Charge the Large: United Airlines has just implemented a tough policy for fat people: If you’re too big to fit in a coach seat on a full plane, you’ll have to pay for a first-class seat or two adjacent coach seats. And if those options are sold out, you’ll be bumped from the flight. The […]

Several people have emailed me (and emails and forward are appreciated by the way) about two articles in The New York Times about IQ. IQ Harmed by Epilepsy Drug in Utero, which Steve’s already commented on. And the most emailed article currently, Nicholas Kristof’s How to Raise Our IQ. Some of you who have been […]

Risk-dependent reward value signal in human prefrontal cortex: When making choices under uncertainty, people usually consider both the expected value and risk of each option, and choose the one with the higher utility. Expected value increases the expected utility of an option for all individuals. Risk increases the utility of an option for risk-seeking individuals, […]

Multiple articles on personal genomics in The New England Journal of Medicine, Genomewide Association Studies and Human Disease, Common Genetic Variation and Human Traits, Genomewide Association Studies – Illuminating Biologic Pathways and Genetic Risk Prediction -Are We There Yet?. Nick Wade has a piece on these articles in The New York Times. Related: Preparing doctors […]

Genetic markers and population history: Finland revisited: The Finnish population in Northern Europe has been a target of extensive genetic studies during the last decades. The population is considered as a homogeneous isolate, well suited for gene mapping studies because of its reduced diversity and homogeneity. However, several studies have shown substantial differences between the […]

Joel Grus, who was a blogger at Gene Expression in 2002, and who is responsible for the banner graphic, has a weblog up promoting his book Your religion is false! (But so is everyone elses.). Labels: Religion

It turns out that the World Values Survey has a decent web interface, rather like the GSS. As an exercise I thought I would compare 4 nations when it came to religious attitudes, the United States, Sweden, South Korea and Japan. The United States because most readers are American. Sweden because it is the apotheosis […]

Less Wrong makes an analogy between Austrian economics and Calvinist presuppositionalism. I’ve turned off comments, so you can comment there. Especially see Robin Hanson’s comment. When I expressed skepticism of rationality, this is part of what I was talking about. Deduction gets you only so far, mostly because humans are stupid and imprecise. Labels: intellectual […]

Most readers are likely familiar with the classic “taming of the fox” experiment started by Dmitri Belyaev–starting with a wild silver fox, the group was able to quickly breed both a tame and hyper-aggressive line of animals. I was unaware that, concurrently with this experiment, that same group was also performing the same experiment on […]

Nature has a nice piece on the uses of alternative model organisms in various parts of biology. The focus is on the medical applications of these models, which I suppose is due to issues with funding. But the real message is that with novel genomics applications (mainly high-throughput sequencing), understanding the genetics of a wide […]

Tyler Cowen points me to this case against YouTube. In short, the user generated crap which dominates the system costs money to host and serve, but doesn’t offer much of a return in monetization. But it seems to me that this is just the problem of too much crap on a lot of these “social […]

There was some talk about Pygmies on the post about Jerry Coyne’s weblog. PLoS Genetics has a new paper up on the topic of Pygmy origins and their relationship to non-Pygmy populations. I’ve blogged it over at ScienceBlogs. Labels: Evolution, Genetics, Population genetics, Pygmies

Jonah Lehrer interviews Judith Rich Harris on the topic of The Nurture Assumption. Related but coincidently I pointed to new research on the investment and returns which adoptive parents get, and how the results are not surprising in a behavior genetic context. Labels: Behavior Genetics

Michael Vassar emailed me the following in response to my indicated skepticism of rationality: First, it seems to me that it is much easier to measure the aggregate power, across human history, of rationality, than to measure its power in individual manifestations. In aggregate, rational thought is what’s responsible for not living in mud huts […]

Part of the preface from Bryan Caplan’s next book is up.

Snowdrift game dynamics and facultative cheating in yeast: The origin of cooperation is a central challenge to our understanding of evolution…The fact that microbial interactions can be manipulated in ways that animal interactions cannot has led to a growing interest in microbial models of cooperation…and competition…For the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to grow on sucrose, […]

The concept of price-to-earnings ratio can be extended to anything that has an objective, fundamental value and a subjective value that people give to the thing — assuming these can be measured, however crudely. The ratio gets bigger when the price goes up while the thing is still generating the same amount of earnings, or […]

The gang at Overcoming Bias has a new project, Less Wrong: A Community Blog Devoted To Refining The Art Of Human Rationality. If you just laughed, you probably shouldn’t click through. Otherwise, you probably already know about it, but if you don’t, check it out. I’ll be honest and admit that I’ve become more skeptical […]

Steve’s latest column is data rich, Graduate School Admissions, Race, And The White Status Game.

A randomized trial of the effect of estrogen and testosterone on economic behavior: Existing correlative evidence suggests that sex hormones may affect economic behavior such as risk taking and reciprocal fairness. To test this hypothesis we conducted a double-blind randomized study. Two-hundred healthy postmenopausal women aged 50–65 years were randomly allocated to 4 weeks of […]