Culture
razib | September 24, 2009Mugabe denies blame for Zimbabwe woes. I recall listening to a debate recently via Planet Money on reforming the banking system. A lobbyist for the big banks made the case that our principles of free enterprise, initiative and and flexibility, letting the market work, meant that the government couldn't and shouldn't regulate the banks more restrictively, or even break them up. Whatever the merits of the specific issues, I was struck by th bald-faced gall he had in making these assertions with TARP + easy money from the Fed + explicit guarantees. The panelists were economists or treasury…
razib | September 23, 2009From American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population:
"Belonging" refers to people who self-identify as "X." For example, someone who asserts that they are an atheist. "Belief" refers to the content of one's avowed beliefs, as opposed to label. Someone who asserts that they "do not believe in God" is placed within the atheist category. As you can see, many more people avow atheist & agnostic beliefs than will own up to the terms. "Soft agnostic" refers to those who say they're not sure about the existence of god, while "hard agnostic" are those who believe there's no way to…
eklemetti | September 23, 2009Some brief tidbits for your Wednesday:
The view of Mt. Saint Helens from the Johnston Ridge Observatory.
There is a decent article about research being done at a dissected caldera system in the Italian Alps' Sesia Valley. The caldera in question is the Permian in age (248-298 million years old) so don't expect to find it in the GVP database, but the outcrops of this ancient caldera are especially well exposed, allowing for a cross section of volcano and plutonic rocks across 25 km of crustal depth (all of which is now at the surface thanks to hundreds of millions years of tectonics). It…
razib | September 22, 2009I watched this rather bizarre Kirk Cameron video today. He's promoting a plan to distribute Origin of Species with what seems to be a scurrilous preface to college students. His argument is that college students need to know the truth about evolution. I don't know how far he'll get, but I suspect many people will be favorably inclined, most college students are impressionable and dumb, and a non-trivial subset will probably reconsider their nominal acceptance of evolution. I only think back to an acquaintance who was a computer science major, and raised irreligious by his anthropologist…
razib | September 22, 2009Seems to be the upshot of this finding, I'll Have What She's Having: Effects of Social Influence and Body Type on the Food Choices of Others:
This research examines how the body type of consumers affects the food consumption of other consumers around them. We find that consumers anchor on the quantities others around them select but that these portions are adjusted according to the body type of the other consumer. We find that people choose a larger portion following another consumer who first selects a large quantity but that this portion is significantly smaller if the other is obese than…
razib | September 22, 2009Bing Keeps Gaining Ground:
For August, Bing's share of the American search market came in at 9.3 percent, up from 8.9 percent in July and 8.4 percent in June. Perhaps more importantly, Bing's growth didn't come at the expense of Yahoo (YHOO), which held steady at 19.3 percent. For the first time, Bing took market share away from Google, which dropped a tenth of a point to 64.6 percent of the market. (AOL was the big loser here, losing a tenth of a point to fade to a dismal 3 percent share.)
I actually stopped using Bing. I liked its UI for many tasks, but Google's breadth and relevance of…
razib | September 21, 2009Lawmakers' inside advantage to trading:
A year ago this week Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke dashed to Capitol Hill. They hastily met with a small group of congressional leaders to tell them that the country was teetering on the edge of financial catastrophe.
Paulson and Bernanke asked Congress to spend hundreds of billions to save the banks.
JOHN BOEHNER: We clearly have an unprecedented crisis in our financial system.
GOP House Minority Leader John Boehner...
BOEHNER: "On behalf of the American people our job is to put our partisan differences aside and to work…
razib | September 19, 2009Poking around the CensusScope site I found some interesting maps to compare & contrast. Here are the frequency of "nuclear families":
No big surprises here. Utah & the Heartland have a high proportion of households composed of nuclear families. The Black Belt, not as much.
How about families composed of people "living in sin"? That is, unmarried couples.
Looks like "Greater New England" likes the sin. Though that isn't a function of climate, as Florida mirrors New England with high rates of cohabitation and low rates of nuclear families.
Now how about families where grandparents are…
razib | September 19, 2009p-ter points out that selection of model organisms can shape the path of scientific research because of the very nature of model organisms. Normative considerations in science are pretty obvious when you look at the set of disciplines; there's a whole field of biological anthropology which studies one species. There is the rather well known case that doctoral research arcs are constrained to a relatively short period, which resulted in a focus short-lived organisms in zoological studies. Imagine trying to write up grant applications focusing on the life history of the tortoise.
razib | September 18, 2009Religiosity and teen birth rate in the United States:
Increased religiosity in residents of states in the U.S. strongly predicted a higher teen birth rate, with r = 0.73 (p<0.0005). Religiosity correlated negatively with median household income, with r = -0.66, and income correlated negatively with teen birth rate, with r = -0.63. But the correlation between religiosity and teen birth rate remained highly significant when income was controlled for via partial correlation: the partial correlation between religiosity and teen birth rate, controlling for income, was 0.53 (p<0.0005).…
razib | September 18, 2009The Nightmare Of Regulatory Reform:
...the SEC and the CFTC, two agencies that have fought hard to stay apart while the products they regulate grow more and more intertwined. Both Republicans and Democrats agree the two should become one, but former House Financial Services Committee chairman Mike Oxley says the chances of that happening are about as good as him beating Tiger Woods.
This is obviously public choice theory at work. But more generally an inspection of history shows that institutions tend to go through phases, as if they have a life history like organisms. The Chinese dynastic…
ejohnson | September 17, 2009
Most Americans are familiar with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, but less well known is his personal struggle with the conflicting ideologies of science and religion. A new film from producer Jeremy Thomas, Creation, aims to tell the story of Darwin's life through the cinematic lens—but Americans who would pay the box office price to watch it unfold won't be able to. US distributors have opted not to pick up the film, which the Telegraph reports has gotten outstanding early reviews, due to concerns that its message won't sit well with religious groups. Ethan Siegel of…
razib | September 16, 2009The Big Money has a profile of Felix Salmon up. Here is why I reckon that Salmon has some rank, every few weeks he shows up as a guest on Marketplace. And he consistently pronounces Kai Ryssdal's first name as if it is really the female name "Kay."
razib | September 15, 2009
One of the problems with human genetics where it resembles economics are the ethical issues involved in experimentation. Luckily for science, but unluckily for individuals, medicine offers many "natural experiments." But in the area of population genetics and history analyses of pedigrees or family based studies centered around particular traits and genes have limitations of scale. Luckily for science again, and unluckily for millions of Amerindians and black Africans, Latin America offers a cornucopia of possibilities when it comes to exploring the outcomes ensuing from admixture between…
razib | September 14, 2009A British film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer:
"The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it's because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they've seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.
"It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There's still a great belief that He made the world in six days. It's quite difficult for…
razib | September 13, 2009U.S. Is Finding Its Role in Business Hard to Unwind:
Between financial rescue missions and the economic stimulus program, government spending accounts for a bigger share of the nation's economy -- 26 percent -- than at any time since World War II. The government is financing 9 out of 10 new mortgages in the United States. If you buy a car from General Motors, you are buying from a company that is 60 percent owned by the government.
If you take out a car loan or run up your credit card, the chances are good that the government is financing both your debt and that of your bank.
And if you buy…
razib | September 13, 2009At my other weblog, two reviews of books on Eurasia. First, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present. Second, China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty.
razib | September 13, 2009I'm reading Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street, which is on many "To Read" lists because of its topical relevance. I think it is especially illuminating when examined in light of another work, Toward Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market by B. Mark Smith. As made clear by the title Fox's stance is generally skeptical of the efficient-market hypothesis (though Fox does often distinguish between weak and strong forms of the hypothesis, and is naturally not as hostile to the former as the latter). In…