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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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With his dissertation Raymond Joseph Coppola is legally entitled to call himself Dr. Coppola and can expect to be addressed as such. I can recommend his abstract to anyone in need of some light entertainment. Read out loud by a competent speaker it would make great stand-up comedy.
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The results by Schmidt et al. are well founded, but aren’t they trivial? For example I read a lot of science, no sports and certainly never football, little about subsidized culture and less about mass culture (i.e. the sort of culture people actually want and are prepared to pay for with their own money). The readers interested in, say, Germany or Israel are naturally more geographically diverse than the authors competent to write about them. There are (relatively) more fans of the Munich football club in Cologne than journalists competent to follow their games and write about them. Scientific publishers too are more spatially concentrated than readers of science. Somebody only superficially interested in science may well get their information from science pages in the daily papers or from TV features. Limits of time and effort force me to concentrate on the smaller subset of reliable peer reviewed publishers. Does that make me less well informed? None of all that is the least bit surprising and these tendencies fully suffice to explain all the displayed tendencies and diagrams. But has it any bearing at all on fake news and its distribution?
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As chance – or, if that’s what you prefer, Jungian synchronicity – has it, this week has both Berman’s skeptically scientific analysis of overly speculative Biblical text criticism and an article by Polak extensively indulging in just that. It concentrates on the narrative parts of the P-source (whereas Frank Moore Cross (1997, list of 2016-11-12) convincingly argues there aren’t any). We all know simple stand-up comedians who can credibly emulate all kinds of speech habits at the drop of a hat and writers who change their style in the course of a single book according to the speed and suspense of the scene just told. But all changes of Biblical style, like length and structure of sentences and choice of verb forms, have to point to different writers of different education and at different times.
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Only few of the 92 reasonably stable elements have been shown to be useful for electrical batteries and of those only two are currently in use for rechargeables. Of those two lead is heavy and poisonous and lithium rare, expensive, and spontaneously igniting. So it would be a huge technological and economic advantage if the cheap and ubiquitous sodium could be successfully employed for the same purpose. Song et al. have just demonstrated in important step in that direction.
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