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Ruff, Ugazio & Fehr strongly amplify my tentative comment on Culotta (list of 2013-10-27). Rule accepting law abidance does not coincide with socially minded fairness but the two seem to form rather two opposite ends of a spectrum. This result can explain a lot of what’s observable in society where “good citizenship” is all too often paired with unbounded and ruthless egotism.
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Starr et al.’s result may be significant in a purely formal statistical sense, but while their figures 2 a and b may show a slight effect at the extremes, the distribution for the bulk of the population is obviously purely random. Another meaningless non-result. Read the rest of this entry »
It began as a seedling perhaps 150 years ago, when Reform Judaism began to separate religion from Judaism and G-d from Tanach. It then flowered into its own true Faith in the 1960’s, after Yasser Arafat invented the phrase, ‘Palestinian People.’
Before the 1960’s, no self-respecting Arab would tolerate being called ‘Palestinian’—for a simple reason: the word, ‘Palestine’ everyone knew, meant ‘Jew land’. To call an Arab a ‘Palestinian’ was tantamount to calling him, ‘Jew.’
Read the full text at berger-odenthal.de
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Contrary to common prejudice and contrary to what he himself seems to imply, the effect of teacher and school quality on further educational success seems to be negligible according to Chamberlain. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tymula et al. repeat the classic mistake of confronting their subjects with exact, numerically given probabilities. No real-life situation is ever like that, so their results are essentially meaningless. When trying to decide whether I can drive through a deep puddle or am likely to get stuck, the estimate is not numerical. Read the rest of this entry »
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In Shennan et al. their diagram for all regions combined is highly suggestive. For their hypothesis to hold they would have to demonstrate it for individual regions and highly diverse timings for individual onset of agriculture though. Read the rest of this entry »
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I find Salter & Crew’s result quite surprising. Received wisdom has it that bloomery iron is nearly pure and a lot of effort is needed to add carbon. Here they seem to have achieved high quality carbon steel in a simple one-step direct process. This reminds of Read the rest of this entry »
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Admittedly Mascaro et al. do not depend on just two or three outliers one could strike off to nullify their result. But still their main result is only present in the top and bottom quartiles of their figure 1 and conspicuously absent in the middle ground. They undoubtedly are on to something, as their figure 2c shows, but figure 2b, where it seems to rest in at most four data points, proves the weakness of their main conclusion. Read the rest of this entry »
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de Waal and Gavrilets offer interesting additional commentary on Opie (list of 2013-08-17) and Lukas (list of 2013-08-24). Read the rest of this entry »
