Daily Data Dump (Friday)

Digital Quantification of Human Eye Color Highlights Genetic Association of Three New Loci. I was going to blog this, but obviously I got distracted. The best part of this paper is that they used a quantitative measure of eye color differences, instead of categorical binning. They confirmed the importance of the HERC2-OCA2 region in blue vs. brown eye color differences, but by using a more fine-grained description of the phenotype managed to smoke out other loci. Is Mental Illness Good For You? One issue which I am much more conscious of now than I was a few years ago are the cultural preconditions for mental illness diagnosis. I come from a background predisposed to accept the maxim "chemistry for better living," so I have no deep fear of drugs. But, I know people in my own life who have been put on anti-depressant medication almost as a preventative measure, and, ...