Mathematical models of contagious diseases usually look at how people flow between three categories: Susceptible, Infected, and Recovered. In some of these models, the immunity of the Recovered class may become lost over time, putting them back into the Susceptible class. This means that if an epidemic flares up and dies down, it may do […]

In case you don’t know, the Cognition & Culture group blog is of some interest. One of the contributors is Dan Sperber, who I interviewed a few years ago. Sperber et al. work within the naturalistic paradigm in cultural anthropology. I like to think of it as anthropology that comes not to praise gibberish, but […]

Rod Dreher has a post about the The problem of pornography. My question: how is porn fundamentally different from fantasizing? Is it because of the shift toward bizarre fetish porn which rescales your perceptions of normal? I’m generally skeptical of anecdotal arguments about how porn is “changing everything.” Because of my interest in Transhumanism and […]

More results for the WVS 2005. I added some demographic data by province as well. I want to pool the “northern” and “southern” provinces soon. I’d appreciate Chinese readers input on the categories if there isn’t something straightforward. Labels: China

In 1990, Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis wrote an article detailing the history of the now standard QWERTY keyboard layout vs. its main competitor, the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. (Read it here for free, and read through the rest of Liebowitz’s articles at his homepage.) In brief, the greatest results in favor of the DSK came […]

The comments below in regards to Chinese regionalism were informative. But for those of us without a more direct connection with China works can be wanting, so I thought looking at the World Values Survey would be interesting as there is a regional breakdown within it. Below the fold are a series of barplots where […]

Robert Frank is promoting his idea that Charles Darwin will become more important than Adam Smith as an intellectual forebear of future economics in The New York Times. That is fine as it goes but I suspect that the bigger issue in the sciences of humanity is that there will be problems with relying on […]

Update: After the comments I’m rather sure that though the WSJ piece was well written and generally right on specific facts (excepting the fact that Sun Yat-sen was not born outside of China as the author claimed) it is grossly misleading. I have no idea if the author had some agenda to push, but it […]

As nation gains, ‘overweight’ is relative: The little number on the tag on a pair of pants that indicates size can mean a lot to a person, and retailers know it. That’s why, in recent years, as the American population has become generally more overweight, brands from the luxury names to the mass retail chains […]

While skimming today’s UK newspapers I noticed this report in the Daily Telegraph on research into the evolution of ‘tit-for-tat’ reciprocal altruism. I haven’t checked out the original research, but thought I would post the story for general interest.

So Francis Collins, as expected, will be nominated to be the next head of NIH. From the NY Times: [P]raise for Dr. Collins, 59, was not universal or entirely enthusiastic. Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, called Dr. Collins’s selection a “reasonable choice.” I think that’s about right–this is […]

Chromosomal Problems Affect Nearly All Human Embryos: Discovery May Explain Low Fertility Rates In Humans: For the first time, scientists have shown that chromosomal abnormalities are present in more than 90% of IVF embryos, even those produced by young, fertile couples. Ms Evelyne Vanneste, a PhD student in the Centre for Human Genetics and the […]

Anti-Irish caricatures, the hypothesis that some races contain little intra-race variation, and how economists keep arguing–normatively and positively–for the rough equality of humankind: It’s all in Peart and Levy’s book The Vanity of the Philosopher. The book is highly recommended to GNXPers with any interest in the complicated historical relationship between genetics and social science. […]

Econlog has been having a running debate between Bryan Caplan and Arnold Kling on the relationship between politics and personality. Labels: Behavior Genetics

Here is a case for Razib to add to his collection of families showing genetic segregation for skin colour and other biodiverse traits. The mother is white and the father mixed-race, while the three children are said to range in appearance from black to white. Actually two of them look to me predictably mixed-race, but […]

There’s a post on porn and rape that’s making the rounds (among the blogs I read, at Half Sigma and Roissy so far). The author claims to show that a greater availability of pornography is associated with lower rape rates. But it is not — nor are the two directly related. They simply appear unrelated […]

Nicholas Wade (guesting posting for John Tierney) points to a set of papers in this week’s Nature reporting large genome-wide association studies of schizophrenia. The main upshot of the papers is that variants in the MHC region influences susceptibility to schizophrenia. This region influences susceptibility to a number of autoimmune diseases, so the association is […]

Enjoy the fireworks & the heat.

I was listening to Marketplace the other day and Kevin Hassett delivered a commentary combining economics with a revisionist evaluation of the American Revolution. Hassett’s argument seems to be that the Revolution, which was notionally predicated on taxation without representation, will in the long run be a historical blip of no consequence as the United […]

In the new issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reviews some book about using the appeal of FREE to grow your business. This is supposed to apply most strongly to information, so that as more and more of a firm’s product / service consists of information, the more it can use the appeal of […]