First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
As if widespread misuse of data dredging and applying single-outcome tests to multivariate analyses were not enough Nieuwenhuis et al. have uncovered yet another widely spread use of bad statistics.
It seems the Aquatic Ape hypothesis espoused by Elaine Morgan and spurned by everybody else is not that silly after all. At least Niemitz from FU Berlin ought to know what he’s talking about.
Different habitats house different prey animals and thus encourage different hunting strategies. If this conclusion seems too trivial to publish, Knell \& Hill don’t agree. I can’t honestly see them adding much of substance to the sentence above, though. Making averages from the few data points in figure 6 seems ridiculous, yet those are, what they use in their argument, though it admittedly gets better in figure 11. They quote rates as dimensionless numbers. While it is rather obvious where to add a “per year” to their equation and to the cull rate in table one the same can’t be said for table 2. Are the rates quoted per month, per season (of unspecified length), or per year. If the latter, is per year set equal to per season, as each season occurs once in a year or is it calculated in the usual way, like driving 50 miles per hour when the whole journey of five miles takes about fifteen minutes in all or like the power of a laser pulse is given in Watts when the length of the pulse is far shorter than a second. Published data with lacking or meaningless units are worthless.