Other People's Work
purepedantry | October 3, 2007Check out this must-read long post on heritability and IQ:
One of the sound tenets of a lot of conservative social and political thought is an insistence on the importance of tradition and tacit knowledge, its transmission through families and communities, and the difficulty of making up for the absence of early immersion in a tradition with later explicit instruction. The fact is, however, that if I studied anything which is transmitted via tradition in the way people estimate IQ's heritability, I'd conclude that it had a genetic component. If, in particular, there are traditions which…
purepedantry | September 24, 2007Encephalon 32 is up at Living the Scientific Life.
The Chernobyl reactor will be encased in a huge steel arch.
This business sounds suspiciously similar to the Simpsons movie.
Larry Summers is not allowed to talk at UC-Davis:
What's more, academic freedom depends on reactions like the response to Summers's 2005 comments. Knowledgeable scholars including the sociologist (and my colleague) Kim Shauman explained that there was actually a great deal more research into, and knowledge of, the ways women founder in scientific careers than Summers had originally suggested. Summers, Shauman said, was…
purepedantry | September 6, 2007Beer pong is now industrial:
These guys aren't exactly Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. But Messrs. Wright and Johnson, both 22 years old, are part of a new wave of young people trying to make money tapping into their peers' devotion to beer pong, a cross between ping-pong and beer chugging. As beer-pong season hits a peak with the start of the school year, these beer-pong entrepreneurs are running tournaments and peddling customized beer-pong tables, balls and apparel.
In 2004, brothers Ben and Jesse Spiegel took a leave from the University of Denver, pooled more than $50,000 in savings and…
purepedantry | August 29, 2007Gene Expression has 10 Questions with Gregory Clark, author of A Farewell to Alms:
Clark also provides archival evidence that in medieval Britain (and to a lesser extent in China and Japan) the wealthy-who presumably had those "middle class" skills in abundance-raised more children than the average person. If you put these pieces together-a system that rewards a new set of abilities, plus greater reproductive success for those who have those abilities-then all you need to get some form of selection is one more link: A transmission mechanism. On the nature of the mechanism, Clark leaves the…
purepedantry | August 22, 2007Megan McArdle on the morality -- not the economics -- of a single-payer healthcare system:
As a class, are the young and healthy more responsible for the bad health of the old and sick? Quite the reverse. Many people in the old and sick category did nothing at all to deserve their fate; they just aged or were victims of fate. But some members of the "old and sick" class contributed to their fate. Contra many of my interlocutors, there are a lot of very expensive diseases that have a substantial lifestyle component: high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, diabetes, lung cancer, emphysema…
purepedantry | August 21, 2007Dusk in Autumn on the perils of blogs and Wikipedia:
In reality, the greatest threat to the intellectual lives of college graduates -- at least those whose minds have not irreparably rotted from studying literary theory or women's studies -- is internet pseudo-learning, exemplified by an addiction to Wikipedia and to blogs. I'll admit that a few years ago, I too was trapped in an ever-increasing spiral of Wikipedia tabs open simultaneously. For unlike TV, Wikipedia is seductive since there is a veneer of respectability to it, and clicking through its entries does, at least occasionally,…
purepedantry | August 20, 2007Anterior Commissure on the reproductive success explanation for why men insult women:
Researchers uncovered convincing evidence that partner-directed insults help to "maintain an intimate partner's exclusive involvement in the relationship." While men employed a variety of insults, ranging from physical to mental, insults that accused a mate of sexual infidelity were most predictive of men's successful mate retention. It's no suprise, then, that men most likely to insult their partner were those who believed their partners were likely to cheat. Based on these findings, researchers believe…
purepedantry | August 13, 2007If you haven't read this post by Matthew Nisbet at Framing Science, you really, really should. It shows how framing scientific issues in terms of jobs and economic competitiveness is much more likely to pass funding bills:
As I've noted here many times, major funding initiatives for science are mostly likely to be successful in winning support from policymakers under conditions where they can be exclusively defined in terms of economic competitiveness and growth. If opponents are unable to recast elements of the proposal in terms of public accountability (funding in the public vs private…
purepedantry | July 30, 2007I am clearing out links, so here are two quotes on a libertarian persuasion.
From Jane Galt (about media coverage of the Hillary/Obama foreign policy debate:
It's not really my business, since I don't think anyone will ever describe me as progressive or (outside of Britain), liberal, but I don't find this surprising, or even necessarily bad. Progressives/Liberals are possibly on the cusp of a political resurgence. It seems perfectly natural that they should spend more time worrying about how to cement their political coalition, then what to do when they have power. This has massive drawbacks…