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Urgolites et al. repeat a common and potentially devastating mistake, when they state “performed similar to the controls P > 0.1”
. That a difference is too small to show up as significant in only 5 subjects, means it can’t be demonstrated to be present. This is by no means the same as claiming it can be shown to be not present. Read the rest of this entry »
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The real null-hypothesis Iliev et al. are testing against is, that words and texts are nothing but meaningless random noise. If there is a content, and if this content or its distribution is determined by external circumstances, then their tests 2 to 4 are meaningless and prove nothing. This is not the case for the linear trend in test 1 but here too they failed to take an important point into account. Language is a social construct Read the rest of this entry »
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I have just been referred to the article by Kaplan (in a journal I do not read regularly, thanks Bernie), who has reevaluated the extent of human induced landscape change in the Holocene. It seems that, as I said on 2016-01-23, Ruddiman’s hypothesis looks well established by now and we should perhaps begin calling it a theory.
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Having next to no previous knowledge about Alfred Rust for evaluating Ickerodt’s comments about him, the article itself is all I have to go by. But that alone is fully sufficient to tell the difference between reasoned argument and prejudiced denigration.
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Lonely people die younger, social contacts help to live longer. Digital “social”
media are said to make you lonely. So Hobbs et al.’s headline, claiming online socialising to work nearly as well as in real life, must come as a godsend to all those digital entrepreneurs out there. As so often happens, their real result is well hidden near the end of the introduction, the least read part Read the rest of this entry »
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In discussing direct, human observable cause-effect relationships correlations of R2≈.2 or R2<.05, as used by Key et al., ought to be seen as utterly beyond the pale. Both their main regressions in figure 4d and e seem to stem from the group of outliers above 150 and 250 seconds alone. Read the rest of this entry »
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As far as I can tell the results derived by Krupenye et al. and concisely explained by de Waal are meaningless and tell us nothing. Read the rest of this entry »
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I wish psychologists would extend the careful preparation of their experiments and their specificity to precise and limited circumstances as claimed by Bryan et al. to the reporting of their results, which quite to the contrary often come out generalised and overblown as Gerber et al. rightly point out.
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Just like Epstein et al. (list of 2016-09-09) Knapp et al. demonstrate the remarkable resilience of nature. The short-term response to change often looks catastrophic but turns out not to be in the longer term. Viewing the vast climate swings of the past it obviously has to be thus. Of course single species or even large numbers of them may easily fall by the wayside, and in the larger picture of things this may well include humans.
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Alright, what do we have in Mason? There is a new phenomenon, first observed in the 1960ies and with a cycle length of about 28 years months, yielding a grand total of two twenty-four observed cycles so far. Now, in the third twenty-fifth cycle something different happens and, guess what, we have a new shocking consequence of Global Warming, what else?
