Harappa Ancestry Project, update
Last week I announced the Harappa Ancestry Project. It now has its own dedicate website, http://www.harappadna.org. Additionally, it has its own Facebook page. For Zack to get his own URL he needs about 10 more “likes,” so please like it! (…
The genomic heritage of French Canadians
Image Credit: Anirudh Koul
One of the great things about the mass personal genomic revolution is that it allows people to have direct access to their own information. This is important for the more than 90% of the human population which has sketchy ge…
Administrative notifications
Had to reinstall WordPress because of security problem over the last couple of days (iframe injection). I’ll slowly be getting the site back to normal look & feel wise.
Portlandia
The boss pointed me to this new series, Portlandia. I lived in Southeast near the Hawthorne neighborhood in 2002, so the following video brings back some funny memories….
Stop using the word “Caucasian” to mean white
About four years ago blogger emeritus RPM of evolgen brought into sharp relief an issue which has nagged me:
Caucasian, literally, refers to people native to the Caucasus, but it has become interchangeable with any number of ‘White’ populat…
Open Thread – January 22nd, 2011
Google is in the news, with Larry Page’s ascension. Generally when I hear people compare Larry Page and Sergey Brin it is Page who is described as the “Big Think” guy. But these guys didn’t always think big. Stupid Business Deci…
A quick RSS note….
Posts within the RSS feed will now be truncated. Since I occasionally write longer pieces, it is likely you’ll now have to “click through” to read the full post. If the ending of a post mystifies you, there is a good chance that it…
Friday Fluff – January 21st, 2011
1) First, a post from the past: Neandertal & H. sapiens sapiens interbreeding.
2) Weird search query of the week: “nicole kidman androgen insensitivity”. I thought she had a baby a few years ago? Say it ain’t so!
3) Comment of t…
The stupid rich and poor smart do exist
WORDSUM is a variable in the General Social Survey. It is a 10 word vocabulary test. A score of 10 is perfect. A score of 0 means you didn’t know any of the vocabulary words. WORDSUM has a correlation of 0.71 with general intelligence. In other w…
The rise and fall of great powers is stochastic
Long time readers know well my fascination with quantitative history. In particular, cliometrics and cliodynamics. These are fields which attempt to measure and model human historical phenomena and processes. Cliometrics is a well established field, in…
Friends & genes & heritability
A few people have inquired of the PNAS paper On sharing genes with friends. I avoided comment in part because I’m skeptical of the findings. So much behavior genomics just hasn’t panned out over the long term, and is probably susceptible t…
Promoting baby-bloggers
Today I received an email from an academic with whom I am acquainted about how to get a successful blog going. Obviously the main necessary condition is actually to keep plugging away. Though that’s not sufficient. Jason Goldman has a post up,…
The rise of genetic architecture
In science, like most things, one prefers simple over complex whenever possible. You keep adding variables until the explanatory juice starts hitting diminishing marginal returns. So cystic fibrosis is due to a mutation at one gene, and the disease exp…
Genetic Future has moved!
The day has come! Dr. Daniel MacArthur has finally gotten the stamp of approval from Tobias MacArthur, and Genetic Future is over at Wired, with all their other great science blogs. Since it can sometimes be a bit difficult to figure out where these di…
Introducing the Harappa Ancestry Project
A few weeks ago I hinted at a South Asian equivalent to Dodecad & Eurogenes BGA. It is now public and in the data collection phase. You can read the whole thing here: http://www.zackvision.com/weblog/2011/01/harappa-ancestry-project This is the feed: http://www.zackvision.com/feed/ If your ancestry is from these nations: Afghanistan Bangladesh Bhutan Burma India Iran Maldives Nepal Pakistan […]
Synthetic associations and all that
PLoS Biology has four items of great interest out today:
– Synthetic Associations Created by Rare Variants Do Not Explain Most GWAS Results
– Synthetic Associations Are Unlikely to Account for Many Common Disease Genome-Wide Association Signals
– Th…
ADMIXTURE vs. MDS, visualization is just visualization
Dienekes did another run of his data with K = 64. He posted a huge plot with the two largest dimensions of variation. He also posted an accompanying spreadsheet with the coordinates of where the Dodecad samples were. So I found my own position pretty q…
The “science diet”
Cell has an interesting piece, profiling four diets, Cell Culture: New Year’s Diets. I know many of the readers of this weblog take an interest in this area. In particular, many subscribe to the Paleo diet or are avid fans of Gary Taubes’ G…
Around the Web – January 18th, 2011
Yes, The Singularity is the Biggest Threat to Humanity.
Imitation and Social Cognition in Humans and Chimpanzees (I): Imitation, Overimitation, and Conformity. Doesn’t fall into the trap of either/or, where chimpanzees are qualitatively different…
Introducing the Harappa Ancestry Project
A few weeks ago I hinted at a South Asian equivalent to Dodecad & Eurogenes BGA. It is now public and in the data collection phase. You can read the whole thing here:
http://www.zackvision.com/weblog/2011/01/harappa-ancestry-project
This is the fee…