razib | February 3, 2009Bonnie Newman will be appointed Senator from New Hampshire. That means that 4 of the female Senators will be from the northeast portion of England; all of New Hamphsire & Maine's Senators are women. What about the rest of the country? Map below the fold.
Red = both Senators male
Tan = one Senator female
Blue = two Senators female
razib | February 2, 2009I hear & read the term "anecdotal evidence" a great deal. But wouldn't it be better to say "anecdotal illustration"? After all, most of the time a few anecdotes do nothing to increase confidence in a hypothesis, rather, they illustrate possible instances assuming that the hypothesis is true.
razib | February 1, 2009OK, it died soon after resurrection, and they used "brute force" methodologies.
razib | January 31, 2009A commenter below wondered how much of Southern American religiosity is just a function of black religiosity, seeing as how blacks make up a larger portion of the American South's population. A fair amount. That being said, I decided to look at two GSS variables, GOD & BIBLE, and break them down by region & race. The regions are from the Census, and I dropped all the regions where the N's for blacks were less than 100. Obviously there aren't that many blacks in the Mountain region, so comparing that region's blacks & whites is going to be difficult with a GSS size sample. In any…
razib | January 31, 2009My Sister's Keeper:
They called it a lesbian paradise, the pioneering women who made their way to St. Augustine, Fla., in the 1970s to live together in cottages on the beach. Finding one another in the fever of the gay rights and women's liberation movements, they built a matriarchal community, where no men were allowed, where even a male infant brought by visitors was cause for debate.
...
"To me, this is the real world," she said. "And it's a very peaceful world. I don't hear anything except the leaves falling. I get up in the morning, I go out on my front deck and I dance and I say, 'It's…
razib | January 31, 2009Gallup has an interesting survey up, State of the States: Importance of Religion. The title makes rather clear the result, but check out this map:
razib | January 30, 2009The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, is now available from Amazon & fine local bookstores. Over at 2 Blowhards one of the authors Greg Cochran has done a 5-part interview: part 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Set some time aside, there's a lot there....
razib | January 30, 2009Well, it isn't just the old media that's having issues. A few days ago Culture11 folded. Now it looks like Pajamas Media network is shutting down (they're going to go into vlogging fulltime?). I got a few links from PM back in 2005-2006, very little traffic. It didn't seem like the aggregation was adding any value to the constituent weblogs. Additionally, a lot of their stuff is 2001-2004 vintage Right-of-Center media commentary, the sell-by date has long passed. Something like The Next Right is what circa 2010 conservative weblogs are going to look like, at least the good ones. Look at…
razib | January 30, 2009
Over at The Root Keith Adkins has a post, Sandra Laing: Born Black with White Parents:
I'm no geneticist or biologist, but it looks like Sandra is a product of an black South African and maybe a white Afrikaneer. I'm saying, it looks like somebody in her family was lying. The tests they used to prove her father's paternity could have been faulty. And what about proving her mother's maternity? Is it possible she was adopted? Is it possible Sandra's mother was "getting love" from a undeniably-black man on the side? I'm not trying to throw salt on Laing's game, I'm just not convinced…
razib | January 30, 2009My friend Aziz Poonawalla has a post up, is evolution sufficient? No, it's not the standard Creationist cant:
The implication of such rapid evolution is that we should actually notice it on human timescales. And that there is actually is some mechanism of action that is actually driving the mutations themselves - cosmic rays? transcription errors? normal statistical variance?
It seems that if we aren't mutating at a rate comparable to above, then some sort of alternative mechanism must also be operating to accelerate the changes in DNA required to evolve from one species to another. There's…
razib | January 29, 2009A few years ago PLoS Medicine published Eight Americas: Investigating Mortality Disparities across Races, Counties, and Race-Counties in the United States. The results were:
-- Asian-Americans, per capita income of $21,566, life expectancy of 84.9 years.
-- Northland low-income rural Whites, $17,758, 79 years.
-- Middle America (mostly White), $24,640, 77.9 years.
-- Low-income Whites in Appalachia, Mississippi Valley, $16,390, 75 years.
-- Western American Indians, $10,029, 72.7 years.
-- Black Middle America, $15,412, 72.9 years.
-- Southern low-income…
razib | January 28, 2009Mars Rover Disoriented Somewhat After Glitch:
More strangely, the Spirit had no memory of what it had done for that part of Sol 1800. The rover did not record actions, as it otherwise always does, to the part of its computer memory that retains information even when power is turned off, the so-called nonvolatile memory. "It's almost as if the rover had a bout of amnesia," said John Callas, the project manager for the rovers.
Another rover system did record that power was being drawn from the batteries for an hour and a half. "Meaning the rover is awake doing something," Dr. Callas said. But…
razib | January 28, 2009Read Genetic Future on Navigenics crappy new product. Better yet, link to the post yourself to crank up the google ranking, you're doing potential consumers a service.
razib | January 28, 2009There are now some articles which are detailing the other Ponzi schemes which are coming out in the wake of l'affaire Madoff. One thing that is notable: the next biggest scam is an order of magnitude less significant. That is, while Bernie Madoff's scam was on the scale of billions, the next ones in the rank order are on the scale of hundreds of millions. If you haven't read The New York Times's piece which speculates on the psychological roots of Bernie Madoff's skill at extracting money from the wealthy, you should read it. It's nothing surprising, most people I've discussed the details…
razib | January 28, 2009Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) predicts behavioral aggression following provocation:
Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) has earned the nickname "warrior gene" because it has been linked to aggression in observational and survey-based studies. However, no controlled experimental studies have tested whether the warrior gene actually drives behavioral manifestations of these tendencies. We report an experiment, synthesizing work in psychology and behavioral economics, which demonstrates that aggression occurs with greater intensity and frequency as provocation is experimentally manipulated upwards…
razib | January 27, 2009Extremely readable OA paper in PNAS, Behavioral experiments on biased voting in networks:
Many distributed collective decision-making processes must balance diverse individual preferences with a desire for collective unity. We report here on an extensive session of behavioral experiments on biased voting in networks of individuals. In each of 81 experiments, 36 human subjects arranged in a virtual network were financially motivated to reach global consensus to one of two opposing choices. No payments were made unless the entire population reached a unanimous decision within 1 min, but…
razib | January 26, 2009
The normal story we are told is that as rose civilization, so declined evolution. The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, inverts that formula as indicated by the title. The idea that humans are beyond evolution isn't limited just to non-scientists, Steve Jones, an evolutionary geneticist, made the same argument last year. I've pointed why the emergence of modern culture and all its accoutrements, such as effective medicine, does not mean that the power of evolutionary forces are somehow negated. In The 10,000 Year Explosion Greg Cochran and Henry…
razib | January 25, 2009Michael Blowhard is doing a 4-part interview with Greg Cochran on his new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. Part 1 is up.