Although I got the email 2/23/13 saying my results were expected in May, I haven’t gotten anything yet, and the site says it is still being sequenced. The results will be encoded. You will need a program to decode it. When you log into the site, at the top one of the options is Software. Under that, they list several programs that can be used. If anyone can make sense of it, I’d love to learn how. Just because I was a mathematical idiot savant at one point doesn’t mean that part of my brain didn’t shrivel up and die once real life happened.
On the website, it eventually updated the due date on sequencing to July. Never got an updated email.
Has anyone gotten results? Is anyone else still waiting?
I didn’t become involved through that route, but I was a participant in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. The majority of participants are from SMPY via the samples taken earlier by Dr. Robert Plomin, another researcher. The SMPY research emphasized gender at nearly every step. I haven’t heard a word about it with this. For whatever reason, the non-verbal intelligence of males exceeds that of females. That is especially true of spatial intelligence, which seems to be specifically what they (ideally) are looking for.
So, any other gals here participating in this?
If anyone is still following this, if you fell slightly short in one area they still wanted people to apply. Those figures were simply for guaranteed inclusion. I think there was a crappy understanding of Western thinking and a lot of people self-excluded who should not have. It seems BGI only got 500-600 people on its own, the other 1500 were via Plomin. When I first read of this almost 2 yrs ago, there was mention of getting 10k volunteers.
I can’t speak to the GRE, but on the SAT it is slightly unusual for people to do extremely well on both the verbal and the qualitative sections. For 2008, a GRE score of 700 was the top 4%. Those top 5% scoring 800 Math would not necessarily be top 4% Verbally, those would be largely English and liberal arts types (like me, 20 yrs after graduating college, nowhere near 800 on Math despite scoring that on the SAT 25 yrs before). Hitting 700 V & 800 M thins the herd, which was already reduced because not everyone goes to grad school, not all schools require tests, some take GMAT, etc.
I am in the same position: results expected in May (2013), status page now says July. I sent them an email in August but had no reply. As a non-American I don’t have a GRE or SAT, but when I volunteered I just listed my educational record and career and waited to see what they said. I am wondering what their actual criteria for inclusion are, defined by who they have actually included.
Have any of their participants, on LW or elsewhere, received their data? Or is this whole thing just a ploy to get free DNA samples from smart Westerners in order to, I dunno, craft a deadly virus that only smart Westerners will succumb to? (Joke.)
Have any of their participants, on LW or elsewhere, received their data?
Someone recently asked BGI Cognitive Genomics and received the following response (NB: most of that linked thread is about commercial sequencing using BGI’s lab, not about the BGI Cognitive Genomics study):
Whole genome sequencing is complete, but proper postprocessing of the data is taking longer than we had anticipated.
More precisely, I inspected the files we could have returned in June, and found that they did not distinguish between high-confidence reference genome matches and no-calls. This is a common trait of research pipelines handling WGS data, but it would have made for highly incomplete reports from third-party personal genomics tools. We are currently working on fixing this, but I cannot yet give a reliable ETA (at this point, “July” is a placeholder for “I don’t know yet”).
The website will be updated as soon as I do have a reliable ETA, and you will receive an email when your data is about to be available for download.
I’m often asked about the status of the BGI cognitive genomics project. [...] While I cannot give a comprehensive update, I can state that
Volunteers who qualified for the study via cog-genomics.org and returned their samples by approximately September 2012 have all been sequenced on the Illumina platform, and will receive updates on the status of their genomic data relatively soon.
The relationship between BGI and Illumina has deteriorated since the acquisition of Complete Genomics by the former, which was vigorously opposed (ostensibly on national security grounds, believe it or not) by the latter. Our project has not escaped collateral impact from this development.
USA resident here, I submitted my sample in April 2013 and have not received data. The status page indicates they are still sequencing my genome. I emailed them twice to inquire on the timeframe for completion to no avail.
I inspected the files we could have returned in early summer, and found that they did not distinguish between high-probability reference genome matches and low-certainty sites. While this is fine for some research purposes, it would have resulted in nearly useless reports from third-party tools. We’re currently working on fixing this problem, but we can’t yet give a precise ETA (the website’s mention of “July” has, sadly, become a placeholder for “I don’t know yet”).
We will update the website and send you another email when we are ready.
I believe some other people have received the same. When I log in to their website and look at my status page, it says:
We’re pleased to report that sequencing has completed. We are now extracting high-probability genotype calls from the raw data, and will send you an email when the process is complete. (This is taking longer than we anticipated; apologies for the delay.)
Although I got the email 2/23/13 saying my results were expected in May, I haven’t gotten anything yet, and the site says it is still being sequenced. The results will be encoded. You will need a program to decode it. When you log into the site, at the top one of the options is Software. Under that, they list several programs that can be used. If anyone can make sense of it, I’d love to learn how. Just because I was a mathematical idiot savant at one point doesn’t mean that part of my brain didn’t shrivel up and die once real life happened.
On the website, it eventually updated the due date on sequencing to July. Never got an updated email.
Has anyone gotten results? Is anyone else still waiting?
I didn’t become involved through that route, but I was a participant in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. The majority of participants are from SMPY via the samples taken earlier by Dr. Robert Plomin, another researcher. The SMPY research emphasized gender at nearly every step. I haven’t heard a word about it with this. For whatever reason, the non-verbal intelligence of males exceeds that of females. That is especially true of spatial intelligence, which seems to be specifically what they (ideally) are looking for.
So, any other gals here participating in this?
If anyone is still following this, if you fell slightly short in one area they still wanted people to apply. Those figures were simply for guaranteed inclusion. I think there was a crappy understanding of Western thinking and a lot of people self-excluded who should not have. It seems BGI only got 500-600 people on its own, the other 1500 were via Plomin. When I first read of this almost 2 yrs ago, there was mention of getting 10k volunteers.
I can’t speak to the GRE, but on the SAT it is slightly unusual for people to do extremely well on both the verbal and the qualitative sections. For 2008, a GRE score of 700 was the top 4%. Those top 5% scoring 800 Math would not necessarily be top 4% Verbally, those would be largely English and liberal arts types (like me, 20 yrs after graduating college, nowhere near 800 on Math despite scoring that on the SAT 25 yrs before). Hitting 700 V & 800 M thins the herd, which was already reduced because not everyone goes to grad school, not all schools require tests, some take GMAT, etc.
I am in the same position: results expected in May (2013), status page now says July. I sent them an email in August but had no reply. As a non-American I don’t have a GRE or SAT, but when I volunteered I just listed my educational record and career and waited to see what they said. I am wondering what their actual criteria for inclusion are, defined by who they have actually included.
Have any of their participants, on LW or elsewhere, received their data? Or is this whole thing just a ploy to get free DNA samples from smart Westerners in order to, I dunno, craft a deadly virus that only smart Westerners will succumb to? (Joke.)
Someone recently asked BGI Cognitive Genomics and received the following response (NB: most of that linked thread is about commercial sequencing using BGI’s lab, not about the BGI Cognitive Genomics study):
Earlier, on August 18, Steve Hsu wrote:
USA resident here, I submitted my sample in April 2013 and have not received data. The status page indicates they are still sequencing my genome. I emailed them twice to inquire on the timeframe for completion to no avail.
I had a reply from them in October 2013, saying:
I believe some other people have received the same. When I log in to their website and look at my status page, it says: