razib
Posts by this author
September 6, 2009
Global Health Magazine has some data up on the "% of women who believe it is OK for husbands to beat them." If you click through the original data, the question is more extensive:
% of girls and women aged 15-49 who responded that a husband or partner is justified in hitting or beating his wife…
September 6, 2009
This comment is funny:
Just because it is lower in calories doesn't mean that it doesn't have poison in it (toxins such as high fructose corn syrup). Read the labels people.
First, watch this video attempting to dispel the myths about high fructose corn syrup:
Now check out this spoof:
September 5, 2009
Matt Springer of Built on Facts has a post up where he defends the potential of nuclear power. Regular readers of this weblog will know that I am broadly sympathetic. I understand that the "atomic age" is not going to be a utopia by any means nor will it solve all our problems, I do have a…
September 5, 2009
Sean Carroll points out that physics and math degree holders have the highest LSAT scores. There's the classic chicken or egg issue implied here: does physics make you smart, or do only smart people manage to complete a degree in physics? I think it is more the latter. How individuals in various…
September 5, 2009
Singapore is a racially diverse society, so there's a natural pool of diversity from which one can draw for study of human variation. The Han majority of Singapore derive predominantly from Fujian in southeast China. The Indians are mostly from the southern regions dominated by Tamils or Telugus,…
September 4, 2009
So Gmail Was Down. Get Over It:
So if Gmail is as good as the power grid, the phone network, and home broadband, why does its failure spark such surprise and outrage--and always make national headlines...An online service's outage, though, is sudden, inexplicable, and communal. Gmail goes down for…
September 4, 2009
The New York Times has a strange article up, For Your Health, Froot Loops, which profiles the controversy around a new health food guideline/endorsement organized by industry which seems somewhat fishy. This part made me laugh out loud:
Dr. Kennedy, who is not paid for her work on the program,…
September 4, 2009
After reading Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe's First Farmers I'm left scratching my head a bit. Cut-out black & white models really benefit from lack of data, and now that there's some serious data I think perhaps that we need to think about starting…
September 4, 2009
Dienekes posted some abstracts of the ASHG 2009 meeting. This one is in the category of facts we assumed but weren't totally sure of:
Abraham's children in the genome era: Major Jewish Diaspora populations comprise distinct genetic clusters with shared Middle Eastern ancestry
Here, we present…
September 3, 2009
Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe's First Farmers:
Following the domestication of animals and crops in the Near East some 11,000 years ago, farming reached much of Central Europe by 7,500 years before present. The extent to which these early European farmers…
September 3, 2009
ScienceBlogs is going to be adding user registration. This should be a nice, as I can't flag certain commenters as approved anymore since the "upgrade." They're taking a poll on features you'd like. I'm keen on a vote/starring system. Some readers have awesome comments. Some do not.
September 2, 2009
Dan MacArthur has a very good post, New York Times adopts medical establishment line on personal genomics:
The NY Times has an article entitled "Buyer beware of home DNA tests" that adopts the paternalistic party line of the medical establishment: taking DNA tests without a doctor's advice is…
September 2, 2009
I notice that the NOVA documentary, Is there life on Mars?, is viewable online (from December 2008). Check it out.
September 1, 2009
Why Gmail Failed Today:
Gmail, which recently passed AOL to become the third largest Web mail service in the U.S., is obviously having some growing pains. A few hours of downtime is not the end of the world, although it might seem like it at the time. It just better not make this a new habit.
The…
September 1, 2009
I have recently mentioned an analogy between the heritability of height & weight. That is, the proportion of variance of the trait which can be explained by variance in the genes. How closely do parents resemble offspring. A new paper in PLoS ONE, How Humans Differ from Other Animals in Their…
August 31, 2009
Carl Zimmer is rather mild-mannered, but has expressed rather strong sentiments about what recently happened on bloggingheads.tv. Sean Carroll, not surprisingly, has stronger opinions. But they're now both proactively dissociating themselves from bloggingheads.tv. The McWhorter & Behe…
August 31, 2009
Mike the Mad Biologist points out that Massachusetts, New Jersey, Minnesota and New Hampshire do better on math scores for elementary age students than most of Europe, and are competitive with Asia. Here are Mike's factors for why this might be:
-Low child poverty rates as measured by school lunch…
August 30, 2009
Over at Living the Scientific Life an update on the quest to go to Antarctica. Turns out you can "reassign" your vote. Also, if you haven't voted, please do. Again:
Voting ends at noon EDT on 30 September 2009, and the Official Quark Blogger will travel to Antarctica in February 2010 to blog about…
August 30, 2009
A few months ago I pointed out that minorities don't oppose gay marriage, blacks do. Specifically, there are sometimes assumptions that Hispanics are extremely religious Roman Catholics characterized by very socially conservative views. From what I have seen the data are of much more modest…
August 30, 2009
Thomas Mailmund is going ape over chimps & humans again, Patterns of autosomal divergence between the human and chimpanzee genomes support an allopatric model of speciation. A review of a paper of the same name.
August 30, 2009
Interesting review paper on disease and Sub-Saharan African, Neglected Tropical Diseases in Sub-Saharan Africa: Review of Their Prevalence, Distribution, and Disease Burden:
The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are the most common conditions affecting the poorest 500 million people living in sub-…
August 30, 2009
I saw Thirst this weekend, a Korean film about a Catholic priest turned vampire. I was expecting strangeness, but it was really strange. The female lead, Kim Ok-bin gave a pretty good performance that I found very memorable. My friend who I watched the film with wondered if Asians produced really…
August 30, 2009
Anthropology.net points me to a new paper, Convergent genetic linkage and associations to language, speech and reading measures in families of probands with Specific Language Impairment:
We analyzed genetic linkage and association of measures of language, speech and reading phenotypes to candidate…
August 30, 2009
From page 55 of Empires of the Silk Road:
...Archaeology has shown that every location in Eurasia where Indo-European daughter languages have come to be spoken, modern humans had already settled there long beforehand, with the sole exception of the Tarim Basin, the final destination of the people…
August 29, 2009
There's a new paper in PLoS ONE, Craniometric Data Supports Demic Diffusion Model for the Spread of Agriculture into Europe. That's fine. There are two extreme models about how farming might have spread in Europe. One model suggests that farmers replaced non-farmers genetically. Another model…
August 29, 2009
Dienekes points me to a new paper, European Population Genetic Substructure: Further Definition of Ancestry Informative Markers for Distinguishing Among Diverse European Ethnic Groups. You've seen this song & dance before:
Population substructure in Japan
Population substructure of Mexican…
August 28, 2009
On a lark I decided to see how Catholics & Protestants broke down in regards to evolution by American region in the GSS. Specifically, I clustered the Census Divisions to create the categories of:
Northeast = New England + Mid Atlantic
Midwest = E & W North Central
South = S Atlantic + E…