Walking & racing to modernity

Posted Today, under Anthroplogy
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Two quantitative facts of note from When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order:

From page 33:

Although the passage to modernity universally involves the transition from an agrarian to service-based society via an industrial one, here we find another instance of European exceptionalism. European countries (sixteen in all)...are the only ones in the world that have been through a phase in which the relative size of industrial employment was larger than either agrarian or service employment. In Britain, industrial employment reached its peak in 1911, when it accounted for 52.2 percent of the total labor force...the peak figure for the United States was 35.8 percent in 1967 and for Japan 37.1 percent in 1973...From a global perspective, a different and far more common path has been to move directly, in terms of employment, from a largely agrarian to a mainly service society, without a predominantly industrial phase....

From page 103-104:

...In 1950 79% of South Korea's population worked in agriculture...by 1960 the figure was 61%, and today it is it around 10%. In the late 1960s the farming population still comprised half of Taiwan's total population, whereas today it accounts for a mere 8%...In 1950 76% of Taiwanese lived in the countryside, whereas by 1989...that figure had been almost exactly reversed...The urban population in South Korea was 18% in 1950 and 80% in 1994...In China the urban population represented 17% of the total population in 1975 and is projected to be 46% by 2015....

Compared with Europe, the speed of the shift from the countryside to the cities is exception. Germany's urban population grew from 15% in 1850 to 49% in 1910...and 53% in 1950...The equivalent figures for France were 19% in 1850 and 38% in 1910 (and 68% in 1970). England's urban population was 23% in 1800, 45% in 1850, and 75% in 1910. In the United States, the urban population was 14% in 1850, 42% in 1910, and 57% in 1950. If we take South Korea as our point of comparison...the proportion of its population living in cities increased by 62% in 44 years, compared with 52% for England over a period of 110 years, 34% over 60 years for Germany (and 38% over 100 years), 19% over 60 years for France (and 49% over 120 years), and 28% over 60 years (and 43% over 100 years) for the United States....

The author emphasizes the extreme rapidity of the economic transition from an agricultural economy to a post-industrial one in much of East Asia, with the long slow simmer of the British Industrial Revolution as a contrast. He points out that the relative gradual nature of industrialization in Europe likely explains the historic and antique aspects of its cities; evolutionary change allows for preservation and appreciation of the past, while very rapid economic growth as has been the norm in East Asia since 1950 tends to overturn the old order in its haste. I would suggest though that the ephemeral nature of East Asian architecture, with its dependence on wood, is something which has a deeper historical basis. But in any case, I think it is plausible that the extremely rapid shift from agrarian to post-industrial societies makes East Asians particularly open to novel technologies and fads.

When China Rules the World is interesting, it occupies a space between The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order and The End of History and the Last Man. The title is a bit hyperbolic, and doesn't really reflect what's within. In fact the subtitle is far more an accurate reflection of the content.

Note: The author points out in the book that the Jin Dynasty was Mongol. It was not, it was Jurchen, the same group which gave rise to the Manchus.

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Disqus and Echo

Posted 2 days ago, under Culture
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I'm starting to see Disqus and Echo all over the web. Anyone else notice this? I wasn't happy when I had to move Gene Expression Classic off Haloscan, so the whole "death of comments" fad isn't something I'm a fan of. But it seems like Facebook's creation of a successful private web is now driving the Facebookification of the public web. The main issue I have with all this revolution of the "discussion" is that in my experience as a blogger most "discussion" is retarded and most discussants are barely sentient.

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Only a minority of Iranian Americans are Muslims

Posted 3 days ago, under Iranian religious break down, Religion
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According to this survey done by Zogby International. The numbers:

42% Muslim
9% Christian
6% Jews
5% Zoroastrian
7% Bahai
31% “Other” (the pollsters presume this is mostly those with “No religion”)

The sample size was small, only around 400. And it seems really strange that there was a religious option for “Other” but not “No Religion,” but perhaps the pollsters simply weren’t expecting that so many people wouldn’t select the religion of their cultural tradition. I was surprised by the low proportion of Jews (several Persian American actors are Jewish), and high proportion of Zoroastrians. Of course Zoroastrians emigrated in large numbers, but their population base in Iran itself wasn’t that huge to begin with, European ethnographers were shocked to “discover” that they were still a living community in the 19th century (part of this was that they isolated themselves in remote areas to escape Muslim persecution). One hypothesis: some Iranian Americans identify as Zoroastrian to reassert their Persian cultural heritage even if they are from traditionally Muslim families (this has happened in Tajikistan somewhat, though only among intellectuals, as secularization during the Soviet period made it psychologically feasible for some to simply “leap-frog” the Muslim period back to their presumed primal identities).

Obviously Iranian Americans are very different from people in Iran. Americans sometimes assume that the anti-clerical attitude of many Iranians indicates a general anti-religious stance, but this is not evident in The World Values Survey. 16% of Iranians consider themselves “not religious” while 84% consider themselves “religious.” 0.1% were convinced atheists, out of a sample size of ~2500 (survey taken in 2005). As a comparison in Turkey 16.9% are “not religious” while in Egypt it is 7.5%. For a Middle Eastern country Iran is actually relatively on the secular side, but only for a Middle Eastern country.

Of course there is no reason that the demographics of an immigrant community would represent well that of the source region. An enormous proportion of people whose ancestors came from the Russian Empire were Jews. Arab Americans in the United States are much more likely to be Christian or other religious minorities (Casey Kasem is Druze). Until recently the rule-of-thumb has been that a majority of Arabs in the United States are Christian, not Muslim, but I suspect that is no longer true. Many people of part Arab heritage (e.g., the 1980s pop singer Tiffany) may no longer identify as Arab (and Christian Arabs seem to have had high outmarriage rates), and the recent immigrant waves have been much more Muslim in composition (this makes some sense since there simply aren’t that many Arab Christians left in the Middle East, though numerically the Copts are still substantial because of Egypt’s large base population).

A final note on Iranian Americans: did the high frequency of those with no religious affiliations emerge in the United States, or was that due to the selection biasing of the Iranian migrants? One can imagine that Iranian Communist intellectual contingent may have been irreligious, but I would assume that educated Iranians would generally have had a nominal religious affiliation to begin with. But with the option to defect in the United States, combined with a secular reaction to make themselves distinctive from the Iranian theocracy, I suspect that the generation born or raised in the United States had less use for adherence to a cultural Islam. In other words, the extent of Iranian American secularity may be as contingent as the prevalence of Latoya face & small-dog ownership among female Tehrangelinos.

(other interesting, if unsurprising, data at thePDF)

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Vitamin D & T cells

Posted , under Medicine
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I have mentioned before the current fad in vitamin D related papers in the medical literature. It's also broken into the pop culture Zeitgeist as well, I regularly get forwards on the topic. Here is a Google Trends chart for the United States:

vitDtrends.png

The history of medicine is, unfortunately, rather similar to the history of astrology. In fact for much of history doctors are likely to have increased, rather than decreased, mortality, thanks to an ignorance of germ theory and false paradigms such as Humorism. The demand-side pressures for cures & prevention seems to still exert a powerful push toward the rise & fall of fads (see google trends for "low carb" for example). A difference between pre-modern and contemporary fads though is that they're not all capricious today. Unfortunately though medicine is still complex, and the demand-side pressures often require an Answer. You have rafts of correlational studies, with each correlation adding to a positive feedback loop until the fad crests, and a new "it-cure" emerges on the scene (and no surprise that the beer industry is supposedly behind some of the studies which show that drinking in moderation is correlated with greater life expectancy).

All this is why papers like this are important, Vitamin D controls T cell antigen receptor signaling and activation of human T cells:

Phospholipase C (PLC) isozymes are key signaling proteins downstream of many extracellular stimuli. Here we show that naive human T cells had very low expression of PLC-γ1 and that this correlated with low T cell antigen receptor (TCR) responsiveness in naive T cells. However, TCR triggering led to an upregulation of ~75-fold in PLC-γ1 expression, which correlated with greater TCR responsiveness. Induction of PLC-γ1 was dependent on vitamin D and expression of the vitamin D receptor (VDR).Naive T cells did not express VDR, but VDR expression was induced by TCR signaling via the alternative mitogen-activated protein kinase p38 pathway. Thus, initial TCR signaling via p38 leads to successive induction of VDR and PLC-γ1, which are required for subsequent classical TCR signaling and T cell activation.

ScienceDaily has a good summary. This schematic represents the biochemical steps:

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On content redundancy

Posted , under Blog
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Felix Salmon, Link-phobic bloggers at the NYT and WSJ:

The problem, here, is that the bloggers at places like the NYT and the WSJ are print reporters, and aren't really bloggers at heart. I discovered this a couple of weeks ago, after I posted a long and detailed blog entry on the court case between JP Morgan and Mexico's Cablevisión. The WSJ's Deal Journal blog didn't link to it, but a couple of days later, the blog's lead writer, Michael Corkery, had a piece in the print version of the newspaper which added nothing to the story, quoted the same Cablevisión executive that I had spoken to, and didn't mention my post at all.

The decision not to cite or link to my blog was made by Dennis Berman, the editor of the WSJ story and a former Deal Journal blogger himself. Corkery and Berman read my piece and spent a couple of days re-reporting it, yet despite the fact that both of them have worked as bloggers, neither felt any need to link to me -- or even to link to the court ruling in question. It's a print-newspaper mindset, and it reveals something important: if even the WSJ's bloggers eschew obvious links, there's really no hope that the newspaper will genuinely embrace the power of the web at any point in the foreseeable future.

Both the NYT and the WSJ have built blogs as something of a link ghetto: if you want to find an external hyperlink anywhere on their sites, the only place you'll have a decent chance of finding one is on the blogs. (There are a few noble and notable exceptions, Frank Rich being one of them: the web version of his column is always full of interesting external links.)

That's depressing enough -- but what's more depressing still is that even the bloggers at the NYT and WSJ are link-phobic, often preferring to re-report stories found elsewhere, giving no credit to the people who found and reported them first. It's almost as though they think that linking to a story elsewhere is an admission of defeat, rather than a prime reason why people visit blogs in the first place. It's a print reporter's mindset, and it should have no place at Dealbook, Deal Journal, or any other blog.

Conventional media organs are great with all their resources and ability to dig deep into a story. But the replication of nearly the exactly same "breaking news" all over the place is a bit much. If there's something that comes out that I want to talk about, one of my first instincts is to see if Ed Yong or Dr. Daniel MacArthur have already covered that ground, there's no point in doing work which has been done, when a link would suffice. But obviously you'll never see CNN or The New York Times just link the AP wire story, let alone each other, when it's something which has just broken and everyone knows the exactly same few facts. In contrast, if Ed or Dr. MacArthur cover the bases, I might extend upon their own angle and see if I have a value-add. Though sometimes even when we don't intend to complement, we may. See How inbreeding killed off a line of kings and Inbreeding & the downfall of the Spanish Hapsburgs; both were published at the exact same moment because were under embargo and had our posts written ahead of time.

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Finding “cousins” through personal genomics

Posted , under Genetics
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The odds of knowing your cousins: 23andme Part 1:

Bizarrely, Jonathan Zittrain turns out to be my cousin -- which is odd because I have known him for some time and he is also very active in the online civil rights world. How we came to learn this will be the first of my postings on the future of DNA sequencing and the company 23andMe.

Just read the whole thing. This is really a matter of the humanities, not science. Specifically, the almost mystical significance people seem to put into the finding that they share genetic ancestry with people, even people who they knew and were friendly with before they knew this datum.

Also, I think this sort of thing makes hang-wringing about the ethical conundrums that genetic counselors might have in regards to paternity issues which a wife might know of, but the husband might not, seem totally ridiculous. With the plethora of personal genomic data which will likely be part of everyone's information portfolio circa 2020 you'd have to be retarded, or very exceptional, not to notice a "extra-pair paternity event" within a family.*

H/T Dr. Daniel MacArthur.

* Exceptional as in the putative father is dead, and all his relatives are dead, or he has no relatives (e.g., only child whose parents were only children, etc.).

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Iceland tells them to shove it

Posted 4 days ago, under Economics
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Icelanders reject deal to repay British and Dutch:

The outcome of the referendum had not been in doubt since Iceland had recently been offered better repayment terms than those contained in the deal on which residents were voting.

Partial referendum results from around a third of the cast votes showed 93 percent opposed the deal and less than 2 percent supported it. The rest cast invalid votes.

But the rejection will still have major repercussions, keeping financial aid on hold and threatening to undermine the center-left government of Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir.

"This has no impact on the life of the government. We need to keep going and finish the (Icesave) debate. We have to get an agreement," Sigurdardottir told public television.

Global capital is really lucky that direct democracy isn't that widespread and that regulatory capture is ubiquitous. On a microeconomic scale we know humans can operate spitefully. I won't go into the evolutionary ideas for why this might be (though W. D. Hamilton wrote a whole paper on the evolution of spite using the inclusive fitness framework), but the inclination is strong enough obviously that you have a whole nation willing to engage on it. How's that for systematic bias in our cognitive faculties?

The big picture problem is that for most of human history. No, for 99% of it, we've operated under zero sum dynamics. That crops up in human behavior, but a variety of historical events and institutions (and I consider science & technology fundamentally institutional products) have converged so that non-zero sum dynamics have produced rapid growth in productivity and post-Malthusian consumerism over the past two centuries. But there is no inevitable reason for why individual rational action should lead to positive sum outcomes; for most of human history it didn't, for there to be some with more others had to have less. I would have to put recent financial innovation by & large into the category of dynamics which recapitulate the dynamics of the Malthusian era, moving wealth from some to others, as opposed to growing the pie (England actually banned the joint-stock corporation during the century leading up to the industrial revolution, so there is debate whether even such primitive capitalist institutions are necessary for the technological breakout).

Note: The consequences of the vote may be somewhat more symbolic than not. See the story linked above.

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Billion year contract

Posted , under Culture
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This is funny:

Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.

They signed a contract for a billion years -- in keeping with the church's belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.

Check this conclusion:

Ms. Collbran says she still believes in Scientology -- not in the church as it is now constituted, but in its teachings. She still gets auditing, from other Scientologists who have defected, like Mr. Rathbun.

Mr. Davis said there is no such thing: "One can't be a Scientologist and not be part of the church."

Mr. Collbran, for his part, wants nothing to do with his former church. "Eventually I realized I was part of a con," he said, "and I have to leave it and get on with my life."

Despite all they have been through together, Ms. and Mr. Collbran are getting a divorce. The reason, they agree sadly, is that they no longer see eye to eye on Scientology.

No surprise that some individuals who are abused by Scientology want to "reform it." Look at the history of Millerism.

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“Cuba of the north”

Posted , under Culture
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Iceland Voters Set to Reject Debt Deal:

After the dust began to settle last year -- after the banks failed, the currency collapsed, the stock market crashed and the government fell -- the dazed inhabitants of Iceland woke up to another unpleasant problem: They owed, it seemed, some $5.3 billion to more than 300,000 angry people in the Netherlands and Britain.

These were the customers of Icesave, a now notorious online retail branch of the Icelandic bank Landsbanki, which went bankrupt in October 2008 along with 85 percent of Iceland's banking system. The British and Dutch governments reimbursed their citizens, but then demanded that Iceland repay the money, the equivalent of $65,000 per household here, plus interest.

To put it in perspective, it is as if American taxpayers were being forced to pay $5 trillion (plus interest) to reimburse customers of the Japanese branch of a failed private American bank, said Magnus Arni Skulason, the head of InDefence, a group agitating for a better deal.

It isn't is as if the average Icelander didn't benefit somewhat from influx of money which arrived during the nation's heyday as a center of international finance. But, I somewhat suspect that the movers & shakers who took risk which yielded massive fortunes are somewhat more comfortable than the average Icelander now. Yes, their paper wealth is not what it was, but they were living far above the median consumption rate anyhow. There is austerity for the masses, and "austerity" for the elite.

There don't seem any good solutions here. The elites of Iceland were either crooked or stupid, or some combination of both, during the years of high rolling. Now they've left their nation holding the bag. And this is Iceland. A tiny Nordic nations which is (was?) characterized by clean government and an efficient elite.

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Interracial divorce, the matrix of sex & race

Posted , under Culture
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It has been known for years that interracial marriages have higher than expected divorce rates. But I did not know that the rates varied quite a bit contingent on the combination of race & sex. Gori Girl* has a post up, Interracial Divorce in the U.S. - Statistics and How Much They Matter:

- Marriages that do not cross a race barrier, but do have different ethnicities (i.e. white/Hispanic white) have a rate of divorce just a little higher than white/white marriages.

- Interracial marriages that have one white person and one person of another race mostly only show higher divorce rates when the white spouse is a female (i.e. white guy + other race girl don't show particularly high divorce rates compared to same-race couples).

- Black husband/white wife marriages are twice as likely to divorce as white/white marriages, and Asian husband/white wife marriages are about 60% more likely to divorce as white/white marriages. Which, I suppose is an unfortunate statistic for Aditya and me (and one I didn't expect at all)!

- White husband/black wife were nearly 50% less likely to divorce than white/white couples, and white husband/Asian wife couples had pretty much the same divorce rate as white/white couples

- Compared to Hispanic/Hispanic couples, Hispanic white/white couples showed a higher likelihood of divorce (not surprising). Likewise, Asian/white couples were more likely to divorce than Asian/Asian couples. However, black/white couples only show a higher rate of divorce compared to black/black couples if the white person in the relationship is a woman.

- The researchers were unable to evaluate other sorts of interracial marriages, such as black/Asian, because of the low number of such couples in the sample data.

The higher divorce rates for white female/non-white male dyads somewhat surprised me, but perhaps I shouldn't have been. There seems a robust body of social science that white women in the United States are particularly race conscious. I stumbled onto a paper which emphasized this point, and its subtle nuances, recently. I didn't blog it because the sex difference in racial mating preference is such a robust finding that it doesn't seem noteworthy (though perhaps racialist message boards should focus a bit more on male rather than female "race traitors," as it is the XY who are more open to sullying the purity of the volk). In any case, the paper is Gendered racial exclusion among white internet daters. Here's the figure which stood out to me:

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