Month: April 2012
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DNA Replication
Most of you have probably seen this stylized graphic somewhere along the away (I think it was on PBS at some point). But it’s still cool….
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Bangladeshi labor conflict
Killing of Bangladeshi Labor Organizer Signals an Escalation in Violence. I have pretty much zero insight to offer, aside from this anecdote: even my wealthy uncle complains that servants are much harder to find today. They’re all working. Not to be a Marxist, but his sort of class conflict is an unfortunate side effect of…
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The way we were
I found out today that a private equity firm has purchased the majority of the Yellow Pages from AT&T. Which prompts me to ask: when was the last time you used the yellow pages? A pay phone? In a similar vein, Google And The Death Of Getting Lost….
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The way we were
I found out today that a private equity firm has purchased the majority of the Yellow Pages from AT&T. Which prompts me to ask: when was the last time you used the yellow pages? A pay phone? In a similar vein, Google And The Death Of Getting Lost….
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Understanding across cultures
One of the non-science aspects of this weblog which I’ve been addressing over the past 10 years is attempting to get a grip upon cultural variation. There are two major dimensions in terms of the problem. One is positive, in that people don’…
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What do you think about group selection?
I just received a review copy of E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth. One of the reasons why this book is “hot” is that Wilson has recently been revisiting the “levels of selection” debates, and significantly downg…
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Another look at mtDNA
The new article in The American Journal of Human Genetics, A “Copernican” Reassessment of the Human Mitochondrial DNA Tree from its Root, is open access, so you should check it out. The discussion gets to the heart of the matter: Supported by a con…
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Baby tossing
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Fluff & more
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Doctors and life expectacy
A friend pointed me to the following infographic on the concentration of doctors per county. The orange represents “very high need,” and dark blue “very low need.” Now let’s compare it to life expectancy by county:
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Yoga and religion
In Queens, Seeking to Clear a Path Between Yoga and Islam: As a community activist in Queens, Muhammad Rashid has fought for the rights of immigrants held in detention, sought the preservation of local movie theaters, and held a street fair to promote diversity. But few of those causes brought him anywhere near as much…
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Understanding ethnic biased sex slavery
Recently on the NPR show Here and Now I was introduced to the concept of ‘loverboys.’ This is a specific phenomenon in the Netherlands were older males target schoolgirls, and entrap them in relationships where these girls are prostituted out (there are repeated references to group sex). Even before it got to that part I…
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Protestant fundamentalists still reject evolution
Recently over at bloggingheads.tv Matt Lewis broached the issue of science, religion, and politics. Being outside of his bailiwick Lewis seemed to be under some misimpressions. First, he seemed to think that most political liberals were not theists. Th…
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Genes are probability, not destiny
On my Facebook feed some geneticist friends of mine were passing around an article in The New York Times, Study Says DNA’s Power to Predict Illness Is Limited. The article is based on a paper, The Predictive Capacity of Personal Genome Sequencing. In…
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Game of Thrones is racist!
I wasn’t going to post more today, in light of the April Fool’s joke I played on you. But here’s me going at it again. Lots of stuff I wouldn’t normally stumble upon hits me via Pulse, and today I see this in Salon, Is “Game o…