Culture
razib | October 25, 2009Lawyer: Death complicates Madoff investment case:
The death of Jeffry Picower, accused of profiting more than $7 billion from the investment schemes of his longtime friend Bernard Madoff, will make it more difficult for suing investors to recoup their money, attorneys said.
...
But the trustee's lawyer said Picower's claims that he was a victim "ring hollow" because he withdrew more of other investors' money than anyone else during three decades and should have noticed signs of fraud.
According to the lawyers, Picower's accounts were "riddled with blatant and obvious fraud," and he should…
ejohnson | October 23, 2009
This week, the Oprah Winfrey Show aired an episode reporting on the quality of life in Denmark. Here, Oprah sat down with a group of Danish atheists and discussed the role of religion--as well as expansive access to healthcare and education--in an improved lifestyle. In somewhat of a surprise to non-religious viewers, Oprah seemed supportive of the concept of atheism, taking "one tiny step toward mainstreaming atheism," as PZ Myers reports on Pharyngula. Greg Laden took note of Oprah's coverage and reported on his blog that "Oprah seemed interested in [atheism], but also said that she just…
edyong | October 23, 2009There is a deep hole in a tree trunk and within is a tasty dollop of sweet, nutritious honey. It's a worthwhile prize for any animal skilled or clever enough to reach it, and chimpanzees certainly have both of these qualities. But the solutions they find aren't always the same - they depend on cultural traditions.
Chimps from the Sonso community in Uganda are skilled at the use of sticks and unsurprisingly, they manufacture stick-based tools to reach the honey. Chimps from the Kanyawara community in a different part of Uganda have never been seen to use sticks in the wild. Instead, they…
razib | October 22, 2009I've pointed out before that the most (reputedly) secular Muslim majority country, Turkey, is more friendly to Creationism and more religious than the United States. This is why I get really agitated by those who argue that Turkey should join the European Union, it isn't culturally appropriate. Europeans might be prejudiced against Turks because they're "oriental" (in the old sense) and Muslim, but that doesn't mean that Turks are just like any European in values. Liberal elites terrified of seeming prejudiced and Eurocentric don't want to acknowledge this generality of difference, but it is…
razib | October 22, 2009The past few months Technorati really stopped working for me. Hardly any new links back in, at least that they detected. They unveiled a new site recently, you can read about it at TechCrunch. I really hate it, though to be honest I'd stopped using Technorati for a while. It looks like they pruned a lot of blogs, and that might be why I stopped seeing new links. In any case, here's an unrepresentative and personal reason why I really think it's a step back:
The page for Gene Expression at ScienceBlogs (this domain).
The page for Gene Expression at gnxp.com, the original blog I started in the…
razib | October 21, 2009I'm not a close follower of the news, but the past week I've checked The New York Times for David Rohde's chronicle of his period of captivity and escape from the Taliban. All five articles are up now (and an epilogue).
razib | October 21, 2009I stumbled onto a fascinating working paper today (via the sagacious Andrew Gelman), All Together Now: Putting Congress, State Legislatures, and Individuals in a Common Ideological Space. It uses the NPAT survey of political opinions to construct an ideological scale (as opposed to self-reports). This is a wide ranging piece of proto-scholarship, with a lot of ideas and results, but one thing that struck me are the probability density distributions on page 13 & 14. The title says it all, but the charts are reproduced below....
Stupid people tend to be politically moderate. Probably also…
drorzel | October 21, 2009As mentioned on Twitter, I spent much of yesterday reading and rating a huge number of grant proposals. As such, I've looked at a lot of CV's and resumes, and the contrast is striking. People who work in industry tend to use a resume format that is mostly just a list of jobs and degrees, while academics... well, we do go on.
"CV" stands for "curriculum vitae" which is Latin for "every damn thing I've done in my life." It's a much more comprehensive listing than you find on a corporate resume, including not just the important events and publications of a person's career, but everything. Where…
razib | October 20, 2009I've gotten a few emails about this new article, The White City, illustrated by this chart:
This isn't news. It's only of interest because people like hoisting others up by their petards. When I lived in Portland I ran into several people who would complain about the city's lack of diversity, but why had they moved from San Francisco in the first place? As for Minneapolis, the most famous black person I can think of from that city is Prince.
But this isn't just white racism. Progressive whites and black Democrats are part of a political coalition which has been fruitful, but that doesn't…
razib | October 19, 2009Relative to atheists, and conventional religious people (though conventional religious people are more delusional than atheists). Tom Rees has more:
Overall, the New Agers were more delusional than the Religious. That was particularly true for belief in witchcraft and telepathy (not shown in the graph). But the New Agers were also more likely to think that people are not what they seem, that they are being persecuted, that electrical devices like computers can control their thoughts, and that their thoughts are 'echoed back'.
On a mass scale people with orthodox beliefs who are affiliated…
razib | October 18, 2009Fascinating interview with Richard Heene's former assistant:
But he was motivated by theories I thought were far-fetched. Like Reptilians -- the idea there are alien beings that walk among us and are shape shifters, able to resemble human beings and running the upper echelon of our government. Somehow a secret government has covered all this up since the U.S. was established, and the only way to get the truth out there was to use the mainstream media to raise Richard to a status of celebrity, so he could communicate with the masses.
As the weeks progressed, his theories got more and more…
razib | October 17, 2009In the comments of this post I mildly disagreed with Eric Michael Johnson that humans are "polygynous" and the relevance of the fact that "estimates range between 5-10% that all children have been sired by men other than a woman's partner."
The human monogamy vs. polygamy argument is long-standing, with anthropologists on both sides. Myself, I'm not sure what I believe, because I think binning into two categories is simplistic. In terms of evolutionary biology societal ideals matter less than the relationship of the distribution of reproductive output of males to females.From what I know…
razib | October 15, 2009What's different about Kiva:
Contrast Kiva with, for example, UNICEF. Kiva makes it possible to trace the path of your donation, to the extent that such tracing is realistic (and it largely turns out to be more along the lines of "you funded a certain MFI" rather than "you funded a certain person"). UNICEF doesn't even seem to have a breakdown of how much money is going to each continent. We definitely can't find information on questions like (a) What specific projects are you funding? (b) What is your role in each? (c) What new projects are planned, and where? (d) How is each project going,…
razib | October 15, 2009In the interminable debate on Wall Street compensation Ryan Avent makes an important point:
Officials in Washington scrutinising the pay packages of TARP recipients are primarily focused on the incentive effects of those pay structures--whether financial pay packages are inducing financial employees to take excessive risks. But the bigger incentive problem may be--almost certainly is--the drain of talent from other fields, into finance. If there were more evidence that this drain was producing significant net benefits for the economy, than there would be less cause to worry. To an increasing…
razib | October 15, 2009
In the OkCupid post on response rates and race & sex there are two charts which show how males and females respond to inquiries of the opposite sex by race. So, you can see that black women on OkCupid respond positively to men in general, while women respond positively in particular to white men. In fact for many racial minorities women respond more positively to inquiries from white men than they do co-racialists (the same is not true of men). I suspect some of this has to do with the excess of men on OkCupid, combined with selection effects in terms of who joins OkCupid. OkCupid is…
razib | October 14, 2009Is Harry Turtledove? Compare the similarity in output to Patterson. I just noticed that Glenn Reynolds received a copy of Turtledove's second book in a quasi-alternate history series he's been working on. Turtledove shines when he's applying what he knows. Even if the Videssos cycle wasn't artful prose, the books had plots which moved along, while his historical, Justinian, had incredible source material to work with. But a lot of his more recent production just crawls along, rather like the later books in The Wheel of Time. Additionally, I have to say that some of it definitely has an almost…
razib | October 13, 2009It's been a few weeks, but I thought I would point you to an interesting post on OkCupid's blog about race and dating. They report an interesting trend of preference for white men among all groups of females, as well as lots of other interesting nuggets. Of course, as many have noted the core demographic of OkCupid is a bit different than the general population, and might be especially so when it comes to racial minorities. I did think though that the stated racial preferences of the sample are interesting in light of other data which suggest women are more racialist than men.
In all classes…
razib | October 11, 2009Eric Michael Johnson has a post up, Does Taking Birth Control Alter Women's Sexual Choices?, where he surveys a new paper,Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans?. Eric notes:
The concern of the researchers is that a woman who gets involved with a guy while on the pill might find that she's no longer compatible with him once she stops later on in the relationship. Imagine waking up next to your boyfriend, or even your husband, one morning only to discover that you're just not that into him. While female comedians make such scenarios commonplace in their stand-up routines,…
razib | October 11, 2009About two weeks ago I pointed to the peculiar disjunction between what a paper on Indian genetics actually said, and how people, including some of the researchers who contributed to the paper, were spinning it. For instance, the finding that South Asians can be reasonably modeled as a two-way admixture between "Ancestral North Indians" (ANI) and "Ancestral South Indians" which varies in ratio between between 7:3 and 2:3 across regions & caste groups was translated into "the genetic unity of India." And now I notice in The Guardian another Indian has an article titled Tracing the fissures…
razib | October 10, 2009Dienekes points to a new paper which attempts to quantify the genetic ancestry of South Asian Muslims into indigenous and exogenous components:
Islam is the second most practiced religion in India, next to Hinduism. It is still unclear whether the spread of Islam in India has been only a cultural transformation or is associated with detectable levels of gene flow. To estimate the contribution of West Asian and Arabian admixture to Indian Muslims, we assessed genetic variation in mtDNA, Y-chromosomal and LCT/MCM6 markers in 472, 431 and 476 samples, respectively, representing six Muslim…