razib
Posts by this author
Swine 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…
Carl Zimmer points out that Marianne Williamson is making some real strange suggestions in regards to the swine flue in The Huffington Post:
l) Pray it away. Just pray it away, asking God as you understand Him, the Divine Physician, Jesus or whatever other form of divine imagery works for you.…
That's what Sandy at Digital Biology is suggesting from her analyses.... (also see Tara of Aetiology's response)
In 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…
Dan MacArthur has a post, Genetics of complex traits in Europeans and East Asians: similarities and differences:
With those goals in mind, you can expect to see many more GWAS of non-European populations over the next couple of years, and some explicit comparisons of the differing genetic…
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…
OK, 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
Wondering, what if Dick Cheney had run for President.
Matt 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…
Serum Vitamin D Levels and Markers of Severity of Childhood Asthma in Costa Rica. See ScienceDaily. Anecdote: my own asthma has gotten much better since I started Vitamin D supplementation. Not only have I had many fewer bouts of bronchitis the past few years, but my basal respiratory…
On the order of ~1 million years ago humans seem to have evolved dark skin. While light skin evolved several times, it looks like dark skin exhibits an "consensus sequence," so that all dark skinned peoples seem to have the same genetic architecture.
This chart (from Signatures of Positive…
Since 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…
The episode is titled "your brains & your genes." There's more emphasis on economics than you think.
One of the arguments of some younger social conservatives (e.g., Ross Douthat) is that while the abortion wars are in stasis, the Right is losing ground when it comes to opposition to gay marriage. Is this true? Below are charts from the GSS with each column representing a year, from the mid-…
Thankfully. Familial Resemblance of Borderline Personality Disorder Features: Genetic or Cultural Transmission?:
Borderline personality disorder is a severe personality disorder for which genetic research has been limited to family studies and classical twin studies. These studies indicate that…
Fortune has a massive profile of Bernie Madoff's life, career and scam. Some new material too.
One of the major problems in most societies, subject to "great sorts" of various kinds, is the fact that people observe correlations of attitudes & beliefs, and infer from those necessary relations. For example, if one of the first things that someone finds out about me is that I am an atheist…
See FuturePundit & Effect Measure. Also see H5N1. CDC recommends (especially for residents of California & Texas):
* Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.
* Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially…
What If Vitamin D Deficiency Is a Cause of Autism?:
As evidence of widespread vitamin D deficiency grows, some scientists are wondering whether the sunshine vitamin--once only considered important in bone health--may actually play a role in one of neurology's most vexing conditions: autism.
The…
Funny clip from the "Fatbeard" episode of South Park. Interesting how Cartman turned into a White Rajah with ease.
Bora points to this report about mega shakeups at Scientific American. The editor for nearly a generation, John Rennie, is out. Nature Publishing Group is now calling the shots. In non-science news Ezra Klein, king of all journolism, is moving to The Washington Post. We live in the age of creative…
There are some papers out on the genome of the domestic cow out right now. ScienceNews has an overview:
Two competing research teams have cataloged the "essence of bovinity" found in the DNA of cattle, but not without disagreement on some essential points.
Reporting online April 23 in Science and…
Misyar: Prostitution By Another Name:
Over the past year many Muslim converts have had the "opportunity" to discover something called a "misyar marriage", or Sunni version of temporary sexual relationship sanctioned by shariah law. From where I stand as a convert, the entire affair appears to be…
Reading Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational I was struck and concerned by his data which suggested that once social norms of reciprocity break down it is difficult to regenerate them. In other words, social capital can be thought of as a limited nonrenewable resource, at least proximately. On the…
See the data that The Audacious Epigone reports. Hope other bloggers will start using the World Values Survey!
Dan MacArthur's post, Can't find your disease gene? Just sequence them all..., is worth a read. He concludes:
But sequencing won't be enough: we need much better methods for sifting out the truly function-altering genetic variants from the biological noise. This is already difficult enough for…
One of the funnier aspects of the discovery of genes correlated with physical traits is that finding the genetic variant which explains 75% of the variation in blue eyes is interesting, but it isn't as if you now have a better way to find blue eyed people (though it is important for forensic work…
Interesting bit from Onion News Network:
More American Workers Outsourcing Own Jobs Overseas