Monthly Archives: November 2012

Court to Decide if Human Genes Can Be Patented. So it seems a group of middle aged to very aged lawyers will decide the decades long Myriad Genetics saga. My position on this issue is simple: if you are going to award patents, they must be awarded to acts of engineering, not discoveries of science. […]

Read more

The American media often confuses the subtleties of international ethography. For example, there is a tendency to use the term “Uyghur” and “Chinese Muslim” interchangeably. This is misleading. The largest Muslim ethnic group in China are the Hui, who were … Continue reading

Read more

Update: You can leave comments now. But, you are forced to register with no third party login option. I know many of you don’t like the last, because you are emailing me about it. If the quantity of responses (<5, vs. the usually of ~50 for an “open thread”) on this thread is a measure I […]

Read more

Population Differentiation of Southern Indian Male Lineages Correlates with Agricultural Expansions Predating the Caste System: Previous studies that pooled Indian populations from a wide variety of geographical locations, have obtained contradictory conclusions about the processes of the establishment of the … Continue reading

Read more

Just been notified that comments from now until Wednesday  may not be saved when the system updates on Wednesday.

Read more

As many of you know, right before the election I made a $50 bet with Hank Campbell that Nate Silver would get at least 48 out of 50 states correct for the 2008 presidential election. I also got one of Hank’s readers to sign on to the same bet. Additionally, a few readers and Twitter followers […]

Read more

GeoCurrents on the political anomaly of the “Driftless” zone of the upper Mississippi (via GLPiggy). The anomaly has to do with the fact that this area is very white, very rural, and not in the orbit of a larger cosmopolitan urban area (e.g., “Greater Boston,” which extends into New Hampshire). The post goes into much […]

Read more

In the social circles that I move in (cosmopolitan, multiracial, liberal, well educated, etc. etc.) I don’t get asked the question “are you Indian?” or “Are you from India?” often. This is a big change from my youth. In the … Continue reading

Read more

Arnold Kling took a break from blogging, but is coming back. But under an explicit set of personal guidelines. About This Blog: I decided to go with my own blog, rather than return to EconLog, because I want to have total control over the blog content. I want to model a very particular style of […]

Read more

Following up my request a reader crunched the numbers (here is his data table) to show the association between supporting supporting Proposition 37 and voting for Barack Obama by county in California: From what I know this issue really polarized people in highly educated liberal enclaves in the state of California. Many of my Left […]

Read more

Following up my request a reader crunched the numbers (here is his data table) to show the association between supporting supporting Proposition 37 and voting for Barack Obama by county in California:

From what I know this issue really polarized peopl…

Read more

If you aren’t too stuffed, ask! I plan to get my simultaneous review of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t and Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society up over the holiday weekend, but I’m going to be focused on other things besides the blog obviously. […]

Read more

If you aren’t too stuffed, ask! I plan to get my simultaneous review of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t and Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society up…

Read more

Many months ago I told some of my friends that I’d run analyses of their 23andMe data, and report it back to them. A year ago I made the same promise to some of my readers. But life got in the way, and I’ve been very busy. I’m working on scripts to make the whole […]

Read more

Justin Wolfers & Betsy Stevenson have a piece up in Bloomberg, Crowds Are This Election’s Real Winners. In The Signal and the Noise Nate Silver has a chapter on Wolfers’ belief that prediction markets are superior to the sort of quantitative analysis that is his stock & trade. The belief isn’t based on an intuition. […]

Read more

Science is about “updating” with new information. But people are attached to their propositions, and shifts in paradigms can take a very long time, often dependent more on human lifespans than the constellation of the data. But please see this post by Luke Jostins’ over at Genomes Unzipped. He has “updated” his own view of […]

Read more

I’ve had a Kindle for a few years now. I read a lot on it. And yet I observed something recently: I’ve stopped going to the library much. This is a big deal for me…probably since the age of 7 I’ve clocked in at least one visit to the public library per week in my […]

Read more

Earlier today Erick Erickson of RedState put up a long and meandering post titled “I Believe and Am Thankful”. As you might infer from the title it elaborates Erickson’s own theological position, and his stance toward the expression of faith in the public square. Because I am an atheist I disagree with many aspects of […]

Read more

20/46
Razib Khan