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Job et al. add to the growing number of studies on the placebo effect, albeit from a novel angle. I wonder how much else demonstrably works just because societal consensus says it does. The study does have the usual number of methodical shortfalls, though. Read the rest of this entry »
Friday, September 13, 2013, Erev Yom Kippur 5774
Palestine is not a state. It doesn’t exist. But don’t tell that to Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
For Abbas, Palestine doesn’t just exist; it exists in place of Israel. You see that in the occasional picture of Mr Abbas in his office or at a PA-sponsored gathering. In such pictures, Read the rest of this entry »
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Anonymity as in Couzin-Frankel is and stays a double-edged sword even if well established in the system of peer review. The suggestion has been made, and is IMHO to be taken seriously, to reverse the system and let named peers judge anonymized papers. As Richard P. Feynman said: Read the rest of this entry »
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Beckes et al. offer a sensible hypothesis and a reasonable method, so at first sight there is little reason to doubt their result. Looking closely they rely on modest correlations arrived at from a limited number of data points, n=22. As they themselves rightly conclude the r=0.59 and r=0.43 in their figure 3b are essentially one and the same. So their whole result hangs on Read the rest of this entry »
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As it panders to my personal values and prejudices I would have very much liked to endorse the study by González-Jiménez et al. The Trojan Number of 504 notwithstanding their whole conclusion rests on a mere 26 cases (table 2). There is no significant trend Read the rest of this entry »
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Park & Brannon’s result is not about approximate mental math, as I first thought, but about eyeballing, so their result is not as obvious as it first seems and reveals something deeper and more meaningful.
Forwood is a healthy reminder of unrecognized confounders. Of course the smaller the effect Read the rest of this entry »
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Looking at Germany the snotty-nosed attitude in Fohrbeck, published by the trade union of German university teachers, seems rather unwarranted. Here too “one point”, i.e. the highest achievable mark, has become synonymous to “passed” with the real grading hidden in the decimal places and the application of knowledge to real life is what humanities graduates have to leave to tradesmen. Read the rest of this entry »
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Epidemiology like that of White et al. is the classic hotbed of junk science but just this once I can find nothing obviously wrong or fishy. Perhaps I’ve had too much Tofu lately. Read the rest of this entry »
Die Wiedereröffnung der Verhandlungen mit den „Palästinensern“, die uns von einer Führung ohne Weitsicht und ohne klares Ziel aufgezwungen wird, stellen nichts als eine Herausforderung des Schicksals dar.
Über den entscheidenden Punkt in Kerrys Ankündigung erneuter Verhandlungen mit Judäas und Samarias Arabern gehen wir hinweg:
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Jack et al. report an interesting result concerning Mithen’s proposed leakage across cognitive domains. It seems these are old enough for a dedicated inhibition to have evolved, limiting but not suppressing the excesses of magic and religion. Read the rest of this entry »
