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agelman | December 31, 2009My colleague Macartan Humphreys recently came out with book, Coethnicity (with James Habyarimana, Daniel Posner, and Jeremy Weinstein, addresses the question of why public services and civic cooperation tend to be worse in areas with more ethnic variation. To put it another way: people in homogeneous areas work well together, whereas in areas of ethnic diversity, there's a lot less cooperation.
From one perspective, this one falls into the "duh" category. Of course, we cooperate with people who are more like us! But it's not so simple. Macartan and his colleagues discuss and discard a…
tlambert | December 31, 2009Greetings from 2010. Here is a picture I just took of Sydney's fireworks.
Looking through the Sydney Morning Herald's gallery, I find a picture of one of my sons! With a million people out to watch the fireworks, what are the odds?
mspringer | December 31, 2009Around ScienceBlogs recently there's been some discussion about the following eyebrow-raising Toys-R-Us advertisement:
The ad has caused rumblings of discontent because it's pretty obvious the pink microscope and telescope are supposed to be "girl" editions, and in both cases the pink one is the smallest, dinkiest, and lowest powered. The bare fact of pinkness in and of itself isn't really something I'd care about - if the same dopey company wants to make "boy" microscopes in MARPAT it would be stupid but as long as it's a good scope then I have no objection to the consumer getting what…
agelman | December 30, 2009There's some psychological/political/sociological phenomenon, I can't remember what it's called, in which you tend to think of yourself and your allies as a diverse coalition, while thinking of the people on the other side as a monolithic bloc. I was thinking about this when I read this comment by Jeffrey Toobin:
The President is pro-choice . . . But, like many modern pro-choice Democrats, he has worked so hard to be respectful of his opponents on this issue that he sometimes seems to cede them the moral high ground. In his book "The Audacity of Hope," he describes the "undeniably difficult…
gregladen | December 30, 2009The new Sherlock Holmes movie is, of course, a must see for Holmes buffs, and beyond that ... for regular movie goers ... it is still recommended. The movie is a high-test, quirky, action packed, funny cliff hanger. Having said that, Holmes aficionados will probably get more out of this movie than those who have not read the original stories or seen some of the better movie and TV depictions. There are also things you should appreciate about this film regarding gender because it is likely to come up. It is very very easy to label a film as racist or sexist in some way. This is partly…
gregladen | December 30, 20091: Men have 3 pts more IQ than women, explaining the gender pattern in professional employment that we see. Seriously. I guess we don't need any more STEM related blogging.
2: Jason is stirring up trouble again. Regarding science and religion.
3: What is the consensus on scientific consensus?
clock | December 30, 2009Not much to say myself, I just find the diversity of opinions in posts and comments fascinating:
Dr.Isis: Careful, Girls! That's Too Much Power!
Arikia: Gendered Color Dichotomies-R-Us
PZ: The powerlessness of pink
Cori Kesler: My Droid is Pink
Mareserinitatis: Pink
Chad: Does Pinkification Fool Anybody?
agelman | December 30, 2009Yesterday I posted this graph, a parallel-coordinates plot showing health care spending and life expectancy in a sample of countries:
I remarked that a scatterplot should be better. Commenter Freddy posted a link to the data, so, just for laffs, I spent a few minutes making a scatterplot containing all the same information. Here it is. (Clicking on any of the graphs gives a larger version.)
How do the two graphs compare? There are some ways in which the first graph is better, but I think these have to do with that graph being made by a professional graphic designer--at least, I assume…
edyong | December 30, 2009I don't really like end-of-the-year lists. They seem a bit too self-knowing and forced, and there are just so many of them, particularly because we're heralding the end of a decade too. I half-expect someone to create a Top Ten Years of the Decade list (and Time Out would probably put 1977 in there just to be edgy).
This might seem like a funny way of introducing an end-of-the-year list, but I've tried to make this one a bit different. This is not a collection of the "top" scientific discoveries of the year. I'm not calling them "breakthroughs". I'm not judging them on such abstract and…
mspringer | December 30, 2009Still working my way through Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, and I'm now about half way through it (and thus about 1/6 of the way through the whole Baroque Cycle). The book is about the intrigues and adventures of Daniel Waterhouse and Jack Shaftoe, but it's actually about the birth of the modern world through the twin developments of science and finance.
There's no shortage of science. One nearly throwaway vignette involves Robert Hooke attempting to empirically resolve a debate concerning the nature of stars, roughly, are they all sort of pasted on a crystal dome not so far beyond the edge…
gregladen | December 30, 2009Short form: Good movie. I think the following review does not have any significant plot spoilers.
For me, in retrospect, the movie started before it started with a long multi-part tear-jerking recruiting ad for the U.S. National Guard, followed by a tribute to the troops in Iraq sponsored by Walmarts. Why was that part of the movie? I'll tell you in a minute.
The premise of Avatar is this: In the year 2154 or so, Earthling-Americans have started to mine the hard to get and rare mineral Hardtogetium (or something like that) and an indigenous population is in the way. There are…
agelman | December 29, 2009I recently blogged on the following ridiculous (to me) quote from economist Gary Becker:
According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent "suicides" in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life.
In my first entry I dealt with Becker's idea pretty quickly and with a bit of mockery ("Sure, 'counterintuitive' is fine, but this seems to be going off the deep end . . ."), and my commenters had no problem with it. But then I updated with a more elaborate argument and discussion of how Becker could…
agelman | December 29, 2009David Blei points me to this report by Lars Backstrom, Jonathan Chang, Cameron Marlow, and Itamar Rosenn on an estimate of the proportion of Facebook users who are white, black, hispanic, and asian (or, should I say, White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian).
Facebook users don't specify race/ethnicity, but they do give their last name, and Backstrom et al. use Census data on the ethnic breakdowns of last names to estimate the proportion of Facebook users in each of several Census-defined ethnic categories. They present their results for several snapshots of Facebook from 2006 through 2009.
Their…
mspringer | December 29, 2009Ok, back from Christmas hiatus which I, uh, forgot to announce. But I am pleased that I survived a full 96+ hours with exactly zero internet access. Didn't even miss it. Much.
Over that break, I happened to be in a bookstore in exurban Atlanta. Gravitating as I tend to do toward the science section, I saw this book:
It is of course How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, by ScienceBlogs' own Chad Orzel. I can't review it yet because I haven't sat down and read it yet (I have a copy in the mail), though based on my bookstore perusing I am certain it will be as brilliant as expected, which is…
cortex | December 28, 2009Apologies for the light blogging: I'm enjoying a little vacation from my computer. But here is a recent little article about willpower in the WSJ:
Willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out; it's an extremely limited mental resource.
Given its limitations, New Year's resolutions are exactly the wrong way to change our behavior. It makes no sense to try to quit smoking and lose weight at the same time, or to clean the apartment and give up wine in the same month. Instead, we should respect the feebleness of self-control, and spread our resolutions out over the…
agelman | December 28, 2009I recently reviewed Bryan Caplan's book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, for the journal Political Psychology. I wish I thought this book was all wrong, because then I could've titled my review, "The Myth of the Myth of the Rational Voter." But, no, I saw a lot of truth in Caplan's arguments. Here's what i wrote:
Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter was originally titled "The logic of collective belief: the political economy of voter irrationality," and its basic argument goes as follows:
(1) It is rational for people to vote and to make their preferences based on their views of…
edyong | December 28, 2009This is the final round of voting for the NERS stories-of-the-year polls. So far, there have been eight polls, each covering a different scientific field and I'm going to collate the results of these in the next couple of days. But before I do, there have been a few straggler stories that may deserve a place on the list. Here's your pick:
You're having fun when time flies
Ballistic penises and corkscrew vaginas - the sexual battles of ducks
Groovy teeth, but was Sinornithosaurus a venomous dinosaur?
Even on mute, TV can perpetuate racial bias
One gene stops ovaries from turning into…
gregladen | December 27, 2009The following is a guest post by Stephanie Zvan. In this post, Zvan addresses a recent study of "reaction times" and IQ measurements in two study groups distinguished by race. I'll let the post speak for itself, but it is worth nothing that in the ongoing discussion of race and intelligence, the complaint is commonly made that critiques of mainstream psychometrics do not pay much attention to the recent literature. This would be a case of that not happening.
Reaction Times and IQ Tests
Stephanie Zvan
In the ongoing discussion about disparities between racial classifications on IQ tests…