razib | January 5, 2010Alex Tabarrok has the back story on the infamous Paul Samuelson projections about Soviet growth. It gets interesting:
Tarshis and Heilbroner were more liberal than Samuelson and McConnell but offered a more nuanced, descriptive and tentative account of the Soviet economy. Why? Levy and Peart argue that they were saved from error not by skepticism about the Soviet Union per se but rather by skepticism about the power of simple economic theories to fully describe the world in the absence of rich institutional detail.
The issue can be generalized to many domains outside economics. If someone…
razib | January 5, 2010Dental maturational sequence and dental tissue proportions in the early Upper Paleolithic child from Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Portugal:
Neandertals differ from recent and terminal Pleistocene human populations in their patterns of dental development, endostructural (internal structure) organization, and relative tissue proportions. Although significant changes in craniofacial and postcranial morphology have been found between the Middle Paleolithic and earlier Upper Paleolithic modern humans of western Eurasia and the terminal Pleistocene and Holocene inhabitants of the same region, most…
razib | January 4, 2010Apparently there'll be a new Skip Gates documentary on personal genomics on PBS, Faces of America.
razib | January 4, 2010The Singularity Institute is having a fundraising drive right now. Here are the details:
...the Singularity Institute has launched a new challenge campaign. The sponsors, Edwin Evans, Rolf Nelson, Henrik Jonsson, Jason Joachim, and Robert Lecnik, have generously put up $100,000 of matching funds, so that every donation you make until February 28th will be matched dollar for dollar. If the campaign is successful, it will raise a full $200,000 to fund SIAI's 2010 activities.
Starting this campaign, we've put more details of our ongoing and potential work online than ever before, so you can…
razib | January 1, 2010Irish atheists challenge new blasphemy laws:
Secular campaigners in the Irish Republic defied a strict new blasphemy law which came into force today by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations online and promising to fight the legislation in court.
The new law, which was passed in July, means that blasphemy in Ireland is now a crime punishable with a fine of up to â¬25,000 (£22,000).
It defines blasphemy as "publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number…
razib | December 31, 2009Noticed a piece at The Root, The Decade in Race: WTF Was That?:
After the tragedy of 9/11, Arab American stereotypes morph from harmless convenient store owner to new American nigger. The Simpsons' Apuh is suddenly nowhere near as funny
There really needed to be more said here. The convenience store owners were not usually Arab (though some were), generally, they were South Asian, most often Indian American. "Apuh" (it's spelled Apu, no "h") is an Indian American, and is depicted as Hindu on The Simpsons. Also, on the order of 50%* of Arab Americans aren't Muslim, they're Christian. Like the…
razib | December 31, 2009Carl Zimmer has a nice write up of the a new paper in Science which characterizes the nature of the cells which are manifest during devil facial tumor disease. The Tasmanian Devil Transcriptome Reveals Schwann Cell Origins of a Clonally Transmissible Cancer:
The Tasmanian devil, a marsupial carnivore, is endangered because of the emergence of a transmissible cancer known as devil facial tumor disease (DFTD). This fatal cancer is clonally derived and is an allograft transmitted between devils by biting. We performed a large-scale genetic analysis of DFTD with microsatellite genotyping, a…
razib | December 31, 2009The Google Decade Ends: If the search king hasn't ripped up your business yet, just wait. 10 years is a long time in the tech industry. I wonder which company will be the center of retrospectives in 2010? It seems that the time cycle of the rise & fall of "It" firm is speeding up; from IBM to Microsoft to Google. So perhaps it isn't even around right now.
razib | December 31, 2009Yeah, you read that right. Overweight and obesity in urban Africa: A problem of the rich or the poor?:Descriptive results showed that the prevalence of urban overweight/obesity increased by nearly 35% during the period covered. The increase was higher among the poorest (+50%) than among the richest (+7%). Importantly, there was an increase of 45-50% among the non-educated and primary-educated women, compared to a drop of 10% among women with secondary education or higher. In the multivariate analysis, the odds ratio of the variable time lapse was 1.05 (p
Here's a chart showing the urban/rural…
razib | December 31, 2009The Properties of Adaptive Walks in Evolving Populations of Fungus:
The rarity of beneficial mutations has frustrated efforts to develop a quantitative theory of adaptation. Recent models of adaptive walks, the sequential substitution of beneficial mutations by selection, make two compelling predictions: adaptive walks should be short, and fitness increases should become exponentially smaller as successive mutations fix. We estimated the number and fitness effects of beneficial mutations in each of 118 replicate lineages of Aspergillus nidulans evolving for approximately 800 generations at…
razib | December 31, 2009If you're getting in at the last second, please see GiveWell's top charities.
razib | December 31, 2009The Massive Stock Market Rally of 2009 Ends Today:
In what the Wall Street Journal calls "a comeback of historic proportions," the U.S. stock market's banner year closes later on today. The paper says, "With one trading day remaining in 2009, the Dow is on track for its biggest annual gain since 2003, when it rose 25%. It finished Wednesday up 3.1 points, at 10548.51, a fresh peak for the year and the highest since October 2008." Leading its business section, New York Times also takes note of this year's rallying stock markets, which "will ring out one of their most volatile periods in…
razib | December 30, 2009Disease Gene Characterization through Large-Scale Co-Expression Analysis:
Celsius, the largest co-normalized microarray dataset of Affymetrix based gene expression, was used to calculate the correlation between all possible gene pairs on all platforms, and generate stored indexes in a web searchable format. The size of Celsius makes UGET a powerful gene characterization tool. Using a small seed list of known cartilage-selective genes, UGET extended the list of known genes by identifying 32 new highly cartilage-selective genes. Of these, 7 of 10 tested were validated by qPCR including the…
razib | December 30, 2009Several readers have pointed me to this development at Berkeley High School:
Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.
The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state…
razib | December 29, 2009Google, Past and Future:
Ah, but what about 2010? That, claim the editors at Smartgrid, will be the year that Google and Microsoft really roll up their sleeves and go to war. In everything from search to office apps and Internet browsers, the two behemoths will roll out fancy new services designed to erode their rivals' revenue streams. "Both companies are largely betting their collective futures on this battle, so the stakes are huge," said industry analyst Rob Enderle. "Microsoft is going to partner and try to starve Google out of content and partners. Google is going to work against…