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Zum Seitenende Ältere Texte bis 2015 Home & Impressum
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In Sunday school I have always found the idea of people making their own idols and then praying and sacrificing to them hard to comprehend. Becoming older, I often find people doing just that. Stocker et al. is another one treating his model as data and telling others using real data, they have to be wrong. Infinitely tuneable models with more parameters than points to be fitted can be tweaked to yield anything.
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“Optimism and looking at those things that get better are realism, not a rose tinted glasses. People are more prepared to promote improvements, if they believe in a chance for success.”
Thus, freely paraphrased, Hans Rosling in the report by Maxmen. Now if that is not tiqqun olam, then I don’t know what is. ...
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Urgolites et al. repeat a common and potentially devastating mistake, when they state “performed similar to the controls P > 0.1”
. That a difference is too small to show up as significant in only 5 subjects, means it can’t be demonstrated to be present. This is by no means the same as claiming it can be shown to be not present. ...
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The real null-hypothesis Iliev et al. are testing against is, that words and texts are nothing but meaningless random noise. If there is a content, and if this content or its distribution is determined by external circumstances, then their tests 2 to 4 are meaningless and prove nothing. This is not the case for the linear trend in test 1 but here too they failed to take an important point into account. Language is a social construct ...
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I have just been referred to the article by Kaplan (in a journal I do not read regularly, thanks Bernie), who has reevaluated the extent of human induced landscape change in the Holocene. It seems that, as I said on 2016-01-23, Ruddiman’s hypothesis looks well established by now and we should perhaps begin calling it a theory.
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Having next to no previous knowledge about Alfred Rust for evaluating Ickerodt’s comments about him, the article itself is all I have to go by. But that alone is fully sufficient to tell the difference between reasoned argument and prejudiced denigration.
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Lonely people die younger, social contacts help to live longer. Digital “social”
media are said to make you lonely. So Hobbs et al.’s headline, claiming online socialising to work nearly as well as in real life, must come as a godsend to all those digital entrepreneurs out there. As so often happens, their real result is well hidden near the end of the introduction, the least read part ...
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In discussing direct, human observable cause-effect relationships correlations of R2≈.2 or R2<.05, as used by Key et al., ought to be seen as utterly beyond the pale. Both their main regressions in figure 4d and e seem to stem from the group of outliers above 150 and 250 seconds alone. ...
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As far as I can tell the results derived by Krupenye et al. and concisely explained by de Waal are meaningless and tell us nothing. ...
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I wish psychologists would extend the careful preparation of their experiments and their specificity to precise and limited circumstances as claimed by Bryan et al. to the reporting of their results, which quite to the contrary often come out generalised and overblown as Gerber et al. rightly point out.
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Just like Epstein et al. (list of 2016-09-09) Knapp et al. demonstrate the remarkable resilience of nature. The short-term response to change often looks catastrophic but turns out not to be in the longer term. Viewing the vast climate swings of the past it obviously has to be thus. Of course single species or even large numbers of them may easily fall by the wayside, and in the larger picture of things this may well include humans.
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Alright, what do we have in Mason? There is a new phenomenon, first observed in the 1960ies and with a cycle length of about 28 years months, yielding a grand total of two twenty-four observed cycles so far. Now, in the third twenty-fifth cycle something different happens and, guess what, we have a new shocking consequence of Global Warming, what else?
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Woodley adds to my criticism of Beauchamp’s result in the list of 2016-07-17. In his answer Beauchamp admits the main underlying fact that he had done his best to hide in the original article.
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I’m still convinced that early Neolithic people did not have the means to transport and exchange staple foodstuffs in bulk. So if grain becomes visible as food, as Cristiani et al. seem to demonstrate, something else must be going on.
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Contrary to what Bagnoli claims, the landing point of a vertically shot projectile can be estimated quite easily and intuitively without employing the mathematics for an accelerated reference frame. He is wrong where he says “On its way down the opposite happens”
. That would only be true for a falling object starting off with the stationary angular velocity for its height. Our bullet doesn’t, ...
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The main result in Isley et al. that I can see, is that you can’t expect uneducated people to make educated choices. They react far more strongly to the way numbers are presented than to the numbers themselves. The evaluation of comparable alternatives relies on subtle quantitative differences. Presenting them as stark black vs. white contrasts is the way to run an efficient dictatorship or ochlocracy, not an enlightened democracy.
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Pavlicev & Wagner may be interesting, but is irrelevant IMHO. That tonsils and ossicles have their ultimate origins in gills may be so but tells us nearly nothing about their evolution and what they were selected for. The female orgasm seems to be a singular human trait, so tracing it back to something shared by all animals is no relevant explanation at all for its existence.
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Marie Curie, Clara Immerwahr, and Lise Meitner had to fight misogynic prejudice in university and even my own mother still faced it in industry. Of course all the less successful female students still claim the same, but the pendulum has swung and any discrimination left now clearly points in the opposite direction as Breda & Hillion demonstrate in one more current example.
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When I looked into it more than thirty years ago, storing 1 kWh of electricity in lead acid batteries cost at least 1 DM (due to the limited number of cycles). According to de Oliveira e Silva & Hendrick it has become slightly cheaper but only at the rate of inflation so the price now is a nominally identical 0.5 €/kWh. Regardless of the price and value of electricity this only makes sense ...
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There are many studies on signalling and costly signalling is, of course, costly and thus hard to fake. But this one by Jordan et al. has to be one of the first to inquire whether the signaler is indeed more trustworthy. I’m gratified to find this bias confirmed by fact.
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I have to endure enough junk as it is and I’d never want to read non peer reviewed publications if I can avoid it. That said Balietti et al. point out one of the downsides of the current review process and add one more voice to the choir looking for improvements.
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That perceived time can influence consciously observable effects like tiredness after a several minutes jog or ability to hold one’s breath is unsurprising. Park et al. show it to influence a purely physiological process of which we’re unaware and for which we have no sensation. To me at least this comes as a surprise, even more so as the effect seems to be large and consistent.
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The main studies on heritability and inheritance were done before the discovery of DNA and genes and they still stand. They are not invalidated by the search for a genetic base of most traits so far drawing up blanks. So Beauchamp’s non-result of statistical significance born from huge numbers alone does not ...
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Another short list and nothing to comment on.
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Fashionable hypotheses conforming to the prejudices of New Age psycho-babble have an easy ride into the most prestigious journals. It is a refreshing change to see Gerber et al. putting them to the test for once.
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Education leads to brain tumor – what a feast Khanolkar et al. have served up to the yellow press. Of course it’s only an observational study and the relative risk of only 1.2 is generally dismissed by serious science, but who cares. In the primary article, not the yellow press rehashes, higher education also boils down to money and socio-economic status and right at the end we find the true explanation: ...
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Lots of stuff from diverse areas this week but nothing I could add a meaningful comment to.
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Conley et al. would have been relevant a decade ago when they find that observable facts and phenotypes have no measurable genetic correlates. We now know, that no heritable trait seems to have them and that our understanding of genes and heritage is seriously incomplete. Thus the far reaching conclusion they draw from their non-result is unwarranted.
And even if it were not and if we take their result at face value, ...
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An important study by Andriole et al. on the efficacy of testing for prostate cancer has just been withdrawn. It has turned out that 80 % of the control group, assumed not to have undergone precautionary testing, has been privately tested too. So yes, the original report was partially wrong. But is it invalidated? ...
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So half of all responding scientists can’t reproduce their own results and over two thirds those by others, but less than a third accept they might probably be wrong, according to Baker? What’s going on here? If I repeatedly let go of an apple in midair and it refuses to fall, shouldn’t that ...
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As real data Anagnostou et al.’s results carry more weight than model gaming does. But then carbon dioxide’s warming potential has never been doubted as such. Interestingly the lowest of all the values shown is way above 500 ppm and, if that was sufficiently low to start the ice sheet development in Antarctica then, in spite of the hysteresis due to ice’s albedo feedback, there’s little reason to assume the same concentration today will melt it all away again.
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I don’t know what it is about psychology and such, but Luby et al. is another classic example of pure junk science. On the unexpected plus side, they do plot data for once, but then their diagrams’ legends have no units and don’t explain, what exactly is shown. What they find is a tiny effect whose significance is statistical only – the whole difference between the extreme ends of the range comes to about a third of the (estimated, no values given) standard deviation and is driven by a few outliers alone. ...
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The more isotope studies developed, the more ambiguous and less meaningful their results became. It seems that Naito et al. have found a new way forward with their analysis of single amino acids instead of bulk collagen.
Apologies for the prolonged leave of absence – moving house absorbs an inordinate amount of time, but now things are beginning to drift back to normal.
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Sex and gender are both purely social concepts and open to free and unconstrained reinterpretation. From reading Vikbladh it seems that the utter nonsense of this idea is finally beginning to dawn on even the artsy chattering classes. ...
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My short evaluation of Berkowitz 2015 (list of 2015-11-06) was based on the scant information from their article itself. Frank has generously taken on the task of reevaluating their raw data and given us his figure 2, which should have been in there from the start. What we see is a totally amorphous and widely spread data cloud with no discernible trend whatsoever. Of course mathematically, calculating a regression will always yield a result and the slope will never be exactly zero. And of course the more parameters you have, ...
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In a striking example of political correctness Mattson more or less verbatim states: “Radiation hormesis has been demonstrated in many experiments, but we refuse to accept it, as that would draw the rug out under the religiously required demonisation of nuclear energy.”
Eppur si muove!
...
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Looking at the comment by Gilbert et al. and the reply by Anderson et al. I shall disregard both their arguments’ merits and take Gilbert et al.’s most optimistic numbers of 85 % and 66 % at face value. What do they mean? The unspoken and unproven but implicit and generally accepted meaning of “statistical significance”
is, that only 5 % of results occur by chance and 95 % (or at least well over 90 %) should be replicable. This holds for the borderline significance of p=0.05. Most studies I read are less than p=0.01 or even p=0.001. So the implicit claim is that at least 99 % of them ought to be successfully reproduced. They aren’t. Something very basic is very much wrong with the results and the reporting in the psychological and sociological sciences.
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I have seen and commented on many sociological and psychological findings of dubious substance, relevance, and (non-statistical) significance, but Schilke et al. have set a new low. In a reply to comment they seriously cite a correlation of less than r2 = 0.01 to bolster their argument. How many zeroes behind the decimal point do you need before you can call a correlation nonexistent?
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It seems the years 1998–2012 have been the driest in the Levant for at least 900 a. And according to Cook et al. it is of course all down to man-made global warming. Let’s look at the details. I can’t fault either their data nor their methodology, both are sound and reported in detail. What we see are the last decades being unexceptional around the Mediterranean, with no serious dry spell since about 1960 (the scale doesn’t help to be more precise). The cyclicity even suggests, we’ve had it good for some time now and a new spell of drought is due. So what we have here is a strong regional anomaly. In general, and there are many examples for this, regional climate is more strongly influenced by local vegetation cover and albedo than by world averages. ...
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Interleukin 6 is an inflammation marker that can also rise under stress. The normal value in healthy subjects is about 1 pg/ml but it can rise up to 1000. Creswell et al. report on the success of “mindfulness meditation”
in lowering a heightened IL-6 value in long-term unemployed subjects. Both arms of the randomised study had normal and statistically identical values to begin with – 1.81 ± 2.03 and 1.21 ± .76 pg/ml. The slightly elevated value for the intervention group looks like most participants with normal and one or two with spuriously high values – as always data are not given. Four months after the intervention both groups show exactly identical values at 1.45 ± .78 and 1.41 ± .73 pg/ml. (I have converted the given SE back into the correct SD here.) If anything, all this study shows is the regression to the mean of a spurious difference in initial conditions.
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I’m not sure Frenda et al. has any meaning at all. Let’s look at the context. All of the subjects were voluntary participants in a study and well aware of the fact. In all probability they were all WEIRD, i.e. well off, educated, aware of their rights, and not easily intimidated by authority. Even if one of them were to damage expensive equipment it would take evidence of malicious intent for the university to do anything about it. All of them hadn’t slept all night, were tired, and this was the last step before they would be able to go home and lie down. Now is there any plausible reason, why the more impulsive among them should not just say “what the heck” and be done with it?
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There is a tendency to fawn all over nasty superiors. According to Matthews et al. a better strategy would be to shun and ignore them as much as the rules of politeness barely allow.
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The minds behind the Retraction Watch website 
confirm what I have been saying for ages and that the common press coverage is completely beside the point:
Question: Is it different when a team member discovers plagiarism by such a high-profile person?
Weber-Wulff: The only difference is that the press reports only on high-profile persons when they are politicians. The plagiarisms that trouble me more are those by people who are currently working in academia, ...
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Politically correct fascism has just hit a new low. As nature’s Seven Days column reports, generous funder and supporter David Koch, a man who has done more for the museum than many others combined, has just been mobbed off American Museum of Natural History’s board of trustees. The reason given is that he also funds research that might yield results that might clash with the totalitarian opinion leaders’ prejudices. This is what science has now become.
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What is it about geneticists like Henn et al. that makes them completely unable to use common language and at least define their terms? PNAS is not a specialist journal and both micronewton and microtesla are well defined SI units that have nothing whatsoever to do with time or population size.
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Martens and Sonnenburg et al. offer another take on the microbiome. This time not its importance but its vulnerability and risk of permanent loss is pointed out. In their study on rodents they do not even mention the wide-spread antibiotic poisoning and abuse seen in humans.
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For those who are interested science has a supplement on aging . Unfortunately they started the year with a totally broken dysfunctional remake of their formerly useful website.
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This week the articles and their abstracts stand for themselves with nothing for me to add.
