Category Archives: Daily Data Dump

Detailed admixture analysis of West Eurasian populations (+ GenomesUnzipped individuals). Dienekes looks at the Genomes Unzipped guys in the context of Eurasian variation. He explains why he prefers bar plots of inferred ancestral quanta over PCA and MDS charts.
A World Upside Down for Greeks. “In Greece, small businesses — defined as stores or workshops […]

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Bob Guccione, Penthouse Founder, Dies at 79. Playboy has been in decline too.
HUMAN GENE COUNT: MORE THAN A CHICKEN, LESS THAN A GRAPE. Going under 20,000. Hey, it’s just a number, not the measure of a man.

Robert Heinlein, We Never Knew Ye. Fred Pohl’s blog is really interesting.
Only You. And You. And You. This is […]

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My DonorsChoose page. Compared to previous years I’m kind of under-performing. I haven’t done any PBS-like incentives before, but perhaps I should. For example, anyone who gives $250 is owed a post from me on a topic of their choice of at least 2,000 words excluding quotations within the next 3 months. Those are just […]

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Use Cash, Not Cards, To Buy Better Food? Another of the upsides of the “pain of paying.” I wonder if the effect will be transferred to debit cards as we move away from cash? Or, perhaps the effect is tied to the concreteness of a currency, and cash is just more concrete than debit cards. […]

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Elitism in the Senate. Harvard Law School:Tokyo University::Congress:Diet. Perusing The Almanac of American Politics makes it pretty clear that Harvard Law is way overrepresented.
Barbara Billingsley Dies. All icons shall pass.

Common variants at TRAF3IP2 are associated with susceptibility to psoriatic arthritis and psoriasis. Will this pan out in replication?
Am I partly Jewish? Testing ancestry hypotheses […]

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As you can see, I got the DonorsChoose widget to work. Here’s the Discover Blogs leader board. Sean Carroll et al. are “beating” me by an order of magnitude right now. Not that that’s the point….
It’s a Jersey Thing. New South Park episode. I noticed a bunch of references to The Lord of The Rings […]

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Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex. Is gay male sexual promiscuity a myth? “…in fact we found that just 2% of gay people have had 23% of the total reported gay sex, which is pretty crazy.”
Bloggers that deserve a wider readership. I second Andrew Gelman.

Fiber Meets Flavor in New Whole-Grain Pastas. I like whole-grain pastas!
Parallel Adaptation: […]

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Incumbents Polling Below 50 Percent Often Win Re-Election, Despite Conventional Wisdom. ‘By the way, the theory espoused by Mr. Kraushaar and others isn’t coming out of nowhere: there is solid evidence that it used to be true, 20 or 25 years ago. Back then, the undecideds in a race usually could be counted upon to […]

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Good morning WWW.
Richard Dawkins publicized the “We Are All Africans” t-shirt on Bill Maher’s show, which resulted in a major backlog of orders. The shirt is factually true. But the “Out of Africa” model is not as clean or simple as it would have been 10 years ago. Ironically Dawkins himself tipped his hand as […]

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Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery. It looks to be a combination of a virus and fungus. The paper itself is open access at PLoS ONE.
The READ: Washed Up. A panning of the attempts of Jersey Shore “cast” members to cash in on their fame. I think the reason that JS was such an […]

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Epigenome effort makes its mark. “This week, the Roadmap Epigenomics Project, a US$170-million effort to identify and map those marks — known collectively as the human epigenome — begins its first comprehensive data release.”
At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture. The story of executives taking home millions while the ship goes down is […]

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Urban and rural differences in mortality and causes of death in historical Poland. Unfortunately good demographic data on urban vs. rural death rates only date from the early modern era, but here in this Polish data set from the 19th and early 20th century you see the large urban > small urban > rural rank […]

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I don’t think I’ll post about Mormons this week. Alas, less traffic.
Y chromosomes of Vlax Roma. Is it a coincidence that all these Roma genetics papers are coming out at the same time that the Roma are at the center of E.U. politics? Probably.
Not So Hidden Influences. Christopher Hitchens asks “Is it so offensive to […]

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Should you go to an Ivy League School? “Clearly, going to a top-ranked school seems to deliver far higher earnings at age 28 than poorer ranked schools. In fact, the relationship is highly non-linear. Contrary to what you may have heard (“All top-ranked schools are the same”); it in fact looks like the difference between […]

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A Widespread Chromosomal Inversion Polymorphism Contributes to a Major Life-History Transition, Local Adaptation, and Reproductive Isolation. Edmund Yong has already written this paper up. Sheril Kirshenbaum offers up her thoughts, stimulated by personal communication with the first author.
Inferring the Dynamics of Diversification: A Coalescent Approach. The title is more forbidding than the topic: “Applying […]

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Just a minor note: if you want an admin update on this weblog, go to my twitter account. You don’t need to subscribe, as you might not be interested in all my random interactions with other bloggers. But if I don’t post for a few days, please don’t email me or post a comment in […]

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Wow, it sure feels like summer!
No one cares about your blog (part 2). “The thing is – it’s just writing, isn’t it? Talking extensively about science blogging is like having intense discourses about what you can do with pen and paper. “Should we staple all our pieces of paper together, or only the ones on […]

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Nobel-winning brain researcher retracts two papers. Looks like there’s the typical blame-it-on-the-Asian going on here, so perhaps this won’t blow up.
In Our Time is back. This week: Imaginary Numbers.
“200 genes potentially associated with academic performance in schoolchildren”. Most genes of small effect. We’ll see. Don’t get too excited yet, you might be disappointed.
Through the […]

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Freshman Weight Gain: Women With Heavy Roommates Gain Less, Study Finds. I guess the model makes sense, but it really makes one wonder about the power of prior expectations about these sorts of things. There just so many plausible stories for any given set of data.
Why Does Spicy Food Taste Hot? The feeling of “heat” […]

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Price’s Second Equation. David B continues his technical review of the Price Equation.
Selective pressures for accurate altruism targeting: evidence from digital evolution for difficult-to-test aspects of inclusive fitness theory. “Our investigations also revealed that evolution did not increase the altruism level when all green beard altruists used the same phenotypic marker.” Read a university press […]

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Razib Khan