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The one variable Voigt et al. have made no attempt to control for is the socioeconomic and educational standing of the persons being questioned, although these could easily be estimated from their parts in the recorded conversations with a high degree of confidence. From observing i.e. doctors in rural areas you will find that many adapt their speech to the current patient and this is not seen as patronizing but rather as being friendly, affable and treating them as equals. I have seen the same from competent and friendly police officers. To the contrary I usually experience the opposite as haughty and disdainful.
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As far as I can tell from the methods, Murphy et al.’s subjects were sufficiently blind to the hypothesis and purpose of the study for that not to have influenced the outcome. But before making use of this result or building on it, anybody wanting to do so ought to check this point in more detail than the article provides.
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Zuo et al. do not deign to tell us, what it is, they have actually dated. Phytoliths as such are carbon-free silica, but it seems they often do contain something like 1 % of occluded and datable carbon. But from Wilding 1967 (and I am not aware of any recent developments of the method) it seems that there is a tendency for this method to yield dates that are far too old.
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Defrance et al. is yet another blatant example of treating model outcomes as data. Explicitly calling a model run an experiment, as they do, is a travesty. As far as I know there are no real data backing up their claim and none of the paleoclimatic data I am aware of point in that direction.
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The extensive Balinese irrigation systems have posed a problem for anthropological theory for quite some time. Massive building projects like these seem to require a strong central power and that seems to have been lacking here. Lansing et al.’s model of self-organization may well provide the missing answer.
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