First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
Marshall has obvious implications for the continual attempts to sever even one- and two-year-olds from their mothers and offload them to state run institutions for most of the day.
The more we come to know about mother’s milk, as in Gura, the more valuable it gets and less easy to substitute.
Black et al. reinforce the results by Brinch and Fryer (list of 2012-01-11) and Lager & Torssander (list of 2012-06-16). As long as there were many causes, financial and otherwise, curtailing schooling for those who wanted more and profited by it, more school meant better outcomes for the individual and society as a whole. Today all the incentives point in the opposite direction and presumably only those forego longer education, who really do not profit by it. It is only those, who are affected by a compulsory extra year, so it’s no surprise that no benefit occurs.
There is a decided scarcity of studies in the energy and fuel needs of early societies and the environmental consequences thereof. Two exceptions are Horne 1982 (list of 2013-03-10) and Marshall 1999 (list of 2012-10-20). As such Kaufman & Scott fills a desideratum. Unfortunately it turns out to be completely useless. The heat of evaporation for arsenic is beside the point, as once evaporated it’s lost. This is the main reason for the rapid degradation of recycled arsenic-bronze. Constituents need not be melted to become alloyed, solid tin is near-instantaneously sucked up by solid copper somewhat below the melting point. Also the energy needed to heat and melt the alloys and their constituents is nearly negligible compared to that for heating up the fuel, oven and air and the heat lost to the surroundings. What does influence these losses at least quadratically is the needed temperature and both tin and arsenic lower the melting temperature in equal amount (see Rieß and Subramanian). Certainly slight differences in the heat of fusion and evaporation for tin and arsenic are completely meaningless here. Incidentally this result could have been expected without further analysis just from seeing Kaufman & Scott giving the average ambient temperature to a precision of a hundredth of a degree.