razib | August 4, 2009Dienekes points me to a new paper, Demographic history of Canary Islands male gene-pool: replacement of native lineages by European (PDF). Here are the results:
Autochthonous (E-M81) and prominent (E-M78 and J-M267) Berber Y-chromosome lineages were detected in the indigenous remains, confirming a North West African origin for their ancestors which confirms previous mitochondrial DNA results. However, in contrast with their female lineages, which have survived in the present-day population since the conquest with only a moderate decline, the male indigenous lineages have dropped constantly…
razib | August 3, 2009Half Sigma has pointed me to two stories that I think are of some interest, and illustrates a general trend. JOBLESS GRAD SUES COLLEGE FOR 70G TUITION:
The Monroe College grad wants the $70,000 she spent on tuition because she hasn't found gainful employment since earning her bachelor's degree in April, according to a suit filed in Bronx Supreme Court on July 24.
The 27-year-old alleges the business-oriented Bronx school hasn't lived up to its end of the bargain, and has not done enough to find her a job.
The information-technology student blames Monroe's Office of Career Advancement for not…
razib | August 3, 2009The author of the paper, Physical attractiveness and reproductive success in humans: evidence from the late 20th century United States, speaks:
Having your study publicized by the media is nice. Having your study misrepresented and misinterpreted in the process is not. The media coverage of my paper on physical attractiveness and having children had a bad start and even worse follow-up. The origin of the problem: Times Online news article sexing up the finding a bit too much (I wasn't interviewed for this article at all and heard about it only after it had been published). Then things got…
razib | August 2, 2009
Where is the rainforest above located? For the answer see below....
It's in Iran, the Caspian Hyrcanian mixed forests of Gilan province. Here's a precipitation map of Iran:
razib | August 1, 2009Apparently the average American gets ~17% of their calories a day from sugar. This varies by population segment:
The intake of added sugars was higher among men than women and inversely related to age, educational status, and family income. Asian Americans had the lowest intake and Hispanics the next lowest intake. Among men, African Americans had the highest intake, although whites and American Indians/Alaskan Natives also had high intakes. Among women, African Americans and American Indians/Alaskan Natives had the highest intakes. Intake of added sugars was inversely related to educational…
razib | July 30, 2009Megan McArdle has a post, Thining Thin, a follow up to America's Moral Panic Over Obesity. She says:
1. Obesity is increasing in the population, so it can't be genetic.
Well, average height is also increasing in the population. Does that mean that you could be as tall as me, if you weren't too lazy to grow?
Twin studies and adoptive studies show that the overwhelming determinant of your weight is not your willpower; it's your genes. The heritability of weight is between .75 and .85. The heritability of height is between .9 and .95. And the older you are, the more heritable weight is.…
razib | July 30, 2009An ancestry informative marker set for determining continental origin: validation
and extension using human genome diversity panels:
Results
In this study, genotypes from Human Genome Diversity Panel populations were used to further evaluate a 93 SNP AIM panel, a subset of the 128 AIMS set, for distinguishing continental origins. Using both model-based and relatively model-independent methods, we here confirm the ability of this AIM set to distinguish diverse population groups that were not previously evaluated. This study included multiple population groups from Oceana, South Asia, East…
razib | July 30, 2009Matt Yglesias pointed to this Forbes list of best cities for singles. Shouldn't one observe that the best city for men might not be the best city for women, and vice versa??? (sex ratio differences) Below the fold is the famous "singles map" from a few years back....
razib | July 29, 2009A quick follow up to the post below, I was curious as to the increased profile of Google in The New York Times (Google trends doesn't seem to be available to the public before 2004) around the turn of the century. In particular, I curious as to Google's prominence in the "Technology" section of the paper. So I looked it up. There were 78 mentions between July 1999 and December 2001. Mentions of Google increase at a rapid clip throughout this whole period. Below is a histogram of this period, illustrating the consistent rise in frequency of mention.
A dotchart view (x-axis = time along a…
razib | July 29, 2009The collaboration between Yahoo! and Microsoft is spawning a lot of articles about the coming duopoly in search (since the Yahoo! Microsoft deal is for 10 years, we're talking 10 year horizon times). But this got me to thinking: when did people realize Google was something big? I realized Google was something big (for me personally since I'm a data junkie) after being pointed to it from this article in Salon in December of 1998. I became a Google evangelist. Initially most people thought my enthusiasm was a bit strange, at that point there were a dozen search engines, and all of them were…
razib | July 28, 2009News story, brought to you by the same people responsible for China Strong.
Police Still Searching For Missing Productive, Obedient Woman
razib | July 28, 2009Update: The author of the paper clears up confusions.
Follow up to the post yesterday, here's the paper, Physical attractiveness and reproductive success in humans: evidence from the late 20th century United States:
Physical attractiveness has been associated with mating behavior, but its role in reproductive success of contemporary humans has received surprisingly little attention. In the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (1244 women, 997 men born between 1937 and 1940), we examined whether attractiveness assessed from photographs taken at age â¼18 years predicted the number of biological…
razib | July 28, 2009Short article in PLoS Biology, Charles Darwin's Reception in Germany and What Followed.
razib | July 27, 2009
In the post below I wanted to have an attractive female headshot, so I naturally looked for something from Megan Fox. A few years ago I probably would have used someone like Jessica Alba. In fact, I did use Alba as an "illustration" a few times in this blog's history. But 3 years is a long time, and Fox is the new thang in the air. But I wanted to make a bit more precise my subjective impression, so I thought Google Trends might be helpful. I think it can be argued that Jessica Alba's "peak" was the mid-2000s, and the trend data goes back to 2004. And so below, the results....
It's rather…
razib | July 27, 2009
Update: The author of the paper clears up confusions.
Update: Here's the paper. End Update
The British media is abuzz with another paper from Satoshi Kanazawa, the evolutionary psychologist who has great marketing savvy. I can't find the study online anyway, so here is the Times Online:
In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts. He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their attractiveness was…
razib | July 27, 2009
If you are a regular reader of ScienceBlogs you will have already stumbled upon several reviews of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future. Janet Stemwedel of Ethnics & Science probably has the most thorough reviews, while P. Z. Myers' 'exchange' with the authors, Sheril Kirshenbaum & Chris Mooney, had the most 'spirit.' Chard Orzel of Uncertain Principles put up a short & sweet positive impression which covers the major points in Unscientific America very well, as well as the overall thrust of the book.
Of course as Chad noted If you read Sheril…
razib | July 26, 2009I'm not a huge fan of the original Tron (floppy-disks in the hiz house!), but Peter Suderman points to an excellent sneak peak.
razib | July 26, 2009Turkmenistan had a bizarre dictator as its ruler until 2006, Saparmurat Niyazov. Here's a sample of his healthcare initiatives:
So, in a frankly insane healthcare reform effort, he restricted the public's access to care by replacing up to 15,000 doctors and nurses with unqualified military conscripts. The next year, he ordered hospitals and clinics outside of the capital, Ashgabat, to close -- even though the vast proportion of Turkmenistan's population lives in rural areas. The BBC quoted him as saying, "Why do we need such hospitals? If people are ill, they can come to Ashgabat." He also…
razib | July 25, 2009For Mozilla and Google, Group Hugs Get Tricky. To some extent it seems that the story is going to be relevant in a few years when Chrome will presumably be more of a full-featured browser. Right now it seems a non-issue since Chrome's penetration is rather low. But this part was pretty weird:
"Mozilla performed a really good service, but you have to wonder what their relevance is going to be going forward," says Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, an independent firm that tracks the company. "They keep Microsoft honest. But if Google is pushing innovation in its own browser,…