Planning a cross-country trip, and I just noticed that Jiwire has fewer wi-fi hotspots listed in Michigan than Imbler. Now, that doesn’t totally surprise me even taking into account the population differential (10 million vs. 3.5). But, out of curiousity I did the following: took the population of the state, divided it by the number of wi-fi spots listed in Jiwire (so, I got the number of people per hotspot), and then divided these numbers by the lowest value (so 1 would be the “state” with the fewest people per hotspot).

Anyway, I put “state” in quotations because Washington D.C. came out on top. Here are the top five (the second value is the raw ratio while the third is the relative measure):

DC 3912 1
WA 7801 1.99
OR 11985 3.06
CA 12053 3.08
CO 12266 3.14

Bottom five:

KY 52793 13.49
AR 60571 15.48
MS 68602 17.53
AL 69242 17.7
WV 181035 46.27

West Virginia is pretty wack. But, I believe it was also the last state to get a Starbucks. Below is the full list. Excel file with all data (and a chart) here (though really, take 30 minutes and you can get it from the Census and Jiwire too!).

DC 3912 1
WA 7801 1.99
OR 11985 3.06
CA 12053 3.08
CO 12266 3.14
ID 13801 3.53
NV 14941 3.82
AZ 15165 3.88
NY 17043 4.36
IL 17405 4.45
TX 17983 4.6
CT 18049 4.61
GA 18361 4.69
MA 18774 4.8
FL 19231 4.92
WY 19279 4.93
HI 21683 5.54
UT 21773 5.57
MN 22190 5.67
KS 22508 5.75
NM 22586 5.77
VA 22939 5.86
MD 25387 6.49
NC 28991 7.41
SC 29001 7.41
RI 29086 7.43
VT 29481 7.54
MO 31869 8.15
NE 32817 8.39
WI 32966 8.43
SD 34741 8.88
ND 35213 9
PA 35330 9.03
NJ 35549 9.09
LA 36261 9.27
OK 36578 9.35
TN 37689 9.63
MT 38234 9.77
NH 39021 9.97
DE 43026 11
IA 43034 11
OH 43154 11.03
MI 43262 11.06
IN 45224 11.56
AK 46344 11.85
ME 50220 12.84
KY 52793 13.49
AR 60571 15.48
MS 68602 17.53
AL 69242 17.7
WV 181035 46.27

Posted by razib at 02:52 AM

What are the acceptable boundaries for the premise of a reality TV show? How much do newly pushed boundaries in TV standards influence the acceptance in society of the underlying TV concept. Judge for yourself.

The TV executives who brought us live sex on Big Brother are planning an even more depraved reality show – in which 1,000 men compete to father a child who is then created live in a laboratory. In Make Me A Mum, a woman will take fertility drugs to produce eggs which will then be harvested under anaesthetic, with one egg selected.

Then the 1,000 men will be whittled down to two – one selected by the mother-to-be on the basis of sex appeal, wealth, fitness and personality, the other by experts for genetic compatibility and quality of sperm.

The series will culminate in a bizarre ‘sperm race’ in which the egg is fertilised live on television. The producers plan to use technology to see which man’s sperm reaches the egg first.

Posted by TangoMan at 05:39 PM

Some Indian immigrants to the US are now returning to India and bringing US culture with them. This New York Times article reports:

Others have been drawn back by the tug of family and the almost atavistic pull of roots, or pushed by diminishing job opportunities in Silicon Valley and tightening Americans visa regulations.

Many of them are returning to communities like Palm Meadows, whose developer, the Adarsh Group, advertises “beautiful homes for beautiful people.” The liberalization of India’s state-run economy over the last 13 years has spawned a suburban culture of luxury housing developments, malls and sport utility vehicles that is also enabling India to compete for its Americanized best and brightest.

Godless comments:

A couple of thoughts…

Concerning brain drain: From our perspective, it makes sense to take the best minds from the developing world. The people arguing against this are usually those afraid of competition – not the consumers enjoying cheaper and better chips and software.

Furthermore, the secondary “welfare of the home country” argument doesn’t fly. The fact is that the countries most reputed to suffer from “brain drain” in the last few decades are the ones that are booming today: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, India, and China.

Lastly, only totalitarian states prevent emigration (leaving the country). Those people aren’t owned by the state. Should we have turned back the Russian defectors who came here during the Cold War? We could indeed prevent *immigration* of highly skilled engineers and physicists, but why would we want to? Every stat shows that they benefit the economy and rapidly integrate. Over half of US engineering doctorates are awarded to foreign students.
The contribution these engineers made to the US wasn’t a “short term” gain. The vast majority of those guys are still in the country – and the 90’s internet boom wouldn’t have happened without Indian and Chinese engineers. See Anna Lee Saxenian‘s stats on the proportion of Silicon Valley companies run or staffed by immigrant engineers:

[By 1998], ethnic Chinese and Indian immigrants run nearly 25% of the high-tech companies started in the Valley since 1980, according to the study by Anna Lee Saxenian, a professor of regional development at the University of California, Berkeley. The 2,775 immigrant-run companies had total sales of $16.8 billion and more than 58,000 employees last year. Ms. Saxenian says those figures likely understate the contributions of immigrant entrepreneurs, because many companies they started are run by native-born Americans.

Those figures are six years old, and don’t account for all the other companies staffed if not run by immigrant engineers. I remember seeing that the fraction is higher today (around 33%), but I need to find the source.

If these guys start software companies in India – fine. Competition is good for the consumer. The idea that we shouldn’t trade with the rest of the world or that it would even be possible to keep all the software innovation in the US is foolish. Would the millions of American auto consumers – as opposed to the thousands in the US auto industry – be better or worse off without the challenge from Japanese cars? The question answers itself.
Finally, I think the whole point of the article is that immigration law makes it difficult for skilled immigrants to gain residence – time limits on H1B’s with master’s degrees in CS are a reason most of them have gone back. In contrast, Bush + co. want to grant amnesty to millions of English-illiterate non-high school grads who are illegally in the country.

As I’ve said before, the immigration issue does not benefit from grouping legal computer programmers and illegal day laborers. The only thing they have in common is that they’re nonwhite.

Posted by TangoMan at 03:34 PM

How much control do you have over your genes? Emerging trends would seem to indicate that whatever control you currently possess is being steadily eroded.

Recall the case of John Moore who sued the The University of California because following a treatment for a rare cancer a university affiliated physician repeatedly induced Mr. Moore to travel to his office in order to withdraw blood and tissue samples with the intent to profit from the cell lines that were being grown. Eventually a cell line based on T-lymphocytes was established and subsequently patented all without Moore’s knowledge.

The court judgement makes clear that Moore was not entitled to ownership of his DNA.

Now in Britain, the police are allowed to keep DNA samples from suspects who have been cleared of the crime for which they stood accused.

The law lords dismissed two test cases brought by people who wanted their DNA samples destroyed once it had become clear that they would not be facing criminal charges.

Lord Brown, one of the five law lords who ruled yesterday, said he could not see why anybody should object to their samples being kept by the police.

The only logical basis for such an objection was that it would make it easier for the police to detect them if they offended in the future. But that could hardly be a legitimate objection, he said.

What this high court ruling seems to ignore is that property owners don’t need to justify their case for upholding lawful use of their property. Of course, if the property does not lawfully belong to the plaintiff then the case moves in a different direction.

The first appeal was brought by a boy from Sheffield who was 11 when he was arrested for attempted robbery in 2001. After his acquittal, he asked for his fingerprints and samples to be destroyed.

It’s interesting that this first case involved a minor for in the normal case of events one would expect his criminal record and his charge to be sealed for they would reflect on his reputation, which is something he would have control over, but because the DNA doesn’t belong to the young man, his case is dismissed.

Lord Rodger said too much weight had been attached to what was seen as a greater cultural resistance in Britain to the collection of data about individuals than existed in other European countries.

So, privacy issues and property rights can be rationalized away by appeal to the practices in other jurisdictions. Those who think that American legal tradition will be a bulwark against such reasoning shoud consider the growing appeal to comparativism in Supreme Court rulings.

The trajectory that DNA rights seems to be following is the same as that of plant genetic material which were classed as the common heritage of mankind and remarkably, the UN treaty conferring this status came into effect on June 29, 2004 to little notice.

I won’t find it too surprising that soon you’ll have no claims whatsoever to your genetic material, and that since every use of it will in some fashion or another be dependent on patentable intellectual property procedures, your DNA will simply be grist for the mill and the information that is extracted will be divorced from the DNA.

Visions of a brave new world? Perhaps.

Godless comments:

Along the same lines, check this out:

In a case that bioethicists say could have wide implications, the state Superior Court invalidated a verbal agreement between a woman and her sperm donor and ordered him to pay child support for twin boys born nearly 10 years ago.

A three-judge panel said the deal between Joel L. McKiernan and Ivonne V. Ferguson that he would not be obligated for any child support was “on its face” a valid contract, but it was unenforceable due to “legal, equitable and moral principles.” Previous state appellate rulings had determined that parents may not bargain away a child’s right to support…

The twins were born prematurely in August 1994. Ferguson filed for support nearly five years later.

McKiernan has been paying up to $1,520 a month in support since losing the Dauphin County case. Since the twins were born, he has married, had two children and moved to the Pittsburgh area.

Our cells, our lives? Somehow methinks NOW isn’t going to stand up for this guy.

Posted by TangoMan at 11:20 PM

Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution has an interesting post on this story about a group of disabled students suing for more time to complete their MCAT tests.

Alex notes:

Do you remember the episode on ER where a patient was rushed into the hospital with severe head trauma and Doctor Green had to go to a quiet room to think about what to do? No, me neither.

(Not every doctor works in an ER but even general practioniers must think quickly if they expect to see enough patients to earn a good living.)

Even more shocking than the lawsuit is the response of the American Association of Medical Colleges. Instead of making the obviously correct argument that time is a legitimate testing hurdle for a physician they argue that the students involved are not disabled enough! If only they had failed more of their undergraduate classes then the AAMC would give them special accomodation. Really, I’m not making this up.

Posted by TangoMan at 12:14 PM

The biggest problem with teleological history is that it leads to sloppy thinking. It causes the historian to torture the facts as he has them so that they will fit into the Procrustean bed of the March of History that he is thinking of. From the WWII until very recently, the story of anti-Semitism was often looked to be a teleological narrative culminating in the Holocaust. This approach is changing, especially among medievalists/early modern historians who are now working to make the distinction between religiously motivated anti-Judaism and racially motivated anti-Semitism. Such a distinction may seem like a trifling point, but it is in fact quite significant. To the anti-Semite, the Jew is the “eternal Jew” forever an alien parasite that can never be assimilated. The religiously motivated anti-Jewish polemic, though, allows the Jew to convert and be accepted into the Church/ummah.

The two modes of thought came into direct contact in several parts of Europe during WWII, moste especially when the extreme right wing Catholic government of Slovakia forced its Jews to accept Baptism, but then reacted in horror when the Nazi government ordered them killed anyway. Religious anti-Judaism was dominant prior to the Enlightenment, while racial anti-Judaism didn’t pick up steam until the 19th century.

I should of course point out that, the further down from the intelligentsia that the two ideas percolate, the less daylight one sees in between positions. Even so, the distinction is still fairly significant, and even when Catholic Spain went after Jewish converts, it did so because the converts were suspected of not having fully converted.

For this reason, it sets my teeth on edge whenever I hear about “anti-Semitism in the Islamic world.” The feelings that the Islamic world has towards the Jewish state, while to some degree nationalistic have, for at least a generation, been primarily religious. Indeed, over the course of the religious revival underway in the Islamic world, the Palestinian issue has become more and more a religious issue, so that one can watch the ideology of the anti-Israel terrorist groups gradually change over the decades.

My point? Well, it is primarily that even a HAMAS or Hizbollah member would accept Ariel Sharon as a fellow believer if he were to acknowledge his error and convert to Islam, though they might of course be suspicion that his conversion was not sincere. It is fairly important that Westerners understand what they are dealing with, since attempting to treat religious anti-Judaism as racist anti-Semitism leads to the wrong approach being taken. Moreover, sloppy terminology regarding such an issue also leads to sloppy thinking.

I have a tendency to harp on this point, but it is an important one. When irreligious people are trying to understand religious people, they ought to at least make an effort to understand the religious people on their own terms rather than trying to cram them into our pre-held templates.

Much of the Middle East, Africa, and parts of South America are strongly religious. And while it is often true that religious and secular concerns overlap, they very often do not. If the secular west is going to have any hope in dealing with those parts of the rest of the world that are strongly religious, its intelligentsia is going to have to actually have a clue as to what is going on.

Posted by schizmatic at 09:59 AM

Straight guys find a way to turn everything into a competition….- slob on Straight Plan for the Gay Man Posted by razib at 11:47 AM

I just realized something. Years back I read that the diversity of sects and movements increases the closer you get to the “center” of the Muslim world. Here you can see a map of Sunni-Shia distribution. Note that at the antipodes there seem to be few Shia. In fact, the frequency of Sunnis seems to be >99% in the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), while almost all Indonesian and Malaysian Muslims are at least nominally Shafi Sunnis. As you move toward the heart of the Muslim world, there is an increase in the percentage of Shia and a proliferation of movements hard to put into a box [1].

This me struck as rather similar to the pattern you see when you have a far flung population that spreads from an initial region of habitation, that is, the highest diversity of lineages is found at the origin. This is the result of neutral mutations accumulating in a region where a lineage has been present for many generations (while regions colonized later have a subset of the original diversity, that is, they go through a founder effect or a bottleneck). The implication from analogy is that the diversity of Muslim groups in the center is not the result of local conditions as much as the reality that more time has accrued to establish heresy than in the periphery. I could be wrong, and can think of many counter-arguments, but I thought the idea was weird enough to throw out…. (it jives with my conception of religious dogmas and creeds as being randon coalitional markers that emerge periodically from the minds of rational thinkers “gone wild.” Now and then theyt stick for whatever reason)

Hell, we know that baby name frequencies float like randomly as if in genetic drift.

Minor addendum: Note that I am suggestiong a mutational random genetic drift model for creeds and mantras and what not, not the basics of religious experience which I think are pretty universal and constrained by practicality and evolution. The reply would be that creeds and mantras have strong functional roles.

[1] For those who want specifics, for example: the Ibadis dominate Oman, a splinter group from the Khajirites. The Zaydis are prominent in Yemen, who rest at an equilibrium between Sunni & Shia. In Saudi Arabia you have a Salafi elite and an oppressed Shia minority in the east. In Iraq, you have a split between Sunni and Shia. In Syria, you have an Alawite minority whose Muslim status is in dispute. In Turkey you have the Alevis who are similar to Alawites. In Lebanon and its environs you have the Druze, who are even more peculiar than Alawites. Not that there aren’t deviant movements in other parts of the Muslim world, but, I sense that the further you get from Mecca, the less likely this seems to be….

Posted by razib at 09:18 AM

One thing I’ve noted is that there is a lot of data out there on religion in America, but pronouncements by many in the public eye seem decoupled from the reality. For example, from the American Religious Identification Survey:

Looking at patterns of religious change from this perspective, the evidence points as much to the rejection of faith as to the seeking of faith among American adults. Indeed, among those who previously had no religion, just 5% report current identification with one or another of the major religions.

Some groups such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses appear to attract a large number of converts (“in-switchers”), but also nearly as large a number of apostates (“out-switchers”). It is also interesting to note that Buddhists also fall into this category of what one might call high-turnover religious groups.

Here is the table that goes with this text (sorry for the small type):

So all this talk of a “religious revival” that you hear in the popular press is a load of crap, polarization might be correct, but inspirational profiles of those seeking spirituality makes a hell of a lot better copy than of those who lost faith. Additionally, there are those on the Left and the Right who want to promote the idea of a religious revival for political and personal reasons.

Posted by razib at 12:24 PM

This week’s Spectator magazine (UK) has a lead article by Anthony Browne, a well known London Times journalist, arguing that: “Islam really does want to conquer the world. That’s because Muslims, unlike many Christians, actually believe they are right, and that their religion is the path to salvation for all”.

Nothing very surprising here, at least for GNXP readers, but Browne has some good quotes from influential Muslim clerics.

The Spectator is available online here (free registration may be required).

Addendum from Razib: Try username: and password: publicgnxp. Also, note this subheading, “Islam really does want to conquer the world. That’s because Muslims, unlike many Christians, actually believe they are right, and that their religion is the path to salvation for all.” The Spectator is British, so they encounter Christians with balls far less often than Americans. Personally, I was kind of excited for evangelical Christian missionaries to go into Iraq and see if the Muslims and the missionaries ended up inadvertently castrating each other.

Godless comments:

Here’s the graph of the consanguinity prevalence as a function of geography:

Conversion gets a really bad rap from our press. But from a secularist point of view, as far as I know the most successful/assimilated/Westernized Arabs are the Lebanese Christians. Conversion changes all sorts of behaviors, including the practice of cousin marriage. And the world beating consanguinity rate is surely one of the factors keeping the Arab world down. (Data from consang.net, though their server appears to be down). See for example Bromiker et. al.:

Consanguineous marriages have been described as an important factor contributing to an increased occurrence of congenital malformations and subsequent morbidity and mortality among the offspring. Within the general population, the incidence of congenital malformations spans a wide range. With few exceptions, the frequency of major malformations reported in western countries ranges between 1.0 and 2.4% (1, 2). By contrast, the risk for congenital malformations in the offspring of marriages between first cousins has been reported to range between 2.9 and 8.0%

It’s so high, in fact, that geneticists travel to Saudi Arabia to seek out rare neurological diseases:

In some parts of Saudi Arabia, particularly in the south, where Mrs. Hefthi was raised, the rate of marriage among blood relatives ranges from 55 to 70 percent, among the highest rates in the world, according to the Saudi government.

Widespread inbreeding in Saudi Arabia has produced several genetic disorders, Saudi public health officials said, including the blood diseases of thalassemia, a potentially fatal hemoglobin deficiency, and sickle cell anemia. Spinal muscular atrophy and diabetes are also common, especially in the regions with the longest traditions of marriage between relatives. Dr. Sakati said she had also found links between inbreeding and deafness and muteness…

“Saudi Arabia is a living genetics laboratory,” said the executive director of the Prince Salman Center for Disability Research, Dr. Stephen R. Schroeder, an American geneticist who has been doing research in Saudi Arabia for the last year. “Here you can look at 10 families to study genetic disorders, where you would need 10,000 families to study disorders in the United States.”

If Christian missionaries were allowed to do their work in Iraq, perhaps this practice could be slowly changed. Fat chance of that happening, of course.

Comment from Razib: My best friend in high school was from a Christian Lebanese background. My family also had many friends of Muslim Lebanese origin when we lived in Western Pennsylvania. Two points:

My friend told me that cousin marriage is practiced among the Christians as well.
I did not see any phenotypic difference between Christian and Muslim Lebanese.

The Christian Lebanese around Mt. Lebanon, the “Maronites,” derive from a theological controversy dating to the 6th century. Eventually they aligned themselves with the Roman Catholic Church. This has had long term consequences, in that their wealth and cosmopolitanism is partly a reflection of the fact that Christian Lebanese have been “hooked in” to the French cultural international for many centuries. This is in contrast to the Shia, Sunni or Druze Lebanese, who don’t have the same European contacts.

Second, the idea that the Christian and Muslim Lebanese are disaparate peoples is often asserted by the Maronites and other Christians, that the former are not Arab, and so forth. The fact is that the Muslim Lebanese are almost certainly converts, several memebers of my friend’s extended family converted to Islam, so the process continues. Additionally, the area around Mt. Lebanon would probably be the last one where there would have been a movement of Arab tribal peoples during the spread of Islam (the Syrian coast in general is where there are still pockets of Aramaic speakers).

That being said, the rise of religious pluralism and further international contacts through the formation of a Protestantized minority couldn’t hurt. And from the secular perspective, in Human Accomplishment Charles Murray seems to hint that Protestantism has a tendency to decay to secularism.

Posted by David B at 01:33 AM