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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Ordinary people’s choices are seldom as stupid and ill-informed as ivory-tower sociologists make them out to be. Are engineers really as sought after as Rozek et al. try to make out? From all I hear about career opportunities, pay offers, and forced early retirement, it does not look like it. What in American society are the real prestige jobs besides football and rock stars? Going by what the media present it has to be lawyers, damagers and other scroungers. Of course brainwashing always works locally and on a small scale, applied with blanket coverage people soon become savvy to it and continue to go by what’s true in their real world. As Feynman remarked, only in Jewish household is a physics professor greeted like a footballer or military officer would be.
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Human society is breeding itself for stupidity. Tis claim has often been made with good but unproven arguments, but now finally Kong et al. supply the long-awaited proof. Combining this with Murray’s Coming Apart we might even be breeding two distinct subspecies in an Eloi vs. Morlocks like scenario.
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As educational advances have shown time and again, something that seems to work well in the laboratory need not yield equal results in real life. Kravchenko et al. demonstrate the same thing happening in agriculture.
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In American English a storm as in Zhu et al. has little to do with wind speed but with precipitation, what in English you’d expect to be called a downpour. Of course it’s a common enough term for readers to know it, but still in my opinion a bad choice of word for an international readership
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Isern et al. again quote the long refuted slow spread of the Neolithic at around 1 km/a. As their model seems to work around the Mediterranean, something like it should be looked for in the Bandkeramik and other sudden bursts of expansion.
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A new and unproven method and a rather sensational result on its first use -- normally that would suffice to ignite all the warning lights. But reading closely Wiktorowicz et al.’s result seems sound and their interpretation plausible.
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