Random Ramblings of a Raconteur

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I read Ahmed et al.’s numbers as probably one serious side effect per 1000 treatments. For a purely preventative, non-essential treatment of limited efficacy against a mostly harmless, transient illness, that seems a lot to me and I can’t quite agree with Wekerle calling it minute.

Correction: It is one per 10 000. So perhaps I can agree with Wekerle after all. For myself I’m only inoculated against life-threatening and permanently disabling diseases, not flue.

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I am very happy to see my thoughts on the responsibilities of co-authorship echoed by someone with hopefully far more clout in the relevant circles. See C. K. Gunsalus and Drummond Rennie in retractionwatch .

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Reading Hockings et al. in the original we find the press reports about it as overblown as they so often are. There is no proof at all that Chimpanzees actively seek out alcohol. What we do find is, that in the tropics highly nutritional fruit and liquids with high sugar content tend to ferment very quickly, so every fructivore had better develop a tolerance for alcohol contamination. Another well known example are fruit flies.

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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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If there is one point I have been keeping banging on and on and on about here all over the last months and years, it is the responsibility of co-authors. Just now an especially blatant example has come to light.

Last December science published a prominent article by LaCour & Green. I didn’t pick it up at the time and didn’t comment on it, but apparently it raised waves among the political science community. The slow and tortuous route to its debunking Read the rest of this entry »

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It has long been suspected that an additional organ transplant may not necessarily be the best treatment in the aftermath of an already critical operation. Pattakos et al. supply the proof for the short term and confirm that in the long term it makes no difference anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

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Camps et al. give the total yearly supply of a photovoltaic generator in kW/h and the number of nominal peak-sunshine hours per year for Barcelona as 1.6 instead of 1600 (figures 9–11). Nagasawa et al. seem to consider a change of 100 % to be synonymous to “no change”. And Paolo et al. call an absolute thickness given from an arbitrary zero-point a “thickness change” in their figure 3. This is like calling a temperature given in degrees Celsius a “temperature change” or Read the rest of this entry »

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Price et al. and van Boeckel et al. paint a clear picture, that can result in only one thing: The youth of today will again see their grandchildren die of infectious disease, just as the lost siblings of their great-grandparents did. As evolution tends to make diseases less virulent in the long run of adaptation and as inoculation will probably continue to work, the new diseases can be expected to be much more vicious and horrible than the traditional ones. Read the rest of this entry »

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So much for the ongoing and unfinished fight for female equality say Williams & Ceci. Interestingly it is just the one group most strongly stereotyped as male chauvinists, who have retained a sensible degree of objectivity.

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