razib
Posts by this author
March 21, 2009
A few years ago a brown friend of mine complained that there were all these diseases which non-white people were susceptible to at a higher rate (e.g., Type II Diabetes, hypertension, ateriosclerosis, etc.), perhaps the white race was really superior (or medical geneticists were entering into a…
March 21, 2009
Needed for AIG and the TARP: Silicon Valley Compensation Schemes:
The engineers of Silicon Valley startups are significantly smarter and work a lot harder than do the traders of Wall Street. Some of the engineers of Silicon Valley make fortunes: they are compensated with relatively low salaries and…
March 21, 2009
Genetic Future has a post which mulls over the idea that not screening for particular diseases is similar to child abuse. I was interested in this last comment:
Naturally there are objections to embryo screening among religious conservatives who believe that inflicting severe disease on children is…
March 19, 2009
See the data over at The Audacious Epigone. This sort of finding shouldn't be super "counter-intuitive," there are a lot of variables which affect the opinions of a set of people on a disparate set of questions, and one shouldn't expect too much internal consistency. I may be that all things…
March 17, 2009
A lot has happened since the mention of the AIG bonuses yesterday on this weblog. The media is overflowing with stories on it, and people are frothing with rage from high to low. In the age when many people are becoming aware of the power of "animal spirits" and the economic irrationality which…
March 17, 2009
This bloggingheads.tv about war robots is pretty fascinating. One of the issues with robots is that people are fixated on androids and really human-like artifice, and that hasn't really panned out. But it seems that technology is becoming a seamless part of our lives in a way that we're not even…
March 17, 2009
Readers were right. I posted about the idea of shaming the AIG execs, but events move faster than thoughts:
A tidal wave of public outrage over bonus payments swamped American International Group yesterday. Hired guards stood watch outside the suburban Connecticut offices of AIG Financial Products…
March 17, 2009
You knew it was coming. Members Looking For Relief For Madoff Fraud Victims.
March 16, 2009
Was this Britain's first black queen?, in The Guardian:
Among those who attended Aptekar's focus groups is congressman Mel Watt, one of very few African-Americans in the House of Representatives and who represents the 12th district of North Carolina which includes Charlotte. "In private…
March 16, 2009
I've kind of been thinking this already: Provoking the AIG Walk of Shame:
What would happen if those names were made public? The populist rage that's bubbling in this country is not something to be toyed with. The very prospect of having their names publicized should be enough to scare the pants…
March 16, 2009
Model Minority? No, Thanks!:
In reality, Indian Americans, much like other immigrants, have diverse experiences and backgrounds. Indian Americans are doctors, engineers and lawyers, as well as small business owners, domestic workers, taxi drivers and convenience store employees. Community members…
March 15, 2009
Dumb article, Nobody's Model Minority, in response to Jason Richwine's Indian Americans: The New Model Minority (H/T Steve), makes a pretty obvious error:
He presses on anyway, attributing Indian Americans' overall "success" in the U.S. to three factors: culture, education (that is, an "obsessive…
March 15, 2009
Genetic Future points to a new paper which suggests that inbreeding is declining over time. Their methodology involved surveying different age cohorts and noting the decreased levels of homozygosity among the youth. Dienekes points out that the use of living people might simply be confounding…
March 15, 2009
Dienekes & John Hawks have already blogged a new paper, Geographical structure and differential natural selection amongst North European populations:
Population structure can provide novel insight into the human past and recognizing and correcting for such stratification is a practical concern…
March 13, 2009
The Audacious Epigone looks closely at the opinions regarding the banning of unpopular speech which I posted on earlier. I limited the sample to whites, because after all, who cares what coloreds think? No seriously, I was trying to get population substructure out of the way (this is why Barack…
March 12, 2009
Have any of my Canadian readers gotten their hands on the All-In-One Pomegranate Smartphone? I've heard the "hand-warmer" feature was designed specifically for customers in the Great North.
March 12, 2009
Joshua Zelinsky says regarding political moderates:
This is interesting. The stereotype is if anything the exact opposite about political moderates. The stereotype is that they are the smart people who can see the shades of gray and who aren't subject to things like belief overkill. This seems to…
March 12, 2009
Like the little boy who can't help sticking his finger into the socket, Dan MacArthur is talking about race, IQ & genetics again. He quotes an exchange in nature where a researcher states:
So, given that we have logical reason to hypothesize about differences in cognitive abilities, why would…
March 12, 2009
I 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…
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…
March 11, 2009
Nine 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…
March 11, 2009
No surprise that a reader points out that healthier areas seem to map onto "Blue" areas of the United States. But there is actually more to this than meets the eye: Are Republicans Healthier Than Democrats?:
In the International Journal of Epidemiology, S. V. Subramanian and Jessica Perkins write…
March 11, 2009
A few years ago I pointed to a paper which surveyed variation in health across the United States as a function of geography. Today Andrew Gelman points to a new map put out by the heath insurance industry. I've placed the two maps side by side below.
March 11, 2009
The 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…
March 11, 2009
In 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…
March 10, 2009
The 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;…
March 10, 2009
One 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…
March 10, 2009
At Genetic Future. As noted by Dr. MacArthur this is currently an exception to the rule when it comes to predicting traits from genes. This can come in handy when you have DNA samples from a crime scene and reconstructing the appearance of the perp.
Related: OCA2, the "blue eye gene".
March 10, 2009
There 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…