razib | July 10, 2009Two emigrants from ScienceBlogs to Discover Blogs, Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer, are on Bloggingheads.tv. The focus is the new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, coauthored by Chris & Sheril Kirshenbaum. A comment from below seems appropriate:
I remember an interesting (if apocryphal statistic) about radiation levels in the UK - you could get a higher radiation dose from living in the relatively undeveloped and unspoilt Cornwall than from living next to Sellafield (the UK's nuclear processing plant, aka Windscale) simply because the granite rocks…
razib | July 10, 2009Yesterday in my review of the recent Pew survey comparing attitudes of scientists and the general public I emphasized the fact that scientists are disproportionately godless liberals. But there are some issues where it seems that the Left is on the forefront of science-skepticism. There has been talk here on ScienceBlogs about the disproportionate Lefty orientation of anti-vaccination activists. From what I can tell this is true, but anti-vaccination sentiment is too shallow of a sentiment for it be starkly political, at least according to these data (there's little party difference). On the…
razib | July 9, 2009Pew has a new survey out, Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media. Lots of interesting facts, though most are not too surprising. Scientists accept evolution at a far greater rate, are less religious and more liberal, than the general public. This is all known. But the report is worth reading, there's a lot of data. One point which might surprise some, young scientists are much more God-believing than older ones. I think one explanation for this might be that older scientists are selection biased.We know that NAS members are far more godless than the general scientariat, so I…
razib | July 9, 2009Two positive assessments of Bing. Google is my main search engine, but I use Bing's image search preferentially now since the UI seems less kludgey.
razib | July 9, 2009Over at Accidental Blogger a remembrance of travels in Xinjiang/East Turkestan. I think the best model for what's going on in China right now is a race riot catalyzed by economic resentment. Uighurs seem to be attacking Hui as well as Han, the Hui being Chinese speakers who are of Muslim background (and by and large are physically indistinguishable from the Han, for example, the Vice Premier of China is a Hui).. Though China is still a poor country much of it is lurching toward modernity; the Uighurs of Xinjiang are an exception to this trend.
Related: Post from last year.
razib | July 9, 2009Tom Rees of Epiphenom has a new paper out, Is Personal Insecurity a Cause of Cross-National Differences in the Intensity of Religious Belief?. The abstract:
Previous research has shown an apparent relationship between "societal health" and religiosity, with nations that exhibit higher mean personal religiosity also tending to provide worse social environments. A possible cause is that exposure to stressful situations (i.e. personal insecurity) increases personal religiosity. To test this hypothesis, income inequality, a widely available proxy for personal insecurity, was compared with other…
razib | July 8, 2009Over at Secular Right I break down attitudes toward a host of issues as a function of class and party identification. It is interesting to see the issues where class matters more than party, and those where party matters more than class, and where one segment is an outlier. Below the fold are a few questions of possible specific interest to ScienceBlogs readers.
Lower = No high school to some college
Higher = Bachelor's degree or higher
Repub or lean Repub
Dem or lean Dem
Lower
Higher
Lower
Higher
Humans evolved from animals
29.7
47.1
43.7
79.6
Will not eat genetically…
razib | July 8, 2009Sunday Function
The subsidiary patient
Pavlov's Dogs: Proving the Null With Bayesianism
UK House of Lords report on genomic medicine: implications for DTC genetic testing
More fuss over Enceladus
razib | July 7, 2009Gmail and a raft of other apps were finally thrown out of beta recently. The assumed reason is that Google is trying to horn in on the enormous business market for applications, and people can get fired for greenlighting betas which break. But if you miss that not-ready-for-primetime new app feel, go "Back to Beta".
razib | July 7, 2009Blogger Thomas Mailund is an author on a new paper, Ancestral Population Genomics: The Coalescent Hidden Markov Model Approach:
With incomplete lineage sorting (ILS), the genealogy of closely related species differs along their genomes. The amount of ILS depends on population parameters such as the ancestral effective population sizes and the recombination rate, but also on the number of generations between speciation events. We use a hidden Markov model parametrized according to coalescent theory in order to infer the genealogy along a four-species genome alignment of closely related species…
razib | July 7, 2009In the early 20th century the geographer Halford Mackinder posited that the key to world domination lay in the control of the Eurasian Heartland. This was in sharp contrast to Alfred Mahan's emphasis on the role of naval power. Whatever the applicability of these geopolitical frameworks in the modern era, it is interesting to observe their precedents in the ancient and medieval world. The rise of Rome was facilitated by the Mediterranean essential role as a conduit for communication and trade which connected the cities which were the foci of the Empire. Easy transport of cheap grain from…
razib | July 6, 2009Living the Scientific Life is still in the running for the trip to Antarctica. If you haven't, consider voting for her essay.
razib | July 6, 2009
Peter Suderman & Megan McArdle are getting married. One of my thoughts was, "How tall will their offspring be?" (assuming they are intent on producing any) I couldn't tell Peter Suderman's height from photographs with certainty, but he has confirmed they are the same height, 6 feet 2 inches. What sort of heights would we expect for the McSuderkinder?* Assuming 80% heritability for height, 3 inches as the standard deviation for both sexes, 5'10 and 5'4 as mean heights (male & female), and plugging into the calculator:
The highest probability of height for any male offspring: 6 feet 3…
razib | July 5, 2009I have posted Creationism as a function of geography before. John Lynch pointed me to a new poll of Argentina, China, Egypt, Great Britain, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Spain and the USA. Though the set of countries is smaller than in some surveys, the number of questions asked were much larger:
-Heard of Darwin
-Not Heard of Darwin
-Know a good/fair amountKnow a little/not much
-Know nothing
-Agree that scientific evidence for evolution exists
-Do not think there is scientific evidence for evolution
-Neither agree nor disagree there is scientific evidence for evolution
-Think it is…
razib | July 5, 2009An Index Of Blogging Clients:
Blogging clients allow you to prepare posts and then upload them directly. Useful for
-composing drafts of posts offline
-easier editing of HTML
-easier inserting and handling of photos
-easier editing of existing posts
Here's a list of the ones I know of. Any additions welcome.
razib | July 5, 2009I notice that Fortune has a story on personal genomics up, Genetic sequencing gets personal Biotech firm Illumina will sequence your entire genetic code -- and throw in a Mac -- for $48,000:
So far, personalized genomics make up just a small fraction of Illumina's revenue. High costs keep sequencing out of reach for most people. But prices will fall substantially as the technology improves. In fact experts say costs could reach $1000 within three to five years, making more people privy to their entire genetic code.
...
One area Illumina is not diving into is sequence analysis. Instead, it is…
razib | July 5, 2009Many of you might have seen this video of Japanese bees defending their nest against giant hornets:
The Japanese bees swarm and bake the giant hornets. But Ed Young reports that there is more to this story.
razib | July 4, 2009Palin's Move Shocks G.O.P. and Leaves Future Unclear:
Many Republican strategists have argued that it would be difficult for someone to run for governor in 2010 and turn around immediately, while running a state, and run for president in 2012. Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota announced last month that he would not seek re-election when his term expired in 2010, as he considers a race for president.
George W. Bush was reelected in Texas in 1998 and ran for president in 2000. Is that so exceptional? Or are there other variables at play? And if so, why is this variable so important? (I've seen…