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What Kemp reports about America strongly smacks of the kind of ideological cleansing practised by Lyssenko and Mao. I may be misled by unfamiliar terms, but as far as I can tell the dismissed Armitage was neither a lecturer nor assistant professor but a technician, and a good one at that. Since when do university students need cloistering, indoctrination, and being protected from whacky ideas? When the university president (more…)
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If Shimelmitz et al. are right, then humans up until the dawn of Neanderthals and moderns had to make do without the nutritional advantage of cooking. This is the opposite of what Wrangham claims, but it would explain the last synchronous spurt of brain growth in two disjunct areas of the world.
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There are two rules that psychologists, sociologists and all the other humanities will probably never grasp: 1) Correlation is not causation, 2) Any regression between the most random data will always yield a definite result with a non-zero slope. Most results shown in d’Acunto et al. depend on one or two outliers alone, and those few (more…)
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Marsh et al. are a particularly strong example for the meaninglessness of statistical significance. While their figure 2b clearly shows a significant difference at the group level, the two groups become completely identical by just taking away two individuals from each, and the predictive value (more…)
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Successful teachers have always scattered witty or engaging anecdotes throughout their more serious stuff. Gruber et al. now show why this is so effective.
Currently the press is full about stretching before sport being not only not beneficial but downright harmful. (more…)
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The result by Franco et al. is unexpected and perhaps disturbing. Publication bias is not a result of journals rejecting null results but of them not being written up and offered in the first place. Understandably having come up with a seemingly plausible hypothesis one will always feel better having it confirmed than (more…)
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Looking at Boëda et al. I see several caveats. All the supposed tools were found near the tops of gravel layers of similar grain sizes. During excavation the fine grained layers are carefully scraped away, so it is the top of any gravel layer that emerges prominently and catches the eye. Lower down the need to remove stones leaves an irregular surface, where (more…)
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Sher et al. use LOWESS to draw regression lines through extremely noisy data. They then go on to interpret those in far more detail than the data warrant. Their single limited sample makes it impossible to distinguish between true age-related changes and random, individual idiosyncrasies. I accept all their first-order results (none of which are new or surprising), but (more…)
