Month: October 2011
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Harappa Ancestry Project at 10 months
It’s been 10 months since Zack Ajmal first contacted me about the possibility of the Harappa Ancestry Project. I was of two minds. On the one hand I did think there was a major problem with undersampling some regions of South Asia. But, it seemed that the 1000 Genomes would fix that soon enough. As…
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Imagine a world with ubiquitous DNA tests….
I thought of that when stumbling upon this story of Spanish babies being sold to adoptive parents, while the biological parents were told that the baby had died: “The father of a friend of mine admitted to him that both he and I had been bought from a priest and a nun from Zaragoza after…
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The history of the world!
My post from last week, Relative angels and absolute demons, got a lot of circulation. Interestingly I received several emails from self-described lurkers who asked me for recommendations on world history, with a particular thought to rectify deficiencies in non-European history. These were people who were not looking for exceedingly abstruse monographs. Below are some…
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In which states do grandchildren live at home?
I recently noted that the SDA Archive has an American Community Survey interface. The ACS has huge sample sizes because the US government can afford to do extensive surveys. And naturally you find some really interesting facts. For example, there’s a variable which tells you about the presence of grandchildren in the household. In some…
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Shades of preference in storytelling
Humans seem to have a strong bias toward narratives. We like stories. This is obvious when you read sports columns. Most of the time there’s really no substantive value-add. If you want substance, just check box scores. But we want a story. So sports columnists give us a story. Usually something mildly counter-intuitive, general platitudes…
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India’s demographic dividend and despair
Amid population boom, India hopes for ‘demographic dividend’ but fears disaster. The article is OK, but I feel as usual it doesn’t do a good enough job highlighting the huge variation in fertility across India the nation-state. Tamil Nadu has the fertility of Northern Europe while Uttar Pradesh is like West Africa. Unfortunately the “demographic…
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From simple to complex
Check out the the prose in this piece, How to Be South Asian in America. (Not.). No matter the substance the overly wordy critical stance in these sorts of periodicals always amuses me….
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Australia on fire
Fascinating, Orbital cycles, Australian lake levels, and the arrival of aborigines: But the other big feature is that the lake-filling events that occurred after 50,000 years ago were much smaller than those which occurred before. Climactically, the conditions 10,000 years ago should have been the same as the conditions 115,000 years ago. But the lake…
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Indian higher education as a redistribution scheme
Squeezed Out in India, Students Turn to U.S.: “The problem is clear,” said Kapil Sibal, the government minister overseeing education in India, who studied law at Harvard. “There is a demand and supply issue. You don’t have enough quality institutions, and there are enough quality young people who want to go to only quality institutions.”…
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The future is not impossible
Alexander Dumas, of mixed race One of the reasons I post regularly on the genetics of mixed-race people and their physical appearance is that I don’t think the media does a good job. There’s a “freak show” element which titillates but does not illuminate. This in a period in the United States where the absolute…
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Is publishing your genotype unethical?
Larry Moran thinks that I had to ask my parents and siblings for permission before publishing my genotype. Interestingly, most of his readers seems to disagree with Larry on this, so I won’t offer my own response in any detail. They’re handling it well enough. I would like to add though that obviously this isn’t…
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Is publishing your genome unethical?
Larry Moran thinks that I had to ask my parents and siblings for permission before publishing my genotype. Interestingly, most of his readers seems to disagree with Larry on this, so I won’t offer my own response in any detail. They’re handling it well enough. I would like to add though that obviously this isn’t…
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The browsers you use
In the comments below Clark misunderstood the browser data I was reporting. It wasn’t from this website, but another. Here’s the Google Analytics on the browser/OS combination for this website:
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Remember Egypt?
Church Protests in Cairo Turn Deadly: At least 19 people were killed Sunday when a protest by Egyptian Christians over the burning of a church escalated into rioting against military rule, with some protesters crushed to death by military vehicles and violence reaching levels not seen since the uprising that overthrew the president in February.…
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Relative angels and absolute demons
My post below defending Steve Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature elicited some responses on twitter. Robert Lee Hotz finds it odd that I defend a book I haven’t read. My logic here is simple: the outline of the argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature has been presented in shorter form. John…
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Browser share via Google Trends
I use Google Trends a lot, but I don’t necessarily know if it’s telling me anything useful. So I decided to see if it might correlate well with browser share data. I know that W3Schools has been tracking their own stats for years, so I took their data from September of 2008 to September of…
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openSNP
Some of the people behind the openSNP website have been in touch with me for a while. As I put my own genotype into the public domain I’m obviously pretty well disposed toward this sort of thing. You should check them out if you haven’t before, they just moved to a beefier server. Here’s what…
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DonorsChoose 2011
Since 2006 I’ve been participating in DonorsChoose (thanks to timely reminders from Janet Stemwedel whenever life got too busy for me to keep track of anything). So I finally set up a page where you can donate to various life science related projects, with a bias toward genetics. Of course you don’t have to donate…
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But peace does reign!
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is finally out. I can’t read it in the near future because of time constraint, but I’m heartened that a public intellectual of Steven Pinker’s stature is finally making people more aware of the fact that in some ways the world is better than it…
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Saturday Stuff – October 8th, 2011
1) Post from the past, One Nation Under Gods, and Mitt Romney, over before it began. 2) Weird search query of the week: “false jewish genetic studies racist.”he 3) Comment of the week: Frank Sweet’s “Legal History of the Color Line” is a good read on this topic. One of Sweet’s arguments is that black…