St. Patrick was just one man!
Month: March 2013
The "death of RSS"
With the imminent demise of Google Reader there’s a lot of talk about how this is a death blow for RSS. I don’t really get this. Does anyone remember the stuff about “the death of comments” in the late 2000s? E.g.:
It’s sad and disappointing but the death of blog comments may be near. It’s getting harder and harder to fight against the hordes of spammers and mediocrity and animosity out there.
That’s from 2007. Granted, many blogs and media organizations have worthless comments sections. But not all by any stretch. And arguably technology like Disqus has made comments more, not less, relevant, due to features like “up voting” (I’m aware that Slashdot had this a long time ago!). Around the same time there was also the “death of email”. Like blog comments, email is still around.
Those idiot savant Neandertals
Another Neandertal paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. But, because there is a delay between when the press is released to talk about it, and when it goes live, I haven’t gotten a look at the primary material. There’s a lot of juicy stuff in this piece at NBC Science though, Brain comparison suggests that Neanderthals lacked social skills. The two scientists giving quotes, Chris Stringer and Robin Dunbar, know their stuff (one of Dunbar’s graduate students also contributed heavily). In case you don’t know Stringer, he is the paleoanthropologist who was most forceful in pushing for the “Out of Africa” model. Dunbar is the popularizer of Dunbar’s number. I’m assuming Stringer brings the anatomy to the game, while Dunbar frames the bigger theoretical picture. Basically the morphology of the cranium implies that Neandertals may have allocated more of their cognitive capacity to vision and coordination, and less to social activities (because there’s not as much room for the latter). This explains how Neandertals could have a larger cranial capacity than modern humans (they did, though so did Ice Age modern humans) but be somewhat less “intelligent” than us (regular readers know I’m not a big fan of scare quotes for intelligence, but in this case I think it’s warranted).
Why more academics should blog (cuz you can!)
Many people have been talking about the Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson piece on why academics should blog. In my own opinion it’s a little hyperbolic, not everyone is the same, whether it is in inter-individual differences in attributes, or the circumstantial point where one is in their career (e.g., if you are a graduate student or postdoc then your boss/mentor’s attitude matters a lot). With that out of the way I think it is important to reiterate that more academics should blog sometimes. I suspect one issue is that the image of academic bloggers is dominated by people such as Jerry Coyne or the guys at Marginal Revolution. They blog in huge quantity on a wide range of topics. Obviously this is not suitable for everyone’s temperament or situation (it seems that after tenure there is a greater obligation to engage in communication because the biggest hurdle of impressing one’s colleagues is over with, though that’s just me).
3-D printing radicalized?
One of the topics that occasionally crops up in personal conversations with friends is the issue of the rate of technological change. And yet the more and more I live life the more I feel that many of these discussions are predicated on the punctuated and precise emergence of technologies at a specific time and point (e.g., the web in 1995). And yet consider the “smart phone,” or more accurately, the phone as we understand it today. When the iPhone came out it was criticized for not being quite so radical or revolutionary, and I think the idea of the smart phone with a data plan has transformed the way we live our lives. It’s just not as sexy as more salient technologies. Sometimes there are even technologies which are obviously radical, but whose importance seems to bleed into our lives. Within the next 5 years I assume that civilian “drones” will become ubiquitous and banal, whether we like them or not.
The rise of drones have the potential for radically centralizing power and control. 3-D printing on the other hand pushes in the other direction. The apotheosis of this idea is a firm called Defcad, which made a splash at South by Southwest. Defcad emerged out of conflicts in the “Maker” subculture. Below is the introductory video of the founder:
In the academic trenches
An email from a long time correspondent who recounts some graduate school interview experiences:
Hi, Razib. Last week I attended a 2-day long interview for grad school, during which I spoke with about 15 faculty, all of whom were biological anthropologists, though of varying specialities. During these informal meetings, the topic of bio vs cultural anthropology came up a few times and a couple of professors spoke very candidly about the divide that exists between the two disciplines and their desire to have bio anthropology split from the rest of anthro. A very common argument was the one you’ve made: that many cultural anthropologists have become glorified activists. This sort of ran counter to the attitude I encountered during my undergrad [identifying information redacted] wherein a ‘four field’ approach was pumped up. I thought this was an interesting little quirk. Basically, when bio anthropologists are amongst only their own (the grad program is separate from the 3 other subfields), they speak openly about the need for separation from cultural anthro because of the latter’s non-scientific ways, but when some of those same bio anthropologists are in the same building as their cultural anthro colleagues, they tout a holistic approach to the field as a whole. I suppose this is to cultivate a positive attitude in the young minds of students interested in all subfields, but it doesn’t seem crazy to think it could have a little bit to do with cultural anthro’s domination of department politics.
Anyway, long story short: your name popped up! It was referenced by a paleoanthropologist who was particularly keen on bashing of cultural anthro. I just thought it was a little amusing and that you should know that the biological anthropologists are with you! Although, I’m sure you know that based on the twitter conversation you had with John Hawks the other day.
The broader concept of finding “patterns of culture” isn’t worthless. And I’m pretty sure that the biological anthropologists above wouldn’t be ashamed to be on the same faculty as someone like Joe Heinrich, who is asking serious questions with sound and transparent methods. Then there is someone like Michael Scroggins, who can write with a straight face that “in this conception, a gene is more rhetorical topic than scientific fact”, who makes a big point of pointing out that I used the term gene in a singular. Are there really people who reduce everything to linguistic analysis? Why yes! Cato had the right of it in some ways. Perhaps sadder is the fact that Scroggins’ ruminations are awesomely persuasive to his colleagues. I’ll leave you a typical example of “Scrogging”:
Open thread, 3/10/2013
Headline hooks which confuse
My friend Aziz Poonawalla* asked me to comment on this piece in The New Scientist, The father of all men is 340,000 years old. My primary thought: the title probably confuses people, while the article itself is quite serviceable.The first paragraph condenses the specific and precise scientific detail well:
Albert Perry carried a secret in his DNA: a Y chromosome so distinctive that it reveals new information about the origin of our species. It shows that the last common male ancestor down the paternal line of our species is over twice as old as we thought
High likelihood that my daughter does not have an autosomal dominant condition
After my previous post my wife started doing research online. The autosomal dominant condition that I have is almost certainly localized to one particular chromosome (there is a large effect QTL there that is strongly associated with my condition). Additionally, I inherit this condition from my mother. My daughter has her whole pedigree genotyped, thanks to 23andMe. My wife went into the Family Inheritance feature, and compared the identity by descent blocks shared between my mother and my daughter. And, it turns out that on that chromosome the only segments inherited from me, her father, come from my father. Ergo, she can not have inherited the autosomal dominant condition from my mother, since she did not inherit those alleles from her!
We are very happy right now. This is one reason I don’t really care about what the F.D.A. thinks about direct-to-consumer personal genomics. We’re talking about commodity technology. And no one is going to stand between you and your health, if you are motivated.
Addendum: With hindsight I could have figured this out myself a year ago. It just hadn’t crossed my mind.
Your health is your health
A quick personal story. I have a treatable autosomal dominant condition. For the non-geneticists, that means any of my children have a 50% chance of exhibiting the trait. Even aggressive treatment is not usually initiated until one is in elementary school. But we want to know now, just so we can know (we plan to have more children soon, so we want to anticipate medical expenses or lack thereof, and well, just to know). When my wife went to the doctor today for a routine checkup for my daughter she asked for a blood test to confirm that my daughter exhibited, or did not, exhibit the symptoms (this is not a common SNP for what it’s worth).
Though the doctor was skeptical of the effectiveness of the test at this age, she also (according to my wife) decided to give my wife a lecture on the appropriateness of testing. Here’s what my wife emailed me: