razib | January 13, 2009Vitamin D and Diabetes:
Diabetes is a leading cause of cardiovascular disease. Persons with diabetes are at greater risk for early cardiac mortality, and for repeat events if they survive their first cardiac event. Recently, low serum concentrations of vitamin D have been associated with increased risk for cardiac events. Evidence indicates that persons with diabetes have lower serum concentrations of vitamin D. In addition, persons at risk for diabetes or metabolic syndrome have inadequate serum concentrations of vitamin D. This review will assess the evidence relative to the impact of…
razib | January 13, 2009Afghan Schoolgirls Under Attack:
One morning two months ago, Shamsia Husseini and her sister were walking through the muddy streets to the local girls school when a man pulled alongside them on a motorcycle and posed what seemed like an ordinary question.
"Are you going to school?"
Then the man pulled Shamsia's burqa from her head and sprayed her face with burning acid. Scars, jagged and discolored, now spread across Shamsia's eyelids and most of her left cheek. These days, her vision goes blurry, making it hard for her to read.
razib | January 13, 2009One of my more quixotic quests has been to dispute the use of the term "Judeo-Christian" in normal conversation. Many people who use the term do so without much forethought, it's just one of the definitions you use to point to the bracketing of the two traditional religions of Western civilization. In our modern context where there are great tensions between the world of Islam and the West it also alludes to a cleavage between the Abrahamic faiths where Islam is painted as the outgroup.
My own contention is that the term misleads, and emerged out of an attempt to acknowledge the rise of…
razib | January 13, 2009The Man Who Made Too Much:
Hedge fund manager John Paulson has profited more than anyone else from the financial crisis. His $3.7 billion payday in 2007 broke every record, and he made it all by betting against homeowners, shareholders, and the rest of us. Now he's paying the price.
There's a lot of talk about how this is equivalent to currency speculation, but is it? I mean morally.
razib | January 13, 2009Sleep Habits and Susceptibility to the Common Cold:
There was a graded association with average sleep duration: participants with less than 7 hours of sleep were 2.94 times...more likely to develop a cold than those with 8 hours or more of sleep. The association with sleep efficiency was also graded: participants with less than 92% efficiency were 5.50 times ...more likely to develop a cold than those with 98% or more efficiency. These relationships could not be explained by differences in prechallenge virus-specific antibody titers, demographics, season of the year, body mass, socioeconomic…
razib | January 12, 2009Over at Culture11, Will Wilson (a mathematics student at Yale) has an interesting article up, Screaming Shapes & Seven-Dimensional Donuts:
It is clear that reductionist and demiurgic approaches to science have stood unchallenged on the intellectual landscape for too long, and their profound philosophical and cultural implications left to unfold freely. Many will complain that explanation and understanding -- which shift the purpose of inquiry away from mere accuracy and toward knowledge of propriety -- is not the role of science. This may be true in the aftermath of the divorce of science…
razib | January 12, 2009Our local White Male Patriarch has a post up, What is science?, where he offers a very succinct definition. I have no great disagreements with his definition, but I will add my own overly simple one just to offer another dimension from the perspective of a non-Patriarchal Person of Color:
Science is a culture
razib | January 12, 2009This Joe Klein post where he points out that there is a lack of ethnic balance in Obama's rumored Middle East advisors is getting some play:
I suppose that it falls to Jewish males like Cohen (and me) to point out this discrepancy since anyone else making the observation would immediately be accused of anti-semitism by the usual suspects. But Cohen has listed some powerhouse Muslims, who would be a terrific addition to Obama's team--Shibley Telhami, Fawaz Gerges and Vali Nasr, among others. I'd also suggest that Pete Mansoor, a Palestinian-American who recently retired from the U.S. Army--he…
razib | January 12, 2009More ancient DNA, Hair Of Tasmanian Tiger Yields Genes Of Extinct Species:
All the genes that the exotic Tasmanian Tiger inherited only from its mother will be revealed by an international team of scientists in a research paper to be published on 13 January 2009 in the online edition of Genome Research. The research marks the first successful sequencing of genes from this carnivorous marsupial, which looked like a large tiger-striped dog and became extinct in 1936.
...
... "I want to learn as much as I can about why large mammals become extinct because all my friends are large mammals,"…
razib | January 12, 2009While The Cat's Away: How Removing An Invasive Species Devastated A World Heritage Island:
Removing an invasive species from sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island, a World Heritage Site, has caused environmental devastation that will cost more than A$24 million to remedy, ecologists have revealed. Writing in the new issue of the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology, they warn that conservation agencies worldwide must learn important lessons from what happened on Macquarie Island.
Shorter:"invasive" and "introduced" organisms for a long enough period results in an ecosystem…
razib | January 12, 2009Genetic Future (and again), John Hawks and FuturePundit have all touched upon a new Steven Pinker piece in The New York Times Magazine, My Genome, My Self. If you read all the weblogs which talk about personal genomics, I suspect we'll look back at this era like those who read PC Magazine in the early 1980s must feel right now. The future is often bigger and stranger than we perceive from the present, and the near future is often more banal than the more exaggerated propagandist might assert. Pinker's strength as a scientific intellectual is the ability to distill these sorts of truths…
razib | January 12, 2009I have a piece up at Taki's Magazine, The Limits of Certitude. It might be read along with a post at ScienceBlogs, Science is rational; scientists are not.
razib | January 12, 2009Turns out that the man who waged a one-man crusade against Bernard Madoff, Harry Markopolos, wants to be left alone. But here's the interesting point:
"Why would people think I feel good about this?" the past president of the Boston Security Analysts Society was quoted as telling the Boston Globe. "People think I'm a hero, but I didn't stop him. He stopped himself."
Markopolos obviously believed he was right, and that Madoff was a fraud, and that the nature of his Ponzi scheme meant that it would all collapse at some point. For most people the Madoff affair has a freak show quality, but not…
razib | January 12, 2009There is a new blog on ScienceBlogs, Blogging the Origin, which is going over The Origin of Species. Because this is the Darwin bicentenary there is going to be a lot of the reflection upon the legacy of the great man; e.g., Blog For Darwin. I have to admit that I haven't read The Origin of Species since I was a child, when I didn't understand evolution with any level of precision, so I plan to reread Darwin's oeuvre at some point this year for my own edification. I also recommend the In Our Time Darwin retrospective; just subscribe to "In Our Time" in iTunes and you can get the 4 programs…
razib | January 8, 2009One of the more interesting an robust survey datum in the United States is the low opinion of atheists, and, the finding that atheists are less popular than Mormons or Muslims or Homosexuals when it come to a vote for high office. Secular Right points out that the Inductivist has posted data from The World Values Survey on this question in an international context. I doubt people will be too surprised, but, I recommend you check out the Inductivist for the full list. Below the fold I've taken the data on that particular question, and compared it to the % of atheists, agnostics an non-…
razib | January 7, 2009Language Log has a fascinating post up, The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe. The distribution of language families, and their relationships, are not arbitrary. They tell us something about human history. Here is the interesting part for readers of this weblog:
It follows that the appearance of IE languages in much of Europe at an early date must reflect a considerable spread of IE languages from their point of origin. Many commentators, for a great variety of reasons, would like to believe that that spread occurred without any significant population movements; but that, too,…
razib | January 7, 2009The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, has a website up, http://the10000yearexplosion.com. If there is an accelerating wave of media coverage that would probably be the place to track it....