{"id":232,"date":"2010-01-22T22:39:02","date_gmt":"2010-01-23T05:39:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.talyarkoni.org\/blog\/?p=232"},"modified":"2010-01-23T00:56:28","modified_gmt":"2010-01-23T07:56:28","slug":"elsewhere-on-the-internets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/2010\/01\/22\/elsewhere-on-the-internets\/","title":{"rendered":"elsewhere on the internets…"},"content":{"rendered":"

The good people over at OKCupid<\/a>, the best dating site on Earth (their words, not mine! I’m happily married!), just released a new slew of data<\/a> on their OKTrends blog<\/a>. Apparently men like women with smiley, flirty profile photos, and women like dismissive, unsmiling men. It’s pretty neat stuff, and definitely worth a read. Mating rituals aside, thuough, what I really like to think about whenever I see a new OKTrends post is how many people I’d be willing to kill to get my hands on their data.<\/p>\n

Genetic Future covers<\/a> the emergence of Counsyl<\/a>, a new player in the field of personal genomics. Unlike existing outfits like 23andme<\/a> and deCODEme.com<\/a>, Counsyl focuses on rare Mendelian disorders, with an eye to helping prospective parents evaluate their genetic liabilities. What’s really interesting about Counsyl is its business model; if you have health insurance provided by Aetna or Blue Cross, you could potentially get a free test. Of course, the catch is that Aetna or Blue Cross get access to your results. In theory, this shouldn’t matter, since health insurers can’t use genetic information as grounds for discrimination<\/a>. But then, on paper, employers can’t use race, gender, or sexual orientation as grounds for discrimination either, and yet we know it’s easier to get hired if your name is John than Jamal<\/a>. That said, I’d probably go ahead and take Aetna up on its generous offer, except that my wife and I have no plans for kids, and the Counsyl test looks like it stays away from the garden-variety SNPs the other services cover…<\/p>\n

The UK has banned the export of dowsing rods<\/a>. In 2010! This would be kind of funny if not for the fact that dozens if not hundreds of Iraqis have probably died horrible deaths as a result of the Iraqi police force trying to detect roadside bombs using magic. [via Why Evolution is True<\/a>].<\/p>\n

Over at Freakonomics<\/a>, regular contributor Ryan Hagen interviews<\/a> psychologist, magician, and author Richard Wiseman<\/a>, who just published a new empirically-based self-help book (can such a thing exist?). I haven’t read the book, but the interview is pretty good. Favorite quote:<\/p>\n

What would I want to do? I quite like the idea of the random giving of animals. There’s a study where they took two groups of people and randomly gave people in one group a dog. But I’d quite like to replicate that with a much wider range of animals \u2014 including those that should be in zoos. I like the idea of signing up for a study, and you get home and find you’ve got to look after a wolf \u201c\u00a6 .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On a professional note, Professor in Training<\/a> has a really great two part series (1<\/a>, 2<\/a>) on what new tenure-track faculty need to know before starting the job. I’ve placed both posts inside Google Reader’s golden-starred vault, and fully expect to come back to them next Fall when I’m on the job market. Which means if you’re reading this and you’re thinking of hiring me, be warned: I will<\/em> demand that a life-size bobble-head doll of Hans Eysenck<\/a> be installed in my office, and thanks to PiT, I do<\/em> now have the awesome negotiating powers needed to make it happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The good people over at OKCupid, the best dating site on Earth (their words, not mine! I’m happily married!), just released a new slew of data on their OKTrends blog. Apparently men like women with smiley, flirty profile photos, and women like dismissive, unsmiling men. It’s pretty neat stuff, and definitely worth a read. Mating … Continue reading elsewhere on the internets…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[105,33,108,109,111,107,690,104,106,112,113,114,110],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEZxN-3K","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions\/236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/talyarkoni.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}