Cultural appropriation must be one of the stupidest concepts to come out of the critical race theory milieu. Back in the day you could just admit that a particular juxtaposition of motifs was dissonant (e.g., I think mixing Arctic and Indian ones might be) or disrespectful (e.g., putting a picture of Jesus on a toilet). Now it requires an NPR think-piece. Despite its jargon, it does strike me that a lot of the long-form discussion veers into the sort of kvetching over intellectual property rights which I find quite annoying and overdone.
A friend of mine was freaking out about Pandas recently. As most of you may know I’m going to be transitioning from Perl to Python, so I was really curious when he mentioned that moving to Pandas also obviated the need for R. So I just got a copy of Python for Data Analysis: Data Wrangling with Pandas, NumPy, and IPython. Figured it would be a good complement to Data Science from Scratch: First Principles with Python.
Since I don’t like to spend time on useless things, I’ve been following the primary race very superficially (sometimes to the extent of asking my labmate every few days what’s going on). But I’d say go long on Rubio. Those following closely freak out too much over debates.
Was talking with a friend recently about the lack of emphasis in biological journals on methods, even though in the long run methods are often more impactful than singular empirical results. Would recommend all readers peruse Ancient Admixture in Human History, with a focus on methods. The paper is now open access.
Admixture into and within sub-Saharan Africa, a pre-print worth reading. That being said, I always have a hard time digesting fineSTRUCTURE work. It seems that a lot of stuff is coming out on Africa right now. If so, then it is important to actually know something about the history and geography of the continent. John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of the Continent is the best I’ve run into in that vein. Though The Fortunes of Africa looks interesting, I haven’t read it.
The 13th Bay Area Population Genomics Meeting is going to be held at UC Berkeley on February 13th, next Saturday. As usual, thanks to Dmitri Petrov for starting this, and Fernando Racimo for taking the lead this time around, and the CCB and AncestryDNA for hosting and sponsoring. I plan to be there….
If you live in California, the The California Weather Blog is a must bookmark/subscribe. When I was a wee lad I used to be a weather nerd. I can’t imagine what it would be like growing up today….
Sick and Tired of ‘God Bless America’: ‘The population of nonreligious Americans — including atheists, agnostics and those who call themselves “nothing in particular” — stands at an all-time high this election year.’ This is arguably wrong. During the early American republic with restricted suffrage a large proportion of the eligible electorate may have been freethinkers, at least judging by the fact that the first six presidents would not be considered orthodox Christians by modern evangelical Protestants. The first president who was probably an orthodox Christian while in office, Andrew Jackson, was an ardent church-state separationist:
“I could not do otherwise without transcending the limits prescribed by the Constitution for the President and without feeling that I might in some degree disturb the security which religion nowadays enjoys in this country in its complete separation from the political concerns of the General Government.” — letter to the Synod of the Reformed Church of North America, 12 June 1832, explaining his refusal of their request that he proclaim a “day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer.”
Reproducible Research Practices and Transparency across the Biomedical Literature:
There is a growing movement to encourage reproducibility and transparency practices in the scientific community, including public access to raw data and protocols, the conduct of replication studies, systematic integration of evidence in systematic reviews, and the documentation of funding and potential conflicts of interest. In this survey, we assessed the current status of reproducibility and transparency addressing these indicators in a random sample of 441 biomedical journal articles published in 2000–2014. Only one study provided a full protocol and none made all raw data directly available. Replication studies were rare (n = 4), and only 16 studies had their data included in a subsequent systematic review or meta-analysis. The majority of studies did not mention anything about funding or conflicts of interest. The percentage of articles with no statement of conflict decreased substantially between 2000 and 2014 (94.4% in 2000 to 34.6% in 2014); the percentage of articles reporting statements of conflicts (0% in 2000, 15.4% in 2014) or no conflicts (5.6% in 2000, 50.0% in 2014) increased. Articles published in journals in the clinical medicine category versus other fields were almost twice as likely to not include any information on funding and to have private funding. This study provides baseline data to compare future progress in improving these indicators in the scientific literature.
Related: What this scathing exchange between top scientists reveals about what nutritionists actually know.
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