First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Anonymity as in Couzin-Frankel is and stays a double-edged sword even if well established in the system of peer review. The suggestion has been made, and is IMHO to be taken seriously, to reverse the system and let named peers judge anonymized papers. As Richard P. Feynman said: (more…)
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Beckes et al. offer a sensible hypothesis and a reasonable method, so at first sight there is little reason to doubt their result. Looking closely they rely on modest correlations arrived at from a limited number of data points, n=22. As they themselves rightly conclude the r=0.59 and r=0.43 in their figure 3b are essentially one and the same. So their whole result hangs on (more…)
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
As it panders to my personal values and prejudices I would have very much liked to endorse the study by González-Jiménez et al. The Trojan Number of 504 notwithstanding their whole conclusion rests on a mere 26 cases (table 2). There is no significant trend (more…)
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Park & Brannon’s result is not about approximate mental math, as I first thought, but about eyeballing, so their result is not as obvious as it first seems and reveals something deeper and more meaningful.
Forwood is a healthy reminder of unrecognized confounders. Of course the smaller the effect (more…)
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Looking at Germany the snotty-nosed attitude in Fohrbeck, published by the trade union of German university teachers, seems rather unwarranted. Here too “one point”, i.e. the highest achievable mark, has become synonymous to “passed” with the real grading hidden in the decimal places and the application of knowledge to real life is what humanities graduates have to leave to tradesmen. (more…)
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Jack et al. report an interesting result concerning Mithen’s proposed leakage across cognitive domains. It seems these are old enough for a dedicated inhibition to have evolved, limiting but not suppressing the excesses of magic and religion. (more…)
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Pessimists admit things might go right but can easily recount dozens of ways how they may go wrong while optimists consent they might fail but enumerate many ways of success. Sonnemann et al. explain the role of this numerical imbalance.
According to Yan et al. variable speed pumps save less than one percent of energy (more…)
In its issue of June 28th, 2013, Science Magazine’s News of the Week column had this quotation from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences about its new report The Heart of the Matter, which makes the case for increased support for the humanities and social sciences:
The stem of the flower is STEM education, and the humanities are the blossom. Without the blossom, the STEM is completely useless.
Very few statements ever manage to stray further from the truth. When a blossom is severed from its stem, the blossom withers and dies while the stem, though lacking grace and beauty, (more…)
First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Something is deeply flawed about genetic method and theory and I doubt any serious progress will be made until that fundamental problem is solved. Some traits like intelligence and body height are highly inherited, studies on families and twins consistently find inheritance to account for 50 % and more of the variation. Intelligence and success in school and education are highly correlated and inherited is generally understood to mean genetic. So when Rietveld et al. regress full genomes of more than 100 000 people against educational attainment and find an R2 of 0.02 % or explain one month of total education (not sure how those two numbers are meant to fit together) this result can only be called a total failure. (more…)
