After an enforced update WordPress has become totally unusable. This blog is closed. Please see http://blog.berger-odenthal.de/ for a longer explanation.
But its content is going to continue appearing. The new address for scientific journal comments is http://axel.berger-odenthal.de/review/ 
and my political musings have moved to http://berger-odenthal.de/random/ . There too RSS-feeds will be made available.
Until all the old content can be moved, it will stay available here as an archive.
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Ordinary people’s choices are seldom as stupid and ill-informed as ivory-tower sociologists make them out to be. Are engineers really as sought after as Rozek et al. try to make out? From all I hear about career opportunities, pay offers, and forced early retirement, it does not look like it. What in American society are the real prestige jobs (more…)
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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The first reports on oxytocin a few years ago led some to ideas, that a small addition to our drinking water or similar might solve all our social ills. As Samuni et al. demonstrate, the hormone and its Janus-faced counterside have been part of primate evolution for quite some time.
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Cheon & Hong start from a plausible hypothesis – high ranking primates are known to monopolise high value food sources making it desirable for lower ranking ones to over indulge whenever there’s a chance. Unfortunately their study fails to prove their case and is systematically unsuitable for doing so. (more…)
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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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.
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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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. (more…)
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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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. (more…)
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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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 (more…)
