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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
The Internet was conceived by the military and devised with maximal reliance and damage tolerance in mind. All nodes are connected in a net with homogenous and isotropic meshes and ideally no node is more important or central than any other. In practice the commercialization of the Net has led to its transformation into a tree structure that can be brought down by attacking a few central trunks. This centralised structure also makes it easy for the Chinese and other governments to control and authorize all permitted traffic.
Conversely the Darknet conforms much more closely to the original ideal. Interestingly, as de Domenico & Arenas have found,it seems that the Darknet too is becoming more centralised over time. This reminds of the fiercely egalitarian forager societies of the Kalahari, who also have to expend a lot of conscious effort to stay egalitarian and to counteract tendencies towards establishing ranks and hierarchies.
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There is an interesting observation Jakob et al. fail to make in their study. Let’s look at their two control experiments. When there is a particularly unappealing job that needs to be done (at least if they aren’t prepared to forego their meagre remuneration), then Jakob et al.’s WEIRD study subjects distinctly prefer taking it on themselves to fobbing it off onto another. These are all young students in an exam-like setting and their decision is public and observed by all present. Might that have influenced them to act differently from what they would normally do unobserved in real life?
Of course looking at the context in which they place their results, conspicuous consumption is a much better explanation for many supposedly correct actions than genuine care for the environment. This is the same phenomenon that has long been observed for other religious gifts and sacrifices.
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I know too little to really understand Morrow et al. But from what I get, it seems that impairing mitochondrial function leads to a homoeostatic counter reaction imparting extra benefits like protection against diabetes and higher tolerance against unhealthy processed food. If that’s so, might the impairment of mitochondria through 2,4-Dinitrophenol have unexpected and unknown benefits too?
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Migration is a rather ambiguous term that can mean one of several things. In the case of Goldberg at al., the result they describe may either go back to migrants coming to stay and settle or to visitors leaving only their genes. As far as I can see, that question can’t be settled by genetic means alone.
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As the well known examples of playing the lottery and fear of flying show, humans tend strongly to overemphasise rare outliers in their judgement. This is of course the natural outcome of their tending to be far more conspicuous than run of the mill events. As Vandormael et al. demonstrate there already is a strong innate mechanism to counteract that fallacy and humans are, on the whole, well capable of making sensible choices from noisy data. It looks like this correction is now being overwhelmed by and can’t cope with the impact of mass media. While this poses an obvious problem when they are being manipulated, Vandormael et al. confer hope in man’s innate ability to adapt and to counteract against them.
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Whatever your academic subject and whatever your political persuasion, Spinney is required reading for everybody. Also see Kahan et al.
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Crowston & Trounce and Williams et al. may be relevant for vegetarians, but also for those eating processed foods with few innards like liver.
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Krauß et al.’s introductory chapter is just about the best summary of what is currently known about the spread of the Neolithic I have ever seen. Those two pages ought to be made required reading for every freshman student of prehistory.
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None of Badawy et al.’s results is new, if described in somewhat more detail. The effect of larger spark gaps was well known from the very beginning and commercially used in mass produced family cars in the thirties. That said their results turn out less than convincing as they fail to adjust ignition timing at all. Their use of the inverse of the commonly employed air fuel ratio – employed without definition or an explanation of terms – makes the article rather incomprehensible at first. The title sounded promising, but there’s nothing there, that’s not been known and documented for many decades.
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