First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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Reading about it elsewhere I first took Haggerty to be an obvious scam. But it seems Economic Geology is a genuine, reputable journal and there really is something in it. And no, it’s not the April 1st issue either.
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No doubt forced breaks can hold back a career compared to unencumbered colleagues. But it seems Nicholson is overstating her case. As we all know, thinking about a problem does not only occur while sitting at our desk but also during the times when we’re apparently doing nothing, more so when that nothing does not entail other cognitive problems. So assuming a full time job would result in a proportional rise in high quality output has to be a promise that can’t and won’t be kept.
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It is heartening to see that Granger et al. have finally left behind an embarrassing legacy from the beginnings of radioactive research. The first to pursue it were chemists not physicists and that resulted in the unfortunate choice of a half-life instead of the standard time constant, that had been employed in physics and electrical engineering for ages. Once established these historical mistakes prove inordinately difficult to get rid of.
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Admittedly after a lot of choosing and fiddling all the dates given in table 6 by Guérin et al. are internally consistent and conform to external evidence. Looking at figure 5 though and at figs. S8 and S9 in the supplement I can’t help but feel that the error margins given in table 6 are little more than wishful thinking.
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The bending strength, or rather section modulus to give it the correct name, as plotted by Ruff et al. is a derived value, dependent on at least size, shape, and internal structure among others. All three are variable and only the first two can be measured in archaeological samples. The true bending strength also depends on the material strength, which is variable and unknown too. Biological growth is an adaptive dynamic compromise in all living tissue. It may well be that the relation of bone strength and internal structure to limb cross section changes depending on the kind and quality of available food while keeping the bending strength roughly constant. The authors completely fail to tell us how they derive at their values either in their methods or their supplement – and no reviewer seems to have caught that omission – and there’s no way to ascertain what their derived value relates to. It may be sedentism, but from the data given we’re not to know.