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Pessimists admit things might go right but can easily recount dozens of ways how they may go wrong while optimists consent they might fail but enumerate many ways of success. Sonnemann et al. explain the role of this numerical imbalance.
According to Yan et al. variable speed pumps save less than one percent of energy Read the rest of this entry »
In its issue of June 28th, 2013, Science Magazine’s News of the Week column had this quotation from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences about its new report The Heart of the Matter, which makes the case for increased support for the humanities and social sciences:
The stem of the flower is STEM education, and the humanities are the blossom. Without the blossom, the STEM is completely useless.
Very few statements ever manage to stray further from the truth. When a blossom is severed from its stem, the blossom withers and dies while the stem, though lacking grace and beauty, Read the rest of this entry »
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Something is deeply flawed about genetic method and theory and I doubt any serious progress will be made until that fundamental problem is solved. Some traits like intelligence and body height are highly inherited, studies on families and twins consistently find inheritance to account for 50 % and more of the variation. Intelligence and success in school and education are highly correlated and inherited is generally understood to mean genetic. So when Rietveld et al. regress full genomes of more than 100 000 people against educational attainment and find an R2 of 0.02 % or explain one month of total education (not sure how those two numbers are meant to fit together) this result can only be called a total failure. Read the rest of this entry »
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The Howiesons Poort industry used to be seen as a distinct horizon marker that occurred at the same time in MIS 4 all over southern Africa. At Diepkloof the dates published by Zenobia Jacobs (science 322 (2008), 733–735) fell on a continuous unbroken line Read the rest of this entry »
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A general rule of biology states that small animals like rodents and deer require high-quality food like seeds, buds, and shoots while nutritionally poor fodder favours large species like mammoths. This is the probable driver behind the size of the dinosaurs as well as the size difference between gorillas and bonobos. So what Craine is obviously doing here is confusing Read the rest of this entry »
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Cacioppoa et al. is a typical example of a non-report not giving any of its results. That the differences in mean marital satisfaction scores (whatever that may be) look small doesn’t mean anything, but to evaluate those differences and to decide, whether they are meaningful or not, we’d need standard deviations and standard errors and none of those are given. Read the rest of this entry »
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I fail to understand how Morton et al. could ever have been accepted for publication. Just because someone prefers something does not in the least imply he’s going to get it. Older women may well be – and are – less desirable, but they’re available and get pregnant all the same. Later children of older women have siblings to care for and look after them Read the rest of this entry »
Sie sprechen von den „besetzten Gebieten“. Bitte erklären Sie uns, wie der Staat heißt, dessen Gebiete Israel angeblich besetzt. Britisches Mandatsgebiet? Das war einmal. Jordanien? Will das Westjordanland aus Angst um die eigene Sicherheit nicht geschenkt haben. Palästina? Ist nicht mehr als ein UN-Beschluss, ein Gebilde Read the rest of this entry »
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In 1990 the rate of child deaths under five in the bottom quarter of countries was 14 times that of the top quarter. By 2011 that gap had risen to 23 times. So how do nature justify their ridiculous claim of a closing gap? Read the rest of this entry »
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Bowles and Choi make a testable prediction for some parts of the upper Paleolithic. Interestingly four of the seven Neanderthal teeth with cooked starches in Henry 2011 (PNAS 108, 486–491, list of 2011-01-14) are from their window of 38–36 ka BP and at 46 ka, Read the rest of this entry »
