First GWAS hits for cognitive ability

This is NOT the BGI Cognitive Genomics project, it's the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium. Their main phenotype is educational attainment, but they also have Swedish conscript scores for cognitive ability. IIUC the largest effect size is smaller than that for the corresponding height loci (1/4.5 as big in units of population SD; 1/20 as big in units of variance), which suggests that cognitive ability will be harder than, but perhaps...

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Long term investing

Will it move the needle? Perhaps.New Yorker: ... This week, Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, invoked Rhodes’s gift as the inspiration behind a large new scholarship for study not in America but in China. He is hoping that familiarity with the world’s rising superpower will blunt growing American anxiety about changes in status. “Anger can lead to trade problems, and ultimately to military confrontation,” he told me. “We had to find a way to stop or ameliorate that situation.” The scholarship will draw...

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Inter-universal Geometer Mochizuki

Mathematics certainly does not lack for eccentric geniuses. Mochizuki homepage. See these slides from his "pedagogical" lecture Invitation to Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory  :-)The Paradox of the Proof: ... The problem, as many mathematicians were discovering when they flocked to Mochizuki’s website, was that the proof was impossible to read. The first paper, entitled “Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory I: Construction of Hodge Theaters,”...

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Sisu: Mikko Salo documentary

Documentary on Crossfit athlete Mikko Salo. His resting heart rate is 31 bpm! See also here.Great deadlift / burpee metcon @34min. Compare to lullaby :-)Wikipedia: Sisu is a Finnish term loosely translated into English as strength of will, determination, perseverance, and acting rationally in the face of adversity. However, the word is widely considered to lack a proper translation into any other language. Sisu has been described as being integral to understanding Finnish culture. However sisu is defined by a long-term element in it; it is...

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Next (and Next Next) Generation DNA Sequencing Methods

This is from 2012 but seems to cover most of the Next Gen platforms currently in use (for some reason he skips over the Complete Genomics slide). There seems to have been a slight plateau recently in the sequencing cost curve; I wonder whether when the next jump will happen ... The conventional wisdom is that the bioinformatics costs now dominate the sequencing cost but I think that can be fixed using existing computing technology (i.e., it is more predictable than a big breakthrough in molecular method).Does anyone know of a comparable talk that...

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A hockey coach?!?

The last post, entitled To the brainy, the spoils, linked to an Economist article about management consulting. It would appear that in the public sector, the highest paid employees tend to work in a tax-exempt sports-entertainment complex that is, for strange historical reasons, hosted by the higher education system. (Via UOMatte...

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To the brainy, the spoils

Economist: ... Big trends that befuddle clients mean big money for clever consultants. Barack Obama’s gazillion-page health reform has boosted health-care consulting; firms would rather pay up than read the blasted thing. The Dodd-Frank financial reform has done the same for financial-sector work. Energy and technology are hot, too.Companies are reluctant to talk about their use of consultants, and consultancies are relentlessly tight-lipped. Bain...

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Nature News: Chinese project probes the genetics of genius

This article is mostly correct -- see my comments below in [[ brackets ]]. As usual the Chinese connection is emphasized in the title, even though Plomin (Kings College London) is the more experienced researcher in this area, and most of our DNA samples come from US citizens.To clarify, my main motivation for understanding the genetics of cognition derives from the observation that the human brain, the most complex object we know of in the universe,...

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NGS, GATK and all that

This is a nice introduction to the nuts and bolts of next-generation sequencing. Slides. Related talks from a workshop on GATK (Broad Institute's Genome Analysis Tool Ki...

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Dennett and Intuition Pumps

At the bookstore today I spent some time looking at Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel Dennett's new book. I highly recommend his Darwin's Dangerous Idea, discussed earlier here. I'm not a big fan of Dennett's work on free will and determinism (for my views, see this old post and also here), but we seem to share the same opinion of John Searle's Chinese Room.For more Dennett, see this Stanford Humanities Center lecture...

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Research Drives America

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Mysteries of the universe: Upstream Color

A new film from Shane Carruth, the director of Primer. I haven't seen it yet but am looking forward to it. Carruth has chosen an independent distribution strategy, so you can watch it right now, e.g., on Amazon or streamed from other sources. Here's a picture of Carruth at Sci Foo back in 2008. When we parted company he was on his way to talk to Steven Soderbergh to start fundraising for his next film. It's been 9 years since Primer was released!...

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Exercise response

Positive for most people, but with a lot of genetic variation. Interestingly, a fraction of the population (about 10%) can have a negative health or fitness response to training (see @40 min or so in the video). This professor's company claims to be able to predict exercise response by looking at about 30 gene variants. The talk also has some interesting results concerning high intensity training.NYTimes: ... That original research, published...

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Nasty, brutish and short?

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of...

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BrunoFest 2013

Unfortunately I had to miss this event, but one of our cohort of Berkeley students (Josh Burton) was able to attend. The photos below were taken by Josh. Had LHC discovered superpartners, Bruno Zumino and Julius Wess would have had a decent claim to a Nobel prize for their early work on supersymmetry.It is strange to see my teachers grow old; to find myself older than some of the younger ones were when I was a student.I remember Bruno as a consummate...

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Lean in, freeze eggs

Better this than Idiocracy. You could also argue that men should freeze sperm as the incidence of de novo mutations in children increases with paternal age.WSJ: ... Egg freezing stopped the sadness that I was feeling at losing my chance to have the child I had dreamed about my entire life. It soothed my pangs of regret for frittering away my 20s with a man I didn't want to have children with, and for wasting more years in my 30s with a man who wasn't...

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Richard Ford '66

Richard Ford, MSU class of 1966, delivers a commencement address. The President was busy handing out diplomas and shaking hands, so I had Ford to myself for most of the two hour ceremony. I can't remember the last time I had such an enjoyable discussion of life, literature and writing.Some quotes and excerpts from Ford below. See also this Paris Review interview.“You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or...

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Everybody digs Bill Evans

Yesterday someone told me I was a techno-optimist, and I replied that I had grown up in an era in which university libraries were the main repositories of high quality information. Sitting in front of the computer, I can share all kinds of things with my kids that weren't available to me as a child. Who could imagine a time when typing in a few words would evoke rich sounds and images of Bill Evans or Chet Baker? Thanks to all the jazz fans who are uploading this rare footage and music!With vocals (Monica Zetterlund). See also this profile, The...

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Learning can hurt

This essay, from 2007, summarizes how progress in genomics came to confront convenient but incorrect views on the genetic clustering of human populations. The vast majority of people, even scientists, are still confused about this subject. See also Human genetic variation, Fst and Lewontin's fallacy in pictures.The flipside of serendipity: human genetics rediscovers race... In this paper I investigate the recent re-emergence of genetic race in more detail, and endeavour to ascertain how, after a half-century hiatus, a young team of population geneticists...

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The last amateurs

Is the age of the talented amateur over in science? By amateur here I don't mean a non-scientist doing science (that age probably ended earlier), but rather a specialist from one area making a contribution in another. The example below is George Gamow, a cosmologist and theoretical physicist who migrated into biology.Wigner:Specialization of science also robbed us of much of our passion. We wanted to grasp science whole, but by then the...

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