Culture
razib | May 8, 2009I've been away from the computer a fair amount the past few days. In any case, my RSS is saturated with posts about this new Star Trek movie, which I haven't seen. Either it must be good, or I read the blogs of other nerds. Or, perhaps both.
razib | May 7, 2009Thabet points me to a new survey of Muslims and the European public. The focus is especially on the UK, France and Germany. In short Muslims in these three nations are more "conservative" than the general population when it comes to social values, but, it is interesting to note that there seems to be an effect of the host culture on the Muslims (i.e., French Muslims track the French, and so forth). But I want to highlight the extreme social conservatism of British Muslims. For example, apparently no British Muslims in the survey thought that homosexual acts were morally acceptable. The…
amillikan | May 5, 2009
The billionaire media icon Oprah Winfrey sealed a contractual deal with notorious anti-vaccination supporter Jenny McCarthy Monday that will enable McCarthy to spread her belief that vaccines cause autism across several platforms. This viewpoint is vehemently opposed in the scientific community, as it remains virtually unsupported after years of rigorous scientific investigation and, if heeded as true, has lethal consequences in the form of diseases like measles, mumps and rubella. With support from Oprah, McCarthy is slated to host a syndicated talk show and maintain a blog. According to…
edyong | May 5, 2009Popularity is a fickle thing. Styles, products, social movements and people can be bathing in the spotlight one day and languishing in obscurity the next. And according to a new study, things that catch on most quickly are also abandoned most easily - the faster the rise to prominence, the steeper the fall from grace.
Many researchers have looked into the reasons behind the success of cultural tastes, but Jonah Berger and Gael Le Mens were more interested in the factors that drive them to extinction. To examine that, they looked at the changing popularities of first names in France and the…
razib | May 4, 2009In Nature, De novo establishment of wild-type song culture in the zebra finch:
Culture is typically viewed as consisting of traits inherited epigenetically, through social learning. However, cultural diversity has species-typical constraints, presumably of genetic origin... Zebra finch isolates, unexposed to singing males during development, produce song with characteristics that differ from the wild-type song found in laboratory11 or natural colonies. In tutoring lineages starting from isolate founders, we quantified alterations in song across tutoring generations in two social environments…
razib | May 4, 2009Via Andrew Sullivan, One nation, seven sins: Geographers measure propensity for evil in states, counties. Here's the methodology:
Greed was calculated by comparing average incomes with the total number of inhabitants living beneath the poverty line. On this map, done in yellow, Clark County is bile (see map on Page 2).
Envy was calculated using the total number of thefts -- robbery, burglary, larceny and stolen cars. Rendered in green, of course, Clark County is emerald.
Wrath was calculated by comparing the total number of violent crimes -- murder, assault and rape -- reported to the FBI per…
razib | May 4, 2009Late last year I reviewed a book by an American sociologist on Danish secularism. The book was titled Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment, and apparently its publication resulted in some controversy in Denmark, in large part due to perceived misrepresentation of the Danish populace by the author. I suspected at the time that part of the issue was that of cultural miscommunication; what "secular" and "religious" are in the United States and Denmark vary a great deal, and the author was attempting to communicate primarily to an American audience…
razib | May 2, 2009Calculated Risk has a great chart showing GDP fluctuations which puts into perspective just how big a downtown the Great Depression represented, and how it compares to the current one. For the population ~30 and under the current downswing is already 3 times more extreme from the peak than any recession they have memory of. In fact, we're already approaching the biggest downswing since World War II and the recession will certainly be the longest as well. On the other hand, we're as far from the commonly accepted definition of a Depression of a 10% decline in GDP as the 1991 one recession was…
razib | May 2, 2009David Brooks has a column out where he mulls over the role of time invested in amplifying talent:
If you wanted to picture how a typical genius might develop, you'd take a girl who possessed a slightly above average verbal ability. It wouldn't have to be a big talent, just enough so that she might gain some sense of distinction. Then you would want her to meet, say, a novelist, who coincidentally shared some similar biographical traits. Maybe the writer was from the same town, had the same ethnic background, or, shared the same birthday -- anything to create a sense of affinity.
...
The…
razib | May 2, 2009Low Vitamin D Causes Problems For Acutely Ill Patients:
Dr Paul Lee, Professor John Eisman and Associate Professor Jackie Center, researchers at Sydney's Garvan Institute of Medical Research, examined a cohort of 42 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients. Forty-five percent turned out to be Vitamin D deficient.
...
When the team correlated the Vitamin D levels with a disease severity score, there was a direct correspondence between sickness and Vitamin D deficiency. In other words, the sicker someone was, the lower the levels of Vitamin D. Out of the 42 patients studied, there were 3 deaths. The…
razib | April 30, 2009Unlike many bloggers I'm not too invested in politics, nor do I have a deep knowledge of the topic (though I do have a strong interest in quantitative political science). But I read political pieces in the same way I read sports columns: entertaining analyses which serve as brain candy. Nevertheless, the candy needs to pass a minimal threshold of intellectual palatability. I'm a Celtics fan, and was excited to see their first championship of my adulthood last year, but any sports writer that throws up a column which asserts that the 2007-2008 team was the greatest of all time would be too…
razib | April 30, 2009UN says Egypt pig cull real mistake:
The United Nations has called Egypt's move to cull 400,000 pigs as a precaution against swine flu "a real mistake".
The Egyptian government ordered the slaughter of the pigs on Wednesday, saying it could help quell any panic in the country that is largely Muslim, who view pigs as unclean.
No pigs in the country have been found with the new strain of H1N1 virus of the so-called swine flu and the World Health Organisation (WHO) says the disease cannot be caught from eating pork that is properly prepared.
I just heard on NPR that urban pigs apparently process…
razib | April 29, 2009
In the wake of Predictably Irrational, check out Tyler Cowen's endorsement of Geoffrey Miller's new book, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. Miller is a good writer, so I'm assuming it will be a page-turner, but he does tend to be "provocative" in all the best & worst ways when it comes to popular science. Evolutionary psychologists have a tendency to make everything about sex & status, but within the field it seems Miller does come off as the "pimp daddy" always talking about the "bling" and "b**tches" as the raison d'être.
razib | April 28, 2009Swine influenza, seasonality, and the northern hemisphere:
This history demonstrates the seasonality of pandemic influenza, and suggesta that spread of A/California/09/2009 in the northern hemisphere is not imminent. Based on this regularity, the epidemic in Mexico should be over no later than the end of May. While it is not 'impossible to see the current contagion spreading in the northern hemisphere over the following months', it would be unprecedented.
razib | April 28, 2009In the wake of my post on Predictably Irrational, The Last Temptation of Risk:
THE GREAT Credit Crisis has cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics. We thought that monetary policy had tamed the business cycle. We thought that because changes in central-bank policies had delivered low and stable inflation, the volatility of the pre-1985 years had been consigned to the dustbin of history; they had given way to the quaintly dubbed "Great Moderation." We thought that financial institutions and markets had come to be self-regulating--that investors could be left largely if…
razib | April 28, 2009
I first encountered Dan Ariely on the radio show Marketplace, where he offers up little nuggets of research data from the new field of behavioral economics. Because of the individual scale of the research many of Ariely's findings have some personal finance implications. Consider the pain of paying. This is the finding that when people pay with credit as opposed to cash for dinner, they are willing to spend more. Why? Because credit cards decouple the psychic "pain" of payment from the specific act. The act of deferring reduces our pain at the damage done, and allows consumption with less…
razib | April 28, 2009OK, it's from Onion News Network. I really like the touch of the vapid hostess.
Autoworkers Compete to Keep Jobs, Livelihoods on New Reality Show
razib | April 27, 2009Matt Springer's comment that while differences in regards to abortion remain important among the young, but that there no deep fissure in regards to homosexuality, rings true. I decided to look at the same variables as I did below across the years, but limited to the age group 18-30. In other words, each year from the early 1970s to the 2000s you are looking at the opinions of individuals who are in the age range 18-30 during that year. An interesting trend popped up.
The trends for abortion and opposition to interracial marriage are familiar (though the latter exhibits differences by…
razib | April 26, 2009Since the post on anti-miscegenation laws got a lot of attention, I was curious about analogs in the World Values Survey. There are two such questions of interest:
Important for succesful marriage: Same ethnic background(D042)
and
Important for succesful marriage: Religious beliefs(D031)
These data are skewed toward European nations. Below the fold are data are % who assert that same ethnic background is NOT very important, or that same religious beliefs are NOT very important. I will admit that the international pattern is surprising to me.
Same Religion Not Very Important…