razib
Posts by this author
November 6, 2008
A Muslim blogger who I am acquainted with, Tariq Nelson, has been threatened:
To the coward that called from a BLOCKED NUMBER and threatened me! I HAVE CALLED the police and I am PUSHING HARD to FIND OUT WHO YOU ARE and I will prosecute to the fullest extent possible! Apparently you know of me in…
November 5, 2008
Yes. This weblog is ostensibly about genetics. And yes, I've gotten a little obsessed about crunching election data. Honestly, I get a little bit like this every four years...I remember the '96 election and the primitive years of the internet even. I decided I might as well post on my fixation…
November 5, 2008
In 1996 Bill Clinton won with 49% of the vote vs. 41% for Bob Dole. The New York Times now allows you to compare county-by-county outcomes across two elections between all presidential years between 1992 and 2008. I think 1996 is the most analogous to Barack Obama's victory yesterday, so I want…
November 5, 2008
Andrew Gelman reports the finding from the national exit polls that the highest income brackets seem to be leaning toward the Democrats this cycle. The difference between 2008 & 2004 is striking and of note. But, remember that $100,000/year in Palo Alto is a working stiff. $100,000/year in…
November 5, 2008
I suggested below that though on average whites did not move toward the Democrats, regionally there might be differences. I inferred this from the fact that areas where blacks are thin on the ground in the South it looks as if John McCain did better than George W. Bush in 2004. So I compared the…
November 5, 2008
The MSM rocks, specifically the New York Times.
If you filtered out blacks I'm pretty sure that the swath of red would be far more discernible in the South.* The blue patches match up very well with the Black Belt. It looks like the East South Central Census division, the core of Old Dixie is for…
November 5, 2008
Over at Culture11 James Poulos refers to the Great Flip; the Republicans of 1860 were a regional party of the North and Greater North (e.g., California). Today to a great extent that is the position of the Democrats; the narrow wins by Barack Obama in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina were due…
November 5, 2008
The New York Times put together a really nice interactive map for the election...but I thought it would be nice to have the three displays right next to each other instead of just toggling. So below the fold are the:
1) States as allocated to each candidate
2) Counties allocated to each candidate,…
November 4, 2008
I'm still chewing through the exit polls, though Steve is right that there are no big surprises. I think I'll put up a few charts which display questions where responses can be thought of in an ordinal manner just to make clear the trend lines. But of course Andrew Gelman has already crunched the…
November 4, 2008
David Boaz of the The Cato Institute observes that Barack Obama is Not Just the First African-American President:
But his achievement is even more striking than "first African-American president." There are tens of millions of white Americans who are part of ethnic groups that have never produced…
November 4, 2008
Please read this post from Mark Blumenthal on the purpose and uses of exit polls. I'll probably starting digging through them and start posting facts and charts late tonight trying to smoke out interesting regional and social dynamics. You can check the exit polls yourself; don't take someone's…
November 3, 2008
FuturePundit points me to new work on a genetic mutation which might predispose one to Season Affective Disorder, A missense variant (P10L) of the melanopsin (OPN4) gene in seasonal affective disorder:
SAD participants had a higher frequency of the homozygous minor genotype (T/T) for the missense…
November 3, 2008
Since the voting has started in New Hampshire, my predictions...The popular vote for President will be:
Obama 52%
McCain 47%
Other 1%
The electoral college & Senate outcome map are below. I think he Democrats will fall short of 60, but Georgia will go to a runoff as neither candidate will…
November 3, 2008
This is the last Jay Nordlinger post. I suspect what's going on here is a chasm between different Ways of Knowing, but this anecdote that he passes on is just bizarre:
So, my husband is black, I am biracial (white/Korean). Here is my three (homeschooled) children's experience of life: All their…
November 3, 2008
Geneic Future has a review & mulling over of implications of a new paper, High-Resolution Mapping of Expression-QTLs Yields Insight into Human Gene Regulation. Well worth the read.
November 3, 2008
Jay Nordlinger has responded to the critiques about his comment about Vermont (thanks to Jim Manzi):
Yes, yes, I heard from Professor Gelman too -- thank you, Jim. You have well and truly schooled me. And I was indeed writing impressionistically and rhetorically -- saying I was taught that the…
November 3, 2008
If you've been following Pollster.com or FiveThirtyEight, you probably think that Barack Obama is a shoe-in. On the one hand, Kathryn Lopez's cherry-picking of polls in The Corner is not impressive. But, I've found some data which strongly suggests that there is a major systematic bias and flaw…
November 2, 2008
Photo: Zhou Xun
I've mentioned EDAR before. If you've ever wondered why East Asians tend to have rather thick hair, it is likely due to genetic variation at this locus, in particular the SNP rs3827760. Yann reminded me that a new paper has come out which replicates and clarifies some earlier…
November 2, 2008
Dept. of Enduring Myths:
I've just come back from a weekend in Vermont -- and here's how I understand it: Modestly off people -- "real Vermonters," as some people say -- are voting for McCain and Palin. Comfortably off people, such as those who own ski chalets, are voting for Obama and Biden. And…
November 1, 2008
My discussion with Jim Manzi on epistasis generated a lot commentary. It's a complex topic, as I said there are different ways to define epistasis, and evolutionarily its effect on trait value might be different from its effect on fitness. Finally, I think it is important that epistatic and…
October 31, 2008
Genetic and Linguistic Coevolution in Northern Island Melanesia:
...Here, we use high-quality data and novel methods to test two models of genetic and linguistic coevolution in Northern Island Melanesia, a region known for its complex history and remarkable biological and linguistic diversity. The…
October 31, 2008
I have a piece up for The Guardian's new Comment is Free Belief site, The use and abuse of statistics - Prophecies of the extinction of religion, or its triumph, fall prey to the weaknesses of linear prediction. Implicit in my argument are these sorts of dynamics:
Bearman and Brückner have also…
October 31, 2008
The Political Gender Gap: Gender Bias in Facial Inferences that Predict Voting Behavior:
...Contrary to the notion that people use deliberate, rational strategies when deciding whom to vote for in major political elections, research indicates that people use shallow decision heuristics, such as…
October 30, 2008
Dienekes and Kambiz both hit a new paper which claims to find the Y chromosomal (direct male descent lines) signatures of the ancient Phoenician colonization of the Mediterranean. I tend to see a lot of merit in Dienekes' criticisms, the net here is thrown so wide that it's almost one of those…
October 30, 2008
Jim Manzi has a long post up on epistasis, that is, gene-gene interactions:
We could call this process of competing algorithms struggling to find the best solution as fast as possible "meta-evolution". That is, each potential search method must compete for survival. The fact that the algorithm that…
October 30, 2008
You can read all about it. I don't have anything interesting to say on the election, so I'll leave it at that. I'm also closing comments on this post because I'm 99.999% sure you don't have anything interesting to say either (added a third 9 after the decimal point upon further consideration!).
October 30, 2008
Evolution of trust and trustworthiness: social awareness favours personality differences (Open Access):
Interest in the evolution and maintenance of personality is burgeoning. Individuals of diverse animal species differ in their aggressiveness, fearfulness, sociability and activity. Strong trade-…
October 29, 2008
In response to a Conor Friedersdorf post on hard-working high earners I decided to look around for some data on the differences between socioeconomic categories in terms of hours worked weekly. In the GSS I found a modest association between higher income and more hours, but the N's were rather…
October 29, 2008
Princeon University Press now has a weblog. It looks like a good idea in terms of getting publicity for authors of academic books (and ideally, you get some value-add in terms of insight and experience). I wonder if Andrew Gelman's editor has tried to figure out how many extra copies of d State,…