razib
Posts by this author
December 31, 2009
The Google Decade Ends: If the search king hasn't ripped up your business yet, just wait. 10 years is a long time in the tech industry. I wonder which company will be the center of retrospectives in 2010? It seems that the time cycle of the rise & fall of "It" firm is speeding up; from IBM to…
December 31, 2009
Yeah, you read that right. Overweight and obesity in urban Africa: A problem of the rich or the poor?:Descriptive results showed that the prevalence of urban overweight/obesity increased by nearly 35% during the period covered. The increase was higher among the poorest (+50%) than among the richest…
December 31, 2009
The Properties of Adaptive Walks in Evolving Populations of Fungus:
The rarity of beneficial mutations has frustrated efforts to develop a quantitative theory of adaptation. Recent models of adaptive walks, the sequential substitution of beneficial mutations by selection, make two compelling…
December 31, 2009
If you're getting in at the last second, please see GiveWell's top charities.
December 31, 2009
The Massive Stock Market Rally of 2009 Ends Today:
In what the Wall Street Journal calls "a comeback of historic proportions," the U.S. stock market's banner year closes later on today. The paper says, "With one trading day remaining in 2009, the Dow is on track for its biggest annual gain since…
December 30, 2009
Disease Gene Characterization through Large-Scale Co-Expression Analysis:
Celsius, the largest co-normalized microarray dataset of Affymetrix based gene expression, was used to calculate the correlation between all possible gene pairs on all platforms, and generate stored indexes in a web…
December 30, 2009
Several readers have pointed me to this development at Berkeley High School:
Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.
The proposal to put the science-lab…
December 29, 2009
Google, Past and Future:
Ah, but what about 2010? That, claim the editors at Smartgrid, will be the year that Google and Microsoft really roll up their sleeves and go to war. In everything from search to office apps and Internet browsers, the two behemoths will roll out fancy new services designed…
December 29, 2009
The Audacious Epigone has an interesting post up, Burden of boredom borne by blockheads:
This isn't just me speaking from personal experience--the data confirm it. The GSS asked respondents in 1982 and again in 2004 how often they have time on their hands that they don't know what to do with. Using…
December 28, 2009
Chard Orzel's book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, is out. Much props to Chad for being able to write a book while being a professor and father. A man for all seasons indeed!
December 23, 2009
I referenced a paper in PNAS yesterday, and I thought it might be good to actually point to it today. There's nothing that new in the paper. It confirms the finding that ~20% of the ancestry of African Americans is European, and, that African ancestry seems to be much more dominant when it comes to…
December 22, 2009
Over at Genetic Future Dr. Daniel MacArthur points out some errors in deCODE's interpretation services. Dr. MacArthur presumably knows his maternity, though if the X chromosome results were correct one would guess that Dr. MacArthur is actually adopted and that his mother might be a Lumbee Indian…
December 22, 2009
Brian Switek, The extended twilight of the mammoths:
So, if the team's analysis is correct, both mammoths and horses lived in the interior of Alaska between about 11,000 and 7,000 years ago. This is significantly more recent than the youngest fossil remains of horses and mammoths, dated between 15,…
December 22, 2009
There has been more blogospheric discussion on the topic of my post Doing the right thing, doing the legal thing. Megan McArdle, who started the discussion, has a long post elaborating on her objections to strategic defaults. Steve Waldman has two good posts up. Finally, at The Big Money Daniel…
December 22, 2009
A few days ago I pointed out that actors with visible Asian ancestry, such as Keanu Reeves, Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Dean Cain, can play white characters, while those with visible African ancestry can not (I will leave it to debate whether you think Rashida Jones or Jennifer Beals are violations of…
December 21, 2009
Tom Rees:
It seems that when Christianity is popular, Christians are content with the idea of a firewall separating Church and State. It's only when Christianity begins to lose it's influence over the population at large that Christians begin to campaign for the State to adopt a Christian character…
December 21, 2009
Spatial Organization of Hominin Activities at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel:
The spatial designation of discrete areas for different activities reflects formalized conceptualization of a living space. The results of spatial analyses of a Middle Pleistocene Acheulian archaeological horizon (about 750…
December 20, 2009
Objective Confirmation of Subjective Measures of Human Well-Being: Evidence from the U.S.A.:
A huge research literature, across the behavioral and social sciences, uses information on individuals' subjective well-being. These are responses to questions--asked by survey interviewers or medical…
December 19, 2009
I saw Avatar in 3D.
- The special effects were very good. I have seen special effects of similar quality, but never such quality in such quantity. The detail was striking enough that I assume I stopped thinking of it as "special effects" and more as simply a background canvas. I'm talking more…
December 17, 2009
Increased Prevalence of Myopia in the United States Between 1971-1972 and 1999-2004:
Results
Using the 1971-1972 method, the estimated prevalence of myopia in persons aged 12 to 54 years was significantly higher in 1999-2004 than in 1971-1972 (41.6% vs 25.0%, respectively; P -2.0 diopters [D]: 17…
December 17, 2009
Since my last post was rather pessimistic, I thought I'd point to something a little more cheerful, Social Scientists Build Case for 'Survival of the Kindest':
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a…
December 17, 2009
Megan McArdle has a post up where she follows up on her disgust with home owners who "walk away" from their mortgage obligations when they can continue to pay them. In California, and many other states, the bank can't come after you if you walk away, so if your home is "underwater" then it is often…
December 17, 2009
Apropos of my skepticism of Census projections of 2050 demographic balances, there's a new paper out on Argentina which is relevant. Here's Wikipedia on Argentina's self-conception:
As with other areas of new settlement such as Canada, Australia and the United States, Argentina is considered a…
December 16, 2009
White Americans' majority to end by mid-century:
The estimated time when whites will no longer make up the majority of Americans has been pushed back eight years -- to 2050 -- because the recession and stricter immigration policies have slowed the flow of foreigners into the U.S.
Census Bureau…
December 15, 2009
That's probably the big takeaway of a new paper on the genetics of Asians, a set which includes South Asians, but in the new research mostly focuses on the people of East Asia. In a global context this work is important. The backstory is that there are disagreements about the exact process of the "…