Random Ramblings of a Raconteur

First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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.

First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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 (more…)

First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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?

First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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 (more…)

First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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 (more…)

First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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.

(more…)

First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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.

(more…)

First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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.

(more…)

First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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 (more…)

First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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 (more…)