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First the link to this week's complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Kraus et al. offer no surprise to anyone. That said, social class has the weakest predictive value of all the variables they tested, the others are sex, race, and age. Very probably what was really perceived was the speakers' education and not social class as such. As far as I can tell from the methods, no attempt was made to control for that. In the hiring trial the class bias is tiny compared to the total spread and there is no effort whatever to test whether putative employers detect real differences in competence that happen to correlate with class. In sum I see nothing much of value that this study can tell us, except for the fact that class biases, as far as they exist, are quite small and totally lost in the overall variance.
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Graves et al. and Jenny et al. are two more examples that the anthropogenic influence on the local and global climate and environment is real and large. They also clearly demonstrate that solar subsidies for the wealthy, windmills, giving up straws in restaurants, and other purely symbolic actions can't and won't have any bearing on the problems.
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In his famous Caltech address Feynman cited the example of the electron-charge after Millikan's first determination and came to two conclusions: “It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history”
and “We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.”
Looking at Castelvecchi and the numbers cited there, we see just the same slow progression all in one direction. So the underlying problem has not been solved and probably never will be. We shall have to live with it, but at least we must do our best to be aware of it and take it into account.
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Carosi and Smorra et al is one more example of a very careful and sensitive experiment with an outcome that's fully compatible with the assumption that there is no such thing as Dark Matter.
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