There’s something wrong with Tucker-Drob. The ten months group shows no correlation to parent’s status at all. So either status does not correlate to intelligence or intelligence is not hereditary – both are disproved. So the base values are corrupt and all conclusions from changes from that base probably meaningless. One possibility might be that identical age does not imply identical development. Just one guess at the solution might be the rate of development correlating negatively to intelligence during the first year. (If there’s less to make, you can finish earlier.) Whatever it may be, I don’t believe a word of exaggerated mathematics erected on a shaky fundament.
Lafourcade works with mice. Years ago there already was a hype about omega-3 and large-scale nutritional supplement trials did not show results. Perhaps humans aren’t rodents after all.
Ullah lets me raise the question, whether we too in Cologne ought to go for the open-source GRASS in favour of our proprietary Mapinfo.
Reynard deserves praise for publishing a negative result.
Singarayer and Wolff contradict Ruddiman, whose hypothesis I’ve always found appealing. In spite of the infinite tunability of Computer models I can’t find a handle to fault this result, though. So we still lack an explanation for unique ten-thousand-years long nearly fluctuation-less plateau.
Last week I forgot a book review. Two authors reached the surprising conclusion, that those, who go to college mostly for the parties and student life, tend not to learn a lot there. Unfortunately the book is rather expensive and so far in Germany only listed in one library in Mannheim. But the Mark Rich Library at the IDC in Herzliya has got it already.
And I forgot two short stories. With the first I’m not quite sure if it really is fiction or rather a prognosis for the near future. The second is not that good, actually, but quite nice all the same.
Here’s the link to this week’s complete list.