Open Thread, September 4th, 2010
If you’re American, you should be at a barbecue or something! So what podcasts do you listen to? The main talk show I listen to is Tom Ashbrook’s.
Daily Data Dump – Friday
Have a good Labor Day weekend!
Catholics and the Evolving Cosmos. And yet 35% of American Roman Catholics are Creationists according to the GSS.
23andMe kits at some discount, with a subscription to the “personal genome service” for at least 3 months. Normal complete edition is about $500, with the discount it’s about $300 + 3 X […]
European man, Y chromosomes & tea leaves
Sometimes in applied fields artistic license is constrained by the necessity of function to particular creative channels. Architecture comes to mind, at least before innovative technologies produced lighter and stronger materials, freeing up form from its straitjacket (whether this was a positive development is a matter of taste). But there’s only so much you can […]
Fertility by non-Hispanic white ethnic group, etc.
In my post on American fertility rates by racial group Mike Keesey asks: ‘It’d also be interesting to see what’s going on within “non-Hispanic whites”.’ One can explore this question in the GSS. Let’s look at ancestry group (e.g., German, French, etc.), religion, belief in God, political ideology, intelligence and education, for non-Hispanic whites. The […]
Which American racial group has the lowest fertility?
Update: Also see breakdowns among non-Hispanic white ancestry groups.
The really sad events around the Discovery Channel hostage situation, and the subsequent death of James Lee, made me wonder a little bit about total fertility rates. Lee seems to have had sentiments very similar to some of the anti-humanists within the Deep Ecology movement. Unlike the […]
HapMap 3: more people ~ more genetic variation
Across the ~3 billion or so base pairs in the human genome there’s a fair amount of variation. That variation can be partitioned into different classes, somewhat artificial constructions of human categorization systems, but nevertheless mapping on to real demographic or life history events of particular importance. Some of the variation is specific to populations, […]
Daily Data Dump – Wednesday
Hello September!
Announcing PLoS Blogs. This looks to be a season of shakeups and transitions in the science blogosphere. Expect some more in the near future from what I’ve been told.
Oh, No, It’s a Girl! South Asians Flock to Sex-Selection Clinics in U.S.. There’s variation in sex ratio bias within India, and it is notable one […]
Open Thread – August 30th, 2010
I always forget about open threads! Anyone read any good books over the summer? Bad ones to avoid? I’ll have a review of The Tenth Parallel up soon, but after reading it, and several other books…I’m beginning to think that for most Americans they should stick to American history if they want to read history. […]
Readership survey soon (again)
Since I’ve moved to Discover Blogs I suspect my readership has changed a bit. I have the results of a previous survey from early in 2010, back when I was at ScienceBlogs, but haven’t posted on it in detail. I’ll try and do that in the next few days, but I also will put up […]
Using the General Social Survey
I’ve mentioned this before, but I thought it would be useful to repeat again. Many of my social science related posts use Berkeley’s web interface with the General Social Survey. Regularly people ask me in the comments details as to the variables, or a more explicit elaboration of the methods. First, this is a weblog, […]
Cartman on “gingers”
(here’s the context)
Jersey Shore nickname
What’s your Jersey Shore nickname? I like “The Prediction” for myself.
Hayek vs. Keynes
You’ve probably watched the Hayek vs. Keynes rap by now:Am the only one who was a little weirded out by the incongruity of John Maynard Keynes kickin’ it with the honeys in the back of the limo? It isn’t as if he was exactly on the down-low. He was a f…
Ibn Khaldun In Our Time
Ibn Khaldun on In Our Time. Excellent program. Khaldun’s assessment that the Mamluks of Egypt had developed a system of rule which was robust against the decay of asabiyyah was born out by 450 years of subsequent history (that is, until the liquidation…
Jersey Shore coming back
They’ve been signed for $10,000 per episode the next go around. Years ago Joel floated the idea of using Reality TV to test theories in social science. Paying the cast of Jersey Shore this much is going to mean that they’ll be under serious pressure to…
Proud to be red
A friend pointed me to this YouTube clip of a young red-haired man objecting to the term “ginger,” and the opprobrium he’s been subjected to since the South Park episode “Ginger Kids” popularized ideas such as the possibility that redheads have no soul…
Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept
What is the single best reference for refuting the notion that “race is only a social construct” for a non-scientist? I don’t know. (Suggestions welcome in the comments.) But Neven Sesardic (previously praised here) does a marvelous job in “Race: A Soc…
City squalor
I recently read The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found & Roman Passions: A History of Pleasure in Imperial Rome. Got me in the mind of thinking more about the history of city life, and what it was like in the past, and how it compares to my …