Random Ramblings of a Raconteur

First the link to this week’s complete list.

Mostly it’s seminar reading for the new semester this week.

First the link to this week’s complete list.

It will perhaps surprise no one, that I violently disagree with Farrington. The declaration of human rights is exceedingly recent and slavery was abolished in the scientific part of the world very shortly before. It’s still rampant everywhere else. The moral superiority of earlier societies is pure Rousseauan daydreaming Read the rest of this entry »

First the link to this week’s complete list.

I don’t quite see the point d’Costa et al. try to make from their results. Fleming did not invent or engineer the penicillium fungus but only discovered its effects. The fungus and other antibiotic organisms have coexisted with bacteria for probably millions of years, so resistance genes as such are not surprising at all. Read the rest of this entry »

The link to this week’s complete list.

This week it’s just the list. Enjoy.

First the link to this week’s complete list.

Nice try by Godfrey to popularise his rather obscure research by linking it to another high-profile one and a resounding slap from Cerling for his presumptuousness. But we’re all so boringly subdued and polite today. Look at Nernst and Haber, when the former demonstrated that the latter had no idea what really was behind the Ammonia-synthesis he received the Nobel Prize for Read the rest of this entry »

First the link to this week’s complete list.

The basis of science is the reproducibility of results and the basis of the scientific method is in actually reproducing them. Due to lack of funding and the race for “new” results this is rarely done any more and Richard Philipps Feynman already decried the end of the scientific age decades ago. The most recent case of Diederik Stapel was not exposed because his results were found to be false, they weren’t as probably no one has tried, but by what are essentially ad hominem attacks by his colleagues and coworkers. Although these allegations of fraud are probably true and the retractions correct, this is not an example of the scientific method at work but rather the rules and methods of mediaeval scholasticism.
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First the link to this week’s complete list.

Zhao 2010 is beautifully dismantled by Samanta and Medlyn. On top of their thorough analysis I note that Zhao‘s figure 1 shows no discernible trend whatsoever except for that inevitably introduced into any limited series by the arbitrary choice of start and end points. Read the rest of this entry »

First the link to this week’s complete list.

Hamann et al. show that from the age of three years on human children are more willing to share unequal rewards if they are gained through cooperation than if by chance or lone effort while chimpanzees do not make this distinction. Seeing that foraging for fruit is a lone effort while hominids have relied on cooperation for millions of years this looks like a sensible adaptation. Read the rest of this entry »

First the link to this week’s complete list.

This week I have nothing whatsoever to add to the abstracts. Happy reading.

First the link to this week’s complete list.

In centuries past it was hard to antagonize the church or the monarch and still keep your university position. This has passed but as Kupferschmidt demonstrates in the case of Edzard Ernst another powerful religious belief system coupled to vested financial interest Read the rest of this entry »