"So, to recap, 1) Cool paper. 2) Sex between blue-eyed people is not incest. 3) We have no idea when or where this mutation came from, but it is now conceivable that we could ask the question. 4) Embarrassingly bad science reporting spontaneously rises from the grave four years later and tries to eat your brain. "

Massively-hyped paper trying to model language history using lightly-repurposed biological models comprehensively debunked by very careful and linguistically-informed data analysis. One of the authors of the debunking shows up in the comments, and says:
"Finally, regarding press; a few news organisations were interested in the initial pitch, but lost interest when they realised that we didn't have a good story here about human origins."

"If pant-wetting were a sport, the recent study on how memory adjusts to the constant availability of online information would have launched the damp drawers Olympics.
‘Poor memory? Blame Google’ claimed The Guardian. ‘Internet search engines cause poor memory, scientists claim’ said The Telegraph. ‘Google turning us into forgetful morons’ wibbled The Register.
If you want a good write-up of the study you couldn’t do better than checking out the post on Not Exactly Rocket Science which captures the dry undies fact that although the online availability of the information reduced memory for content, it improved memory for its location.
Conversely, when participants knew that the information was not available online, memory for content improved. In other words, the brain is adjusting memory to make information retrieval more efficient depending on the context..."

Somebody (hopefully not me) really needs to write a book about vampirical hypotheses testing.

In this corner, a distinguished experimental psychologist who can actually read a paper in PNAS; in that corner, John Tierney.

Aargh, aargh, aargh. Look, it's a cute story, and Fallon seems to be trying to do good, but the illogic! Take at face value that this "warrior gene" (barf) allele predisposes to violence, all else being equal. Do we know all the _other_ genes which contribute to this? No. For all we know he has the "big ol' teddy bear" gene (just look at him!), which is much stronger. Or again, if the function of such-and-such a region of the brain is suppressing violent impulses, _and_ this shows up as metabolic activity, _and_ that activity is absent, maybe it's because he doesn't have many impulses that need to be inhibited.

And this, children, is how publicizing scientific findings actually comes to create myths.

Now this is what I call an epic take-down.

I seriously hope that the report itself is at a higher level than the 1953-vintage headline and unfocused noodling of the piece. (Since Tom Mitchell is involved, I expect so.) N.B., as a socialist, i am all in favor of the technological elimination of toil and drudgery, a.k.a. automation getting rid of crappy jobs...

They seem to have given up the struggle around 2007.

"It has actually been long established that the earliest evidence of artistically conscious humans has been found in, as we might expect, Africa, given that it’s where our species emerged. Specifically, South Africa, in Blombos Cave. There were beads made from shells, and geometric engravings on ochre – i.e. slam-dunk “modern” tokens, unimaginable of even the smartest dog, parrot, chimp, or even Australopithecine “Lucy.” And this stuff dates back to 75,000 to 80,000 years ago. No bosomy figurines, sure – but if what got dug up in Germany was jewelry and etchings instead, we can sure there would be the same claims that here was the birth of advanced thought."

Having read the papers and re-implemented the method, I now concur with Mark: this is an methodological EPIC FAIL.

When I wrote about Chris Anderson's idiotic piece back in the spring, I didn't say anything about the quote from Norvig, because it sounded very strange and not at all like Norvig. And, indeed, he now says "That's a silly statement, I didn't say it, and I disagree with it." Ah, Wired!

I forget how I wound up here, but it's well worth reading --- especially when you get to the flogging-of-dubious-products bit.

Barro and (especially) Levitt really do not come out of this looking good.

Why I do have this vivid mental picture of Mark defiantly shouting "¡No pasaran!" as he's overwhelmed by a horde of zombies/science writers?

Mark continues his lonely crusade to pound some sense and decency into science journalists writing about research on sex differences.

Morgan Meis hates on _Blink_ (I felt the same about _The Tipping Point_): the smaller stories are fine, the frame-tale is silly. Why _do_ Gladwell's books try to be synthesis and not just good journalism?

With bonus William Saletan bashing!

In addition to all the problems Mark lays out, it seems that the study has no way of differentiating between how people act and how they talk, or between behavior and impressions of norms.

"Boy babies are innately somewhat more interested in transdimensional monsters than girl babies are."

A profoundly - and characteristically - stupid cover story from Wired. (And I say this as someone who _works_ on nonparametric model discovery.)

When oh when will people learn not to confuse self-reports --- especially self-reports about sex, especially self-reports from sub-populations selected for bragging and lying! --- with reality?

"Despite what these articles in the Guardian and New York Times say, neuroscience has yet to show that directly measuring brain function predicts sales or advertising success better than existing methods."

Man, what a cluster-fuck of stupidity. (There is a decent behavioral experiment lurking underneath the, in this case, totally uninformative fMRI.)

I'm not sure where Mark finds the patience.

I like the definition of the "helga".

"But now we're talking about fitting a statistical model to the distribution across studies of effect sizes -- a measure of the difference between the distributions of outcomes in the "drug" and "placebo" groups -- as a function of initial severity. And t

I'm sorry, but this has to be pure confounding.

What heritability is and, more importantly, isn't. (Preach it, sister!) With particular reference to the BBC on obesity.

Excuse me while I bang my head into the wall. Ahh, that's better...

Dissociating receptivity to specific smells from reactions to them. Silly journalists do not say where the research was published. Cool picture.

" focusing on individual failings ignores the fact that all of the people involved -- scientists and journalists and executives and rent-a-weasels -- are responding to the normal economic and psychological forces within their diverse subcultures, which in