Random Ramblings of a Raconteur

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

Seeing the comments and reply to Halpern I find her original conclusions confirmed, which goes against my preconception, but thus are the facts.

On May 25^th I wrote: “[Slimak’s] arguments against moderns are quite convincing too. So, could these be the elusive Denisovans?” Seeing the comment and reply by Zwyns and Slimak I now tend (more…)

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

The commentary by Beroza is wrongly listed under geology, it ought to be placed prominently in the social sciences, epidemiology and probably climatology. “A more subtle effect is cherry picking, which amounts to defining retrospectively the behaviour that is considered anomalous… They find, for example, that, when anomalous clusters are defined retrospectively, 30% of realizations of a Poissonian earthquake catalog will contain clusters that should occur less than 1% of the time.” (more…)

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

There is a reason for the Flynn-effect and the need to renormalize the test results for each year cohort. In Brinch I fail to see anything more than a simple training effect.

Talk about standing things on their head. It used to be the case, that parents paid to send their children to school and many parents still do. I don’t want that back, as it (more…)

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And once more another proposition of the “our forebears were all idiots”, “tradition is always wrong”, “new and different is always better” school has fallen flat on its face in the light of objective evidence (more…)

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I’m sorry, but the reply by Priyadarshi et al. is total and utter nonsense. When the Tsunami came, and for several hours after, all four reactor blocks and cooling systems were intact (more…)

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Finally Crocker & Cooper come round to addressing the crux of the fraud problem. Wicherts strongly reminds me of Richard P. Feynman on cargo cult science – diligently copying the outer trappings of what scientists do (more…)

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I know breast feeding is a bit of a pet subject with me, but according to Caspi et al. its effect on IQ is quite pronounced, about ½ σ, for all but a small genetic minority.

According to Molkentin & Giesemann there are real measurable differences between organic and mass produced milk. (more…)

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I find it very funny how the innocuous little story from the list of Oct 22^nd draws out the feminists of both sexes in Gerardin. Structurally it’s very similar to the ones about Santa [nature 456 (2008), 1007–1008] and Neanderthals [nature 453 (2008), 562] but neither of those has such well organised lobby groups with vested interests behind them. With all the power and finance in lobbying I’m never sure (more…)

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Crocker makes some pertinent points but completely ignores the facts starting to come out. From Callaway and Vogel of last week it becomes clear, there was more than one warning sign in his data that ought to have aroused suspicion. They didn’t. The scientific method relying on reproducibility and reproduction has completely failed here. (more…)

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Ramsden et al. are in conflict with decades old dogma. The next step must be to find out, what drives these changes.

The article to go with Callaway and Holmes is broken on the nature website and so far they have not seen fit to do anything about my error report.