Kommentare zu Zeitschriftartikeln aus 2013

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(13-12-28) Articles to 2013-12-28

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Previous analyses of archaeological finds and experimental results by e.g. Craddock (1999) and Rovira (2003) have shown that copper smelting in a poorly reducing atmosphere – presumably chosen on purpose to exclude iron – also prevents the reduction and inclusion of tin, leaving it in the slag. ...

(13-12-20) Articles to 2013-12-20

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McNulty et al. is the purest and most blatant piece of Cargo Cult I’ve ever seen, including draft undergraduate essays. There isn’t a single table (except for secondary data in the supplement), results are scattered throughout the text. The single figure is pure fraud. Points and errors shown have nothing whatsoever to do with data ...

(13-12-14) Articles to 2013-12-14

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The widespread antibiotics abuse already claims 23 000 casualties every year in America – real casualties with names and documented causes of death, not phantoms from statistical fraud like passive smoking and similar chimeras. ...

(13-12-09) Articles to 2013-12-09

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Origins of war, origins of bipedalism and some climate this week.

(13-11-30) Articles to 2013-11-30

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What Bissell seems to imply is that, if a result published as a general feature for a certain kind of cells turns out only to be valid for one single proprietary cell line as used in the authors’ laboratory, a failure of replication is meaningless, because with the identical, original cells it can be replicated even if with no others. ...

(13-11-22) Articles to 2013-11-22

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Ruff, Ugazio & Fehr strongly amplify my tentative comment on Culotta (list of 2013-10-27). Rule accepting law abidance does not coincide with socially minded fairness but the two seem to form rather two opposite ends of a spectrum. This result can explain a lot of what’s observable in society where "good citizenship" is all too often paired with unbounded and ruthless egotism.

(13-11-15) Articles to 2013-11-15

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Starr et al.’s result may be significant in a purely formal statistical sense, but while their figures 2 a and b may show a slight effect at the extremes, the distribution for the bulk of the population is obviously purely random. Another meaningless non-result. ...

(13-10-31) Articles to 2013-10-31

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This week’s list is mainly seminar related. There is something new about placebos, music, and the newly found Dmanisi cranium.

(13-10-27) Articles to 2013-10-27

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Contrary to common prejudice and contrary to what he himself seems to imply, the effect of teacher and school quality on further educational success seems to be negligible according to Chamberlain. ...

(13-10-22) Articles to 2013-10-22

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Tymula et al. repeat the classic mistake of confronting their subjects with exact, numerically given probabilities. No real-life situation is ever like that, so their results are essentially meaningless. When trying to decide whether I can drive through a deep puddle or am likely to get stuck, the estimate is not numerical. ...

(13-10-14) Articles to 2013-10-14

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In Shennan et al. their diagram for all regions combined is highly suggestive. For their hypothesis to hold they would have to demonstrate it for individual regions and highly diverse timings for individual onset of agriculture though. ...

(13-10-07) Articles to 2013-10-07

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I find Salter & Crew’s result quite surprising. Received wisdom has it that bloomery iron is nearly pure and a lot of effort is needed to add carbon. Here they seem to have achieved high quality carbon steel in a simple one-step direct process. This reminds of ...

(13-09-28) Articles to 2013-09-28

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Admittedly Mascaro et al. do not depend on just two or three outliers one could strike off to nullify their result. But still their main result is only present in the top and bottom quartiles of their figure 1 and conspicuously absent in the middle ground. They undoubtedly are on to something, as their figure 2c shows, but figure 2b, where it seems to rest in at most four data points, proves the weakness of their main conclusion. ...

(13-09-22) Articles to 2013-09-22

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de Waal and Gavrilets offer interesting additional commentary on Opie (list of 2013-08-17) and Lukas (list of 2013-08-24). ...

(13-09-15) Articles to 2013-09-15

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Job et al. add to the growing number of studies on the placebo effect, albeit from a novel angle. I wonder how much else demonstrably works just because societal consensus says it does. The study does have the usual number of methodical shortfalls, though....

(13-09-07) Articles to 2013-09-07

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Anonymity as in Couzin-Frankel is and stays a double-edged sword even if well established in the system of peer review. The suggestion has been made, and is IMHO to be taken seriously, to reverse the system and let named peers judge anonymized papers. As Richard P. Feynman said: ...

(13-09-02) Articles to 2013-09-02

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Beckes et al. offer a sensible hypothesis and a reasonable method, so at first sight there is little reason to doubt their result. Looking closely they rely on modest correlations arrived at from a limited number of data points, n=22. As they themselves rightly conclude the r=0.59 and r=0.43 in their figure 3b are essentially one and the same. So their whole result hangs on ...

(13-08-24) Articles to 2013-08-24

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As it panders to my personal values and prejudices I would have very much liked to endorse the study by González-Jiménez et al. The Trojan Number of 504 notwithstanding their whole conclusion rests on a mere 26 cases (table 2). There is no significant trend ...

(13-08-17) Articles to 2013-08-17

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Park & Brannon’s result is not about approximate mental math, as I first thought, but about eyeballing, so their result is not as obvious as it first seems and reveals something deeper and more meaningful.

Forwood is a healthy reminder of unrecognized confounders. Of course the smaller the effect ...

(13-08-09) Articles to 2013-08-09

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Looking at Germany the snotty-nosed attitude in Fohrbeck, published by the trade union of German university teachers, seems rather unwarranted. Here too "one point", i.e. the highest achievable mark, has become synonymous to "passed" with the real grading hidden in the decimal places and the application of knowledge to real life is what humanities graduates have to leave to tradesmen. ...

(13-08-05) Articles to 2013-08-05

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Epidemiology like that of White et al. is the classic hotbed of junk science but just this once I can find nothing obviously wrong or fishy. Perhaps I’ve had too much Tofu lately. ...

(13-07-27) Articles to 2013-07-27

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Jack et al. report an interesting result concerning Mithen’s proposed leakage across cognitive domains. It seems these are old enough for a dedicated inhibition to have evolved, limiting but not suppressing the excesses of magic and religion. ...

(13-07-22) Articles to 2013-07-22

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Pessimists admit things might go right but can easily recount dozens of ways how they may go wrong while optimists consent they might fail but enumerate many ways of success. Sonnemann et al. explain the role of this numerical imbalance.

According to Yan et al. variable speed pumps save less than one percent of energy ...

(13-07-14) Articles to 2013-07-14

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Something is deeply flawed about genetic method and theory and I doubt any serious progress will be made until that fundamental problem is solved. Some traits like intelligence and body height are highly inherited, studies on families and twins consistently find inheritance to account for 50 % and more of the variation. Intelligence and success in school and education are highly correlated and inherited is generally understood to mean genetic. So when Rietveld et al. regress full genomes of more than 100 000 people against educational attainment and find an R2 of 0.02 % or explain one month of total education (not sure how those two numbers are meant to fit together) this result can only be called a total failure. ...

(13-07-05) Articles to 2013-07-05

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The Howiesons Poort industry used to be seen as a distinct horizon marker that occurred at the same time in MIS 4 all over southern Africa. At Diepkloof the dates published by Zenobia Jacobs (science 322 (2008), 733–735) fell on a continuous unbroken line ...

(13-07-01) Articles to 2013-07-01

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A general rule of biology states that small animals like rodents and deer require high-quality food like seeds, buds, and shoots while nutritionally poor fodder favours large species like mammoths. This is the probable driver behind the size of the dinosaurs as well as the size difference between gorillas and bonobos. So what Craine is obviously doing here is confusing ...

(13-06-22) Articles to 2013-06-22

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Cacioppoa et al. is a typical example of a non-report not giving any of its results. That the differences in mean marital satisfaction scores (whatever that may be) look small doesn’t mean anything, but to evaluate those differences and to decide, whether they are meaningful or not, we’d need standard deviations and standard errors and none of those are given. ...

(13-06-15) Articles to 2013-06-15

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I fail to understand how Morton et al. could ever have been accepted for publication. Just because someone prefers something does not in the least imply he’s going to get it. Older women may well be – and are – less desirable, but they’re available and get pregnant all the same. Later children of older women have siblings to care for and look after them ...

(13-06-10) Articles to 2013-06-10

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In 1990 the rate of child deaths under five in the bottom quarter of countries was 14 times that of the top quarter. By 2011 that gap had risen to 23 times. So how do nature justify their ridiculous claim of a closing gap? ...

(13-06-04) Articles to 2013-06-04

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Bowles and Choi make a testable prediction for some parts of the upper Paleolithic. Interestingly four of the seven Neanderthal teeth with cooked starches in Henry 2011 (PNAS 108, 486–491, list of 2011-01-14) are from their window of 38–36 ka BP and at 46 ka, ...

(13-05-19) Articles to 2013-05-19

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The Toba eruption at 77 ka was a very nice explanation for lot of interlocking mutually confirming data and now all that seems to be completely thrown over by Lane et al. ...

(13-05-05) Articles to 2013-05-05

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Years ago nearly all children went to small and largely unsorted local primary schools. Cheng & Xie show why this is important and why small local schools must be brought back.

(13-04-26) Articles to 2013-04-26

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Jasechko’s model stands and falls on his assumption, that plant transpiration does not fractionate. Not only is that theoretically highly improbable, but Kahmen et al. have shown fractionation to be the case ...

(13-04-15) Articles to 2013-04-15

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This week I’ll let the list speak for itself.

(13-04-01) Articles to 2013-04-01

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McLauchlan et al. offer little evidence for their assumed connection between nitrogen availability and isotopic signature. Their assumption of its being unchanged today seems totally unfounded. Besides lightning nitrogen fixation used to be mainly biological, with a huge preference for the common light nitrogen. ...

(13-03-25) Articles to 2013-03-25

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For several reasons I was very sceptical about Scally’s extrapolation from single generation mutation rates to evolutionary time spans. (List of 2012-10-14, my comment 2012-09-27) Reading Fu it seems I was right to be. ...

(13-03-18) Articles to 2013-03-18

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All issues of Pysikalische Blätter have been scanned and made freely available. While still in high school I used to read my father’s issues and I remember reading about climate warming there first, very probably Flohn 1981. The quality of the source made me accept the claim and probably was part of what led me to Nuclear Engineering later. ...

(13-03-10) Articles to 2013-03-10

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Zhu et al. convincingly show that horizontal gene transfer rises in step with antibiotic resistance. Our short interlude of curable disease is all but over, we’ll soon be back to sitting up and praying as our grandparents did. ...

(13-02-19) Articles to 2013-02-18

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For decades I have been unmoved by doomsayers, it’s when I read the optimists that I become afraid. Take food. The supply keeps growing faster than population and there’s still lots of room for more intensification – at more than one fossil calory for every calory on the plate and growing. ...

(13-02-11) Articles to 2013-02-11

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I have grave doubts abouts Chimps’ ability to evaluate abstract tokens correctly, in fact I expect most humans to act differently when using symbolic tokens from what they’d do when actually distributing tangible goods. That said, if Proctor et al.’s result is good enough for Milinski, whom I’ve found always to be exemplary in his rigour, then it’s good enough for me. ...

(13-01-30) Articles to 2013-01-30

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Lots of good stuff this week, that does not need any comment of mine added.

(13-01-19) Articles to 2013-01-19

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Castle et al. claim to have excluded confounding cohort effects. I’m not fully convinced. Only a few decades ago it was very rare to interact with anyone commercially you did not expect to deal with many times in the future too. Anonymous strangers were a rare occurrence, one’s grandnieces and grandnephews did not stay out of touch ...

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