keen skepticism of deriving ought from is, so I’m a touch confused by this current tack, though the maxim on the t-shirt is quite fashionable in our age.
Deep ancestors of human DNA compatible with structured African population. Dienekes reviews a paper which came out this summer. This is going to make me sound stupid, but did I review the paper? [confused it with another paper, no, this just came out] I’ll have to look. There have been models like this around for years, but the discovery that there’s non-trivial Neandertal admixture in non-African populations using the retrieved Neandertal genome should shift our priors a bit in terms of evaluating these papers.
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Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery. It looks to be a combination of a virus and fungus. The paper itself is open access at PLoS ONE.
The READ: Washed Up. A panning of the attempts of Jersey Shore “cast” members to cash in on their fame. I think the reason that JS was such an initial hit is that unlike MTV’s other reality television offerings they are taken as they are and there is no attempt is made to “reform” them by opening their minds. In fact they’re arguably becoming more extreme in their caricature of the working-class East Coast white ethnic ethos.
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Razib Khan’s degrees are in biochemistry and biology. He has blogged about genetics since 2002, previously worked in software development, is an Unz Foundation Junior Fellow and lives in the western US. He loves habaneros.
