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Zum Seitenende Ältere Texte bis 2014 Home & Impressum
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Marginal lands have always been settled by the poor and disadvantaged driven off the more favourable ones and the all too frequent climatic downturns have always hit the marginal lands hardest. We can see that back to the earliest Neolithic settlements and the same pattern very probably already held true for Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. We can also see that this very use of the most vulnerable areas has always resulted in a disproportionate and lasting amount of ecological damage. So if the rich and advantaged are to spend enormous amounts of money as urged by Dennig et al. it will be used far better to get those settlers out of there than in a vain attempt at stabilizing their local weather patterns.
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At first glance I liked Scudellari a lot. Looking closer it’s a good idea badly executed. Myth 3 contains two glaring mistakes. First for a value that can only be roughly estimated and for which the current best guess is 86 milliards (billions in American) 100 milliards is a reasonable round number. Calling it wrong instead of rounded is just nit picking. Secondly the brain masses of all placental mammals closely follow a power low from their body masses with an exponent of around 3/4. Not all are exactly on it, the primates follow a line slightly shifted to higher values but with the same slope. Of all mammals included humans and dolphins are clear outliers beyond the normal range (Martin 1981, nature 293, 57--60). Myth 5 is just wrong. ...
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I’m beginning to feel like a broken record, but again all Blake et al. show us are (third order polynomic? – they don’t tell) regressions and no data whatsoever. ...
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I think the current retraction mania is getting silly and way over the top. Science is about truth, reproducibility and the ascertaining of facts. Of course ethical rules are important and violating them has to be punished, but retracting a valid and valuable result for purely formal reasons is to the detriment of all.
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Dibner, Perelis, and Mukherji strongly suggest that a life style of skipping breakfast and eating late at night may be an important contributor to obesity, diabetes and other health disorders. It might be a good idea, though hard to achieve in practice, only to eat during the time of daylight.
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As Dale et al. show, female bird coloration is not just a meaningless result of genetic constraints but the result of or at least linked to social and life-history variables. What they don’t consider is the other possibility that those variables are caused by female coloration that is itself the result of genetic constraints.
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As Damian & Roberts point out a result can be both statistically significant and practically meaningless – something obviously not taught in any sociology department in the world.
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False positive results need not be the result of fraud or lack of due diligence, they may just be bad luck as Fowler & Montagnes demonstrate. They offer a couple of – non fail safe – recommendations on how to avoid such pitfalls.
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My first reaction to Berkowitz et al. was ‘So what’
, as I tend to consider typical school math tuition between worthless and nonexistent and to assume all basic math is learnt at home or not at all. But it seems this intervention especially helps children of innumeric and math-anxious parents. If true this would make it an exceptionally valuable result. ...
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Male faculty for STEM subjects tend to reject studies that assert gender bias in their fields. So this is proof for their own gender bias and prejudiced rejection of female colleagues – at least according to Handley et al. Maybe so. But if ...
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In the current deluge of publications Kot asks a very relevant question: How much pure and utter nonsense is out there, that is not intentional and produced by humans?
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Some of the scientists involved in Boyajian et al. speculate that all the natural explanations examined so far come up short in one way or another and we ought to consider an extraterrestrial civilisation at work here. Maybe so. Let us wait and see and them come up with some evidence. What they published so far is entirely valid.
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Life has adapted to and survived in the real world and its wildly variable and changing climates, so it should be obvious, that (nearly) all its feedbacks have to be negative and its physiological changes limited. It seems this has been obvious to all but the adherents of the man-made global warming religion, ...
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I really want to know the Homo naledi fossils’ age now, but I’m totally at a loss to suggest a suitable dating method. We can be sure they are way out of the range for carbon. In the absence of dripstones and with neither heat nor light to reset radiometric clocks I have no idea what material to date.
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If you believe Kolbabová et al., the diurnal melatonin cycle of calves is upset by the magnetic field from 50 Hz power lines at least in winter. Is it?
Their n=80 and n=20/20 in Figs 1--3 violates common standards, as it does not count the number of subjects as usual but that of individual measurements. The total size ...
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What is science and is the way research is currently done, both in universities and the private sector, even able to produce science? Bohannon, the Open Science Collaboration, Le Noury et al., and Veresoglou all ask the question, an answer is not yet in sight.
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Every time you think the question of American settlement is near to becoming settled something new turns up to upset the apple-cart. This time Skoglund et al. have turned up evidence of two founding populations ...
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There is one inconsistency Leppard fails to explain. Seeing how little we find in regions, we consider to have been continuously inhabited for hundreds of thousands of years, how is it that artefacts left by single individuals in single lifetimes are found at all in the frequencies they obviously are on islands all over?
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Several of the studies cited in Cressey share the same common mistake. While purporting to examine recreational use, what they are really looking at is equal to getting drunk every day. That is not recreational use, it’s abuse. Recreational drinking means a glass of whine with a meal with friends or even, as in the case ...
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Whatever the risks and benefits of vaccination may be, what the study by Horne et al. really is about is the efficacy of large scale brain washing programs. So every responsible citizen and critical journalist should ...
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I had wanted (on 07-02) to let Alessia Errico’s stand as the final words on the Tim Hunt affair. It’s not to be. Reporters for The Times[1] have finally done what should have been any responsible journalist’s job in the first place and looked into the facts. They found Prof. Hunt’s words to have been ...
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Abramson is not just about religion and not just about Judaism, but about the general question of individual freedom versus the totalitarian aspirations of the state. And as Abramson clearly states it is completely wrong for anyone to watch from the sidelines as the American Jews do, just because we are not currently the targets. As notably said by Martin Niemöller, Totalitarianism is never sated and devours its victims singly, one group after the other. The only way ...
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In the past century and probably already 3.5 millennia ago in Mesopotamia (Altaweel 2012) there are dozens of cases where scientists and advisers went out and told farmers what to do, just as Schiermeier wants them to do today. In most cases that advice turned out to be counterproductive or even catastrophic in the long run. Farmers tend to be cautious and conservative and over centuries and millennia they managed to improve, not degrade continuously famed lands. ...
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In their comparison Beltrán-Sánchez et al. stress the higher male mortality rate in late middle and early old age and try to find reasons for it. The relative rates for individual causes of death that they look at are meaningless and rise just because people stop dying from other causes. They totally fail to look at absolute age-specific rates. ...
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It seems that beneath Kehdy et al.’s results lies the fact, that as a group Africans carry far more harmful mutations than Europeans do. This apparent fact is neither clearly stated, nor explained nor discussed.
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In this week’s list we find two new takes on the Bronze Age side by side. First there is the deconstruction by Kienlin and then the article plus comments by Ling & Stos-Gale that strengthens the old World System view with interconnections as represented by Kristiansen, Kienlin’s nemesis.
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I read Ahmed et al.’s numbers as probably one serious side effect per 1000 treatments. For a purely preventative, non-essential treatment of limited efficacy against a mostly harmless, transient illness, that seems a lot to me and I can’t quite agree with Wekerle calling it minute.
Correction: It is one per 10 000. So perhaps I can agree with Wekerle after all. For myself I’m only inoculated against life-threatening and permanently disabling diseases, not flue.
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I am very happy to see my thoughts on the responsibilities of co-authorship echoed by someone with hopefully far more clout in the relevant circles. See C. K. Gunsalus and Drummond Rennie in retractionwatch 
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Reading Hockings et al. in the original we find the press reports about it as overblown as they so often are. There is no proof at all that Chimpanzees actively seek out alcohol. What we do find is, that in the tropics highly nutritional fruit and liquids with high sugar content tend to ferment very quickly, so every fructivore had better develop a tolerance for alcohol contamination. Another well known example are fruit flies.
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Reading about it elsewhere I first took Haggerty to be an obvious scam. But it seems Economic Geology is a genuine, reputable journal and there really is something in it. And no, it’s not the April 1st issue either.
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If there is one point I have been keeping banging on and on and on about here all over the last months and years, it is the responsibility of co-authors. Just now an especially blatant example has come to light.
Last December science published a prominent article by LaCour & Green. I didn’t pick it up at the time and didn’t comment on it, but apparently it raised waves among the political science community. The slow and tortuous route to its debunking ...
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It has long been suspected that an additional organ transplant may not necessarily be the best treatment in the aftermath of an already critical operation. Pattakos et al. supply the proof for the short term and confirm that in the long term it makes no difference anyway. ...
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Camps et al. give the total yearly supply of a photovoltaic generator in kW/h and the number of nominal peak-sunshine hours per year for Barcelona as 1.6 instead of 1600 (figures 9–11). Nagasawa et al. seem to consider a change of 100 % to be synonymous to “no change”. And Paolo et al. call an absolute thickness given from an arbitrary zero-point a “thickness change” in their figure 3. This is like calling a temperature given in degrees Celsius a “temperature change” or ...
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Price et al. and van Boeckel et al. paint a clear picture, that can result in only one thing: The youth of today will again see their grandchildren die of infectious disease, just as the lost siblings of their great-grandparents did. As evolution tends to make diseases less virulent in the long run of adaptation and as inoculation will probably continue to work, the new diseases can be expected to be much more vicious and horrible than the traditional ones. ...
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So much for the ongoing and unfinished fight for female equality say Williams & Ceci. Interestingly it is just the one group most strongly stereotyped as male chauvinists, who have retained a sensible degree of objectivity.
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Compared to what was reasonably to be expected, the effect reported by Besbris et al. is tiny. Rather than stressing it, their title had better indicated, that the widely held expectation is as good as refuted. They completely fail to tell us what the error bars in their figure 2 are supposed to mean. Standard deviation, standard error, range, quartiles – we’re not supposed to know. Neither do they discuss ...
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Kendler et al. is highly relevant for divorce cases, where the courts’ custodial sentencing all too often deliberately creates fatherless households. As everyone can see, motherly love tends to burn strongest in those countries, mostly Germany and the USA, where custody is coupled to significant monetary entitlement. Naturally the incentive is strongest for less well educated women with prosperous husbands, i.e. those where father deprivation hurts most. Considering the size of the effect, this may well have measurable consequences on the national level.
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And here we go again, and again it’s none other than the Journal of Archaeological Science. In Piqué et al. there are nine co-authors, several referees and an editor, who have all signed their names to passing the article and not a single one of them has noticed the figure (5) with no labels on the axes whatsoever and a caption ...
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Something seems to be missing in Normile’s (unreferenced) description. X-ray imaging only works, because the anode is more or less a point source. Muons come from all sides, so you’d need a highly directional detector. How do you achieve that for something that nearly does not interact and can’t be shielded?
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This week I look at two more studies about colorectal cancer. Brenner et al. 2009 is the source for Wikipedia’s number of 11.4 % advanced adenomas found in screening. Brenner et al. 2015 extrapolate the number of prevented cases to 180 000 (100k for men plus 80k for women) until death. For 4.4 million screenings ...
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It is tempting to dismiss Smith et al. out of hand. Their method is questionable or at least not widely accepted, but it seems they have been very thorough and have eliminated most sources of error. So what can it mean? Seeing that until the Highy Middle Ages the transport of staple food was marginally feasible only in famines ...
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One way to stop something from being done badly is, I suppose, preventing it from being done at all. I for one have ranted about ridiculous, irrelevant, and wrong claims about statistical significance often enough. Still I do have my doubts, that banning them completely, as the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology has just announced in their editorial by Trafimow & Marks is the best answer out there.
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Popular literature tends to describe risk prone and overactive actors in the financial markets as hungry. Following Xu et al. it seems that once again language betrays a deep seated unconscious folk knowledge mostly disregarded by rational thought.
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The new studies mentioned by Callaway are both not yet available in reasonably legible form. I’m looking forward to that discussion.
Everybody is conspiring to demolish the beautiful Solutréen hypothesis, now also Boulanger & Eren. Shame really, but there you are.
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The brainwashing study by Falk et al., of interest to e.g. the junk food, sweets, alcohol, and tobacco advertising industry, cries out junk science loudly and clearly. The only value they don’t state a standard deviation for in their table 2 is the measured one ...
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I can’t access the primary source for Beniston but his conclusion seems rather overblown. Every limited time series with a definite cut-off at the beginning will produce ever increasing extremes in both directions. So during the fifties half of these were new minima, which seems low, since they fall in the middle of three decades of a known and well recorded decrease in average temperature. In the single recent year Beniston has picked out ...
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As Smith et al. report, the Fukushima plume has finally arrived on America’s west coast in earnest, doubling the bomb testing fallout and expected to double yet again by next year. Are thousands to die? Well, at its expected peak of 5 mBq/kg ...
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As often happens, Ling et al. become honest towards the end of their article. Contrary to what the title and abstract imply, they do not expect their new antibiotic to prevent resistance, but only for it to take longer to establish itself. Not quite the same thing, is it? Of course what all this does not address ...
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This month’s J. Arch. Science contains two glaring examples of Cargo Cult, the imitation of the outward appearance of the scientific method without any real sense and understanding of it’s purpose and substance. Pretending to describe the tool used for cutting her sample teeth Burt only names the maker of its electric drive. Even if that were at all relevant, which it isn’t, ...
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I think Lesk is conflating two totally unrelated problems. There is wrong, fraudulent, or irreplicable research and there are authors, who submit their own identical results several times to more than one journal. These two things have no bearing on each other, except perhaps ...
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I don’t understand the article by Couzin-Frankel at all. She’s been an experienced science journalist for years and ought to be at home in quantitative thinking. Personally I am grossly overweight, have hated and eschewed all kinds of physical exercise at least since age three, and run a partly treated high blood pressure. All those are large and well known risk factors. Other people smoke, drink, or engage in sports (to my observation the highest risk factor by far for all kinds of accidents and injury). Are any of those ...
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Nearly all of the total methane emission from abandoned wells comes from very few highly emitting cases, according to Kang et al., suggesting that little effort might make a big difference here. On the other hand their total sample size is a mere 19 wells, so before acting a much more comprehensive look is in order.
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