In Turnabout, Children Care For Sick Elders:

Partly paralyzed, with diabetes and colitis, Linda Lent needs extensive care at home.
But with her husband working long hours at a bowling alley, Ms. Lent, 47, relies on a caregiver who travels by school bus toting a homework-filled backpack: her 13-year-old daughter, Annmarie.

Younger people caring for the aged or ill is nothing new, it’s the way it’s always been. Widespread outsourcing the care of the elderly and the very young to “professionals” is an innovation of the market economy. But there are other issues that the modern world imposes
1) Health care has improved so that many will live on in a state of moderate to extreme morbidity deep into their 70s & 80s.
2) The average number of children that individuals are having is decreasing, and larger numbers are choosing “child-free” lifestyles.
3) People are putting off having their children because of the needs of establishing career & financial security in their 20s. Therefore, a significant number of individuals who become ill “early” (e.g., 40s to 60s) will have offspring who are barely adult themselves.
The correlation in the GSS between the number of children & age at first child is -0.27, modest, but not trivial. This means that those with smaller families tend to have them later than those with larger families. Those who become ill early in life who have fewer children also will have younger ones. We really need robots….

Exploring a ‘Deep Web’ That Google Can’t Grasp. I remember when I first encountered Google, right after reading this article in Salon. Not to put a fine point on it, I was tired of search engines that returned a list of porn stars when I was trying to look up the black conservative “Shelby Steele.” Obviously Google changed that, the search experience become so quantitatively different than it was qualitatively different. There was the pre-Google web, and the post-Google web. In any case, I’ve been hearing stuff about the “Deep/Dark Web” for years now. Hopefully someone will figure this out. There was a time when you’d play around with a few search engines as well as a directory like Yahoo to find some information. Google was such an improvement that it introduced one-stop searching, making MetaCrawler irrelevant. If some of these Deep Web technologies pan out, perhaps we can do away with Orbitz too.

I was curious as to how trust in science related to questions like human evolution or the danger of nuclear power. So I looked at the variables NUKEGEN, SCITEST4 and TRUSTSCI in the GSS, which ask questions about the danger of nuclear power, the truth of human evolution and our trust in science, respectively. Below I report those who:
1) Agree or strongly agree that we trust too much in science
2) Definitely accept, or believe it is probable, that humans evolved from animals
3) Believe that nuclear power is not very dangerous, or not dangerous at all
I combined the weak and strong opinions and checked the frequencies across various demographic groups. I combined here and there to increase the sample size; i.e., liberals include those who are very and slightly liberal, atheists & agnostics are a category which includes those who do not believe, or are skeptical of the existence of god. Below are the raw data in a table, and also some charts which show how the opinions in these various groups relate to each other.

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I recently got bored and played a joke on Southern Fried Science a few days ago…my usual PC-tard schtick,* see the comments. In any case, the author of the weblog suggests that I was being unkind at his expense. I won’t stop playing these sorts of jokes (see this Greg Laden comment thread), but I figured it would be a mitzvah to send some traffic his way. It takes some courage for a privileged white male to attempt to abolish cant when it comes to discussion about race in this nation of cowards.
* My usually method is to not think about what I’m typing, but just stick together random things I’ve heard or seen said and attempt to keep some sort of syntactic coherency. Usually people make some sense out of it.

In 2007, SNPs in an intron of the gene FTO were reported to be associated with obesity. At the time, essentially nothing was known about the gene. A few months later, a group of biochemists proposed a role for the gene in demethylation of nucleic acids (RNA or DNA). This week, a group of mouse geneticists present an analysis of a knockout of the gene, and show that the knockouts are resistant to weight gain due to increased energy expenditure.

There’s still quite a ways to go before the mechanism by which FTO contributes to weight variation in humans is understood (oddly enough, there’s some evidence that the mechanism is through increased energy intake rather than expenditure), but people keep chipping away…

It’s been a while since I did a reader survey, so I posted 15 questions here. I’ll put up a csv file with the results in a week.

Ed Yong has an excellent post reviewing new research which suggests that collective religious rituals are more predictive than religious belief as to support for suicide bombings. The novelty and insight from these studies is that they decompose the independent dimensions from which religious phenomena are constructed. Consider for example that religion may consist of:
A) Belief in supernatural agents
B) Participation in communal rituals
C) Regulation of personal behavior under religious law
D) A metaphysical system which explains the nature of the universe
And so forth. A study like the one above suggests that it is the second, communal rituals, which heighten the ingroup-outgroup biases which often lead to religiously motivated atrocities. By analogy we can compare these to politically and ethnically motivated violence. Religious actors from within the phenomena in question naturally blur the boundaries of these individual components, and so naturally may claim that it is the “Will of God” which demands that they act in the way they do. Similarly, unbelievers whose own first-hand knowledge of religion is slight may naturally take the words of these violent actors on the fact of it. Researchers such as Scott Atran and Robert Pape have shown that in fact variations in belief have little to do with these actions in the name of belief.

It’s been a while since I did a reader survey, so I posted 15 questions here. I’ll put up a csv file with the results in a week.

Ziel points me to an amusing post, The Credit Snobs:

I rather like the title “voodoo priest of free market economics” so I am happy to take the blame for the sub-prime mortgage defaults and at the same time stick a few pins in Nouriel Roubini.
Roubini and others generating hysteria about defaults in the mortgage market are credit snobs – they think credit is something that only the rich can handle. Just look at the language that Roubini uses to analogize borrowers – they are “reckless patients” who “spent the last few years on a diet of booze, drugs and artery clogging junk food.” Similarly, the Washington Post tells us that it’s the end of the “borrowing binge.”

Check out this comment from “DK”:

The critical question for me is how much pain the subprime loans really cause their borrowers. Yes, some people will end up homeless and with their savings wiped out, and their suffering will be severe. But many people will end up in rental housing (i.e. where they would have been all along if subprime lending was not available), and not all will lose their houses. And many people with ARMS and low initial rates are significantly better off than they would be if they had chosen traditional fixed-rate loans, especially young families who intended from the beginning to move when their 5 year locked rate expired.

I mentioned a few months ago that Socks was in end stage cancer. It ended today. R.I.P. Socks.