Culture
razib | October 9, 2009A friend pointed out to me that the regular brown guys on bloggingheads.tv (Reihan Salam, and to a far lesser extent Ramesh Ponnuru and myself)
1) have names that start with "R"
2) lean Right
razib | October 8, 2009Copenhagen dreaming: In defense of the scientific method:
As the Copenhagen conference on the successor to the Kyoto Protocol draws near, I want to lay some meta-thoughts out about the scientific method which I think are important, as a context for my general support of the theory of global warrming and the need for decisive action by our own nation to reduce carbon emissions and embrace alternative forms of energy (including nuclear). The next post in this series will then lay out my position on global warming specifically.
razib | October 8, 2009From Matt Springer of Built on Facts. For what it's worth, many people at the Summit were skeptical of Kurzweil's specific vision. I mean in the audience, not just among the speakers.
razib | October 8, 2009For Gun-Shy Consumers, Debit Is Replacing Credit:
Visa announced this spring that spending on Visa debit cards in the United States surpassed credit for the first time in the company's history. In 2008, debit payment volume was $206 billion, compared with credit volume of $203 billion. MasterCard reported that for the first six months of this year, the volume of purchases on its debit cards increased 4.1 percent, to $160 billion, in the United States. Spending on credit and charge cards sank 14.8 percent, to $233 billion.
"Consumers are rational thinking individuals, and they're going to…
ejohnson | October 8, 2009What moves human beings to innovate measures of security? History will tell us that the most inventive and industrious times are fraught with warfare, uncertainty, and widespread fear. Greg Laden, a longtime ScienceBlogger, helps tackle this topic this month on the new Collective Imagination blog with Peter Tu, a systems design engineer who has developed algorithms for the FBI Automatic Fingerprint Identification System, and is the principle investigator for the ReFace Program at the Visualization and Computer Vision Group at the GE Global Research Center. Greg and Peter discuss the important…
razib | October 7, 2009My thoughts on the talks at The Singularity Summit 2009 below the fold....
Shaping the Intelligence Explosion - Anna Salamon: A qualitative analysis of the implications of the emergence of artificial general intelligence. Having talked to Anna before, and knowing the general thrust of the work of the SIAI, not too surprising. AGI will come fast if it comes, it will be beyond our comprehension, etc. The main issue with Anna's talk was that it was hurried at the end, so perhaps we missed some points.
Technical Roadmap for Whole Brain Emulation - Anders Sandberg: Interesting. Lots of pictures.…
razib | September 30, 2009As you can see by looking to the left (right below the cutest kid that ever was) I'm participating in DonorsChoose this year. You can of course donate to any project you think is worthy, but my current list is biased in two directions:
1) Need
2) Biology
Since last fall a lot as changed economically and socially, and of course people on the margins are squeezed the most. Those of us not on the margins have seen hardship, or seen those around us subject to hardship, but really this sort of thing is normalized to our relative context. Many of the projects require small amounts of money; this…
razib | September 30, 2009Lewis Is Said to Be Leaving Bank of America. Years ago I'd read that there was some social science which suggested that M&As were encouraged by the incentive structure of CEO careers; that is, the upside for a CEO in relation to a successful M&A are higher than for their firm. As for the downsides, the effect sizes are probably inverted. Steve Case & Gerald Levin might have their reputations in tatters, but they remain wealthy men. As for Time Warner....
razib | September 29, 2009The Religious Landscape Survey has a lot of data various denominations. Recently I noticed something weird about Mormons; they are very anti-evolution, as well as anti-universalist in their views on salvation, according to this survey. These are notable views because Mormons don't have well established attitudes on evolution from on high (which is why Mitt Romney expressed anti-Creationist sentiments without any blowback during the 2007-2008 campaign), and, their religious tradition actually seems to have been influenced by American Universalism, and so an exclusive attitude toward salvation…
razib | September 28, 2009I remember back in the early 1990s that there was some talk about the United States going from a plural majority Protestant nations, to a Roman Catholic one at some point in the early 21st century. This in itself wouldn't be that big of a deal today, Canada already has more Catholics than Protestants (44% of the adult population is Catholic), and it has retained the dominance of Anglo-Protestant culture (also, the influence of Roman Catholicism in Quebec collapsed during the 1960s). But here in the United States things haven't quite worked out. Latinos have become rapidly de-Catholicized, and…
razib | September 28, 2009
Darren Naish has the full story. In a bygone age without scientists who...know stuff, these sorts of finds would become the germ of myth. As it is we cobble together a bunch of banal facts and likelihoods into something far less exciting, but more likely to b a true description of reality.
eklemetti | September 28, 2009A bit of news for your last Monday in September:
Pumice deposits from the ~13,000 year old Laacher See eruption. Image by Erik Klemetti, taken in August 2007.
More press for Dr. Joyce and his campaign to make the people of Australia terrified that volcanoes will destroy them. He warns of "new volcanoes" springing up in the Ballarat region to the northwest of Melbourne (which, incidentally, is where I pointed out might be the most likely place for future volcanism). Yes, sure, we should expect that a new, unknown scoria cone may form in the Newer Volcanic Province - I mean, that is what…
razib | September 27, 2009I took the Fst values from Reconstructing Indian population history, and decided to plot them in different ways. Remember that Fst measures the proportion of between population variance, the variation which can't be accounted for by the normal variation you'd find within a population. So it's a rough measure of genetic distance. I've removed the Chenchus, Siddis and Tibeto-Burmans from the data because they're outliers, especially the last two. I've taken the Kashmiri Pandits as reference group, so that all Fst values are such that they measure the distance between Pandits and group X. I…
razib | September 26, 2009My post below elicited a lot of response. One thing to point out though, which I want to emphasize: a higher proportion of smart people go to college now than in the past. How can this be? First, let's review the change in distributions of intelligence of those with college degrees (or higher) and those without. The first two charts show the proportions of WORDSUM scores for individuals with and without college degrees for two decades. I limited the sample to whites ages 30 and over. So for example in the period between 1974-1984, of those with college degrees and higher 26.8% scored 10 on…
razib | September 25, 2009John Hawks & I did a diavlog for Science Saturday. We decided it would be appropriate to synchronize with dark-rimmed glasses. Also, Mr. Parrot kind of decided it was an opportune time to make a huge racket by swinging his perch against the cage repeatedly. Just so you know....
(I put it below the fold too)
razib | September 25, 2009I made a comment earlier that college students, and by inference college graduates, are not as intelligent as they used to be on average. I made that comment based on what I'd seen in the General Social Survey. What I had seen was a decline in average WORDSUM score over the years (WORDSUM being a variable which records how many correct responses individuals received on a vocab test). But I'll lay out the data here.
I limited the sample to whites between the ages of 22-35. That way I get a snapshot of those who graduate from university in a particular time period, and I need to limit the…
grrlscientist | September 24, 2009tags: Twatif?, twitter, workplace, strange, offbeat, culture, streaming video
So..... what if you were restricted in the real world to only 140 characters and spaces? The office might be a sticky place .. The rumor is that this video is funny .. but you be the judge.
What's with the "di" sound when the guy supposedly meant to say "dumb"?
razib | September 24, 2009A reader pointed me to an article, Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Study. Some of the authors of the paper I reviewed today (actually, I wrote the post yesterday and put it in schedule) had some interesting things to say:
The great Indian divide along north-south lines now stands blurred. A pathbreaking study by Harvard and indigenous researchers on ancestral Indian populations says there is a genetic relationship between all Indians and more importantly, the hitherto believed ''fact'' that Aryans and Dravidians signify the ancestry of north and south Indians might after all, be a myth.
''…