Daniel Koretz of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education took the lecture notes from his course, “Methods of Educational Measurement,” and turned it into a book: Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. It’s readable, filled with funny anecdotes, and contains absolutely nothing that will be new to regular GNXP readers. But because Koretz takes […]

A rumor I’ve been hearing a lot lately, although I recall hearing it as early as 2003, is that “porn is becoming / has become mainstream” — or that it’s ubiquitous, unavoidable, the wallpaper of our culture. Like most alarmist ideas spread by the innumerate — failing schools, oral sex rampant among teenagers, the coming […]

A little while back, I mentioned a paper demonstrating the rapid evolution of a gene duplicate as it was selected for targeting to a novel subcellular location. The same group has apparently been following up a number of these stories–see this new paper on another example of a retrocopy of a gene acquiring a novel […]

Most of you have heard about the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation (which, more accurately should probably be termed the Catholic Reformation). But after posting earlier on the parameters which affect the shape and constraints of religious change, I thought it was important to mention something: in the second half the 16th century Catholicism was very […]

The Daily Star in Bangladesh has published a profile I wrote of Reihan Salam.

Another dopamine-related fear and anxiety related gene, COMT Genetic Variation Affects Fear Processing: Psychophysiological Evidence. ScienceDaily with the predigested form. Quick points, 1) It looks like the SNP in question does show some variation world wide. Europeans seem to have a higher frequency of the MET/MET genotype than Africans, while Asians tend to be lowest. […]

Our intuition of space and time is to perceive them logarithmically: we place a bunch of tick-marks near “here” and “now,” and only measure orders of magnitude as we move outward. The linear scale used by scientists places a tick-mark at evenly spaced intervals. For example, between “here” and 100 miles away, humans may have […]

Dienekes has a long post on a new paper, Correlation between Genetic and Geographic Structure in Europe. I took the figure and decided to just label the geographic provenance of the primary clusters which emerged when one plotted them along the two largest dimensions of variation (Y axis is 1st component, X is 2nd component) […]

Peter Turchin’s Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall showed up a little sooner than I’d thought it would, and it was an even quicker read than War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires (see review). There isn’t really anything new verbal in the more technical treatment, but the book is […]

Tyler points me to a new paper coming out in PNAS, Male dominance rarely skews the frequency distribution of Y chromosome haplotypes in human populations. It isn’t on the site yet, but New Scientist has a write up: To determine whether dominance could last more than a couple generations, Watkins and a team of anthropologists […]

This week’s To the Best of Our Knowledge is on Post-Modernism. The whole episode is worth a listen, but one of the segments is with Christian Lander of Stuff White People Like. Unlike most of my friends I haven’t generally found the website that funny,* but Lander is actually pretty amusing in the interview. I […]

Yesterday assman recommended Peter Turchin’s oeuvre as a nice theoretical overview of world history, in particular Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall. Unfortunately it was checked out at the library, so I’ve ordered it, but his more popularly oriented War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires was available and I […]