First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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In the past century and probably already 3.5 millennia ago in Mesopotamia (Altaweel 2012) there are dozens of cases where scientists and advisers went out and told farmers what to do, just as Schiermeier wants them to do today. In most cases that advice turned out to be counterproductive or even catastrophic in the long run. Farmers tend to be cautious and conservative and over centuries and millennia they managed to improve, not degrade continuously famed lands. This changed only with the economic pressures and belief in progress of the last half century, leading to soil loss and degradation at an unprecedented scale.
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At the moment Benson et al. is nothing but pure, silly playfulness, but I’m convinced that once these methods are securely mastered serious applications will be found. I’ve no idea what they will be, but they’re sure to be novel and entirely unprecedented.
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It’s a fact, compared to the society as a whole or to freshman students there are too few female professors in most subjects. What to do? Elevate first year students to full professorship immediately? Hardly. Looking at the figure in Normile the seemingly very different curves for faculty and full professorship become identical if we add a ca. twelve year lag between them. How long does it typically take men from first joining the faculty to be awarded a full professorship? As the old Jewish joke says, if you ask G”d to grant you a lottery win, at least go and buy a ticket first.
I also find it deeply disturbing to suggest changing the way of doing things in science, just because young and inexperienced women tend not to like them. You should choose your procedures according to what works and what yields results and not what looks nice when seen from outside.
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With the extreme mixing, movement, and mobility of populations following the world wars and through modern economy, human genes get mixed over unprecedented distances. Following Joshi et al. this might partially explain the Flynn effect and also the academic success of Chinese Americans. It also confirms the long suspected effect on societies where marriage inside clans and among relatives is the norm.
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Nowadays it has become quite fashionable to style yourself a disadvantaged minority and claim special privileges. If women can do it successfully in spite of embodying the actual majority, why shouldn’t we dichromates at 2 %? No wonder I like Álvaro and can confirm her results.
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There is a recent global warming – the Little Ice Age was real after all – and to a greater or lesser degree human influence probably does have a part in it, possible has had for the last 10 000 years. As Dutton et al. show yet again that does not mean it is either unprecedented or catastrophic. As far as human experience goes back, the warm times have always been the good ones, although the wind swept mammoth steppes with their abundant herds did have their nice sides for small and widely dispersed groups too.
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Frangipane is a classic example of how the long and diverse view of the historian can and should guide the short term goals of the politicians. Both the USA and Europe would do well to take her conclusion to heart, but I see no sign of that going to happen. At least we can teach our children what to expect.
One might conclude from these cases that it was only full integration between interacting ethnic/cultural components that led to lasting development, albeit by sacrificing certain cultural traditions, whereas the lack of integration, even in diverse sociopolitical contexts and models of interaction, was a source of instability and conflict.
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In her Teotihuacan article Manzanilla demonstrates how multiethnicity can work for a time, if all groups compete in a productive manner through their contributions. With their stronger pressure towards earning a living the USA do better here than Europe with its comprehensive state handouts. Still she does point out the inherent instability and coming breakdown of such arrangements.