Nuclear Energy still most efficient

Nuclear Energy still most efficient



Fake News repackaged





Not believing it is the same as believing it.


Here he/she/it goes:


via The Evidence for the History of Jesus — NeuroLogica Blog

Claim: Study links shorter sleep and sugar-sweetened drink consumption

Claim: Study links shorter sleep and sugar-sweetened drink consumption

The mindless anti-sugar nanny state strikes again.

Short and sweet: This study is all based on self-reported (i.e., unreliable) diet and sleep data. I doubt the authors’ claim that the diet data have been “validated” and they admit that the sleep data are of unknown quality

The phenomenon of lousy data used to produce weak statistical associations is just GIGO junk science.

Particulate Matter in Outdoor Air Does NOT Cause Death

Particulate Matter in Outdoor Air Does NOT Cause Death

This is the ultimate fact sheet for debunking what has become the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s most potent regulatory weapon — the claim that fine particulate matter (soot and dust called PM2.5) in outdoor air kills people. This sheet will be updated regularly as needed. This will be Version 1 (September 22, 2016). Please let me know if you have comments/suggestions.


Transparent science conflicts with EPA’s secret science. The EPA’s claim that PM2.5 causes long-term death is grounded in two long-term epidemiologic studies, commonly referred to as the (1) Harvard Six-Cities Study [17] and the (2) “Pope” study [18]. Both studies are controversial for many methodological reasons. But the methodological controversies cannot be resolved because EPA refuses to release and/or refuses to compel release of the mortality data used in the studies to independent researchers for purposes of re-analysis and replication. For results to be considered to be scientifically credible, they must be capable of being independently replicated. In contrast, a large analysis of the recent daily air quality and daily death data from California for 2007-2010 reports no association between PM2.5 and death. [19] The data from the California study are available upon request from the researchers.

But haven’t EPA’s PM2.5 claims been validated by its independent science advisers? No. The group of independent science advisers formed to review EPA air quality science is the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC). In 1996, when the CASAC was actually mostly comprised of independent advisers, CASAC concluded that EPA had not shown that PM2.5caused death. While subsequent CASAC panels have ruled in EPA’s favor, these panels are almost exclusively comprised of researchers who receive hundreds of millions of dollars worth of research grants from EPA — and wind up passing judgment on their own work. These more recent CASAC panels can hardly be considered as independent of EPA. The nature of the PM2.5 science has not changed since 1996 — but composition of EPA’s “independent” panels has. [20]

What about claims that PM2.5 from indoor cooking kill people? The World Health Organization (WHO) claims that smoke from indoor cooking kills more than 4 million people die every year. [21] The studies used to support this claim depend entirely on the EPA’s claim that PM2.5 kills people. So the WHO’s claim is not supportable. While many individual researchers (not EPA-related) have attempted to examine whether indoor cooking increases deaths rates, they have so far not been able to link PM2.5 with death. [22]

Conclusion: PM2.5 does not kill anyone. The EPA’s claims of PM2.5 lethality rank among the most nonsensical, fraudulent and readily disprovable scientific claims ever.

Original Article by Steve Milloy

Nul uren contracten, werkgevers schaam je

Nul uren contracten, werkgevers schaam je

Ik heb een kennis, alleenstaande moeder, die met gemak in de bijstand kon duiken na een langdurige ziekte.

Echte deze vrouw is trots, is iemand die niet afhankelijk wil zijn. Dus zocht ze naar een baan. Vanwege 45+ moest ze genoegen nemen met een uitbuiter die haar een nul uren contract aanbood.

Met veel voldoening nam deze vrouw die baan als call center juf aan. Voor 8 euro en nog wat per uur. Deze baan geeft haar plezier. Maar tegelijkertijd moet ze wel voltijds moeder zijn. Van dat schijntje in haar levensonderhoud voorzien.

Nu stel dat ze ziek zou worden. Dan kan haar werkgever gewoon besluiten haar niet meer op te roepen. Nul uren contract. Heeft ze voor getekend.

Maar wist ze ook dat als diezelfde werkgever haar niet meer oproept binnen de contractsduur ze geen recht heeft op de ziektewet als ze onverhoopt ziek word ofwel geen bijtelling van jaren bij haar WW heeft ingeval van ontslag?

Nee, tuurlijk niet stond niet in haar contract. Staat in de wet. Ze kan als ze ziek wordt lekker het heen en weer krijgen en haar kind ook.

Toch bijstand aanvragern maar dan m oetze eerst ontslag aanvragen of moet haar werkgever (slavendrijver) haar willen ontslaan. Op geldige gronden.

Maar er zijn geen geldige gronden om een zieke werknemer te ontslaan. Dus die vrouw krijgt geen WW. Mag blij zijn als ze bijstand krijgt.

Maar joh, er zijn belangrijkere zaken. Lekker politiek bedrijven over wat iemand ooit eens gezegd heeft en uren over het woord babbelen. Betaald goed, gaaf pensioen en nooit zorgen mocht je ooit eens een weekje de griep krijgen.

Leve Nederland. Wees er maar trots op

Reconsidering the evolution of brain, cognition, and behavior

Reconsidering the evolution of brain, cognition, and behavior

Concluding Remarks

Beside all the methodological and conceptual problems reported here, a significant bias in evolutionary neuroscience is the particular place given to human brain and cognition. As stated by Deacon; “we are, after all, the ‘sapient’ ape, distinguished from all other species by our unusual mental powers. But this has also motivated the many preconceptions that we bring to the topic that affect both the selection of scientific evidence and our interpretations of it. The single most pervasive issue behind most of these preconceptions is the notion of human intellectual superiority” (Deacon, 1990a, original quotation marks). Under this view, it is the fact that the human brain is not at the top of a criterion that makes this criterion inadequate for determining intelligence, and conversely. The misconceptions that this approach has lead, even at the brain size level (see above), have a heuristic value and warn against considering this approach for more complex variables. This comment echoes Chittka et al. (2012) who, referring to an analysis that found human species to be the slowest in a color learning task, warned that although “there may be good reasons not to equate learning speed with intelligence […] the fact that humans do not top the chart should not be one of them.”

The importance of such fallacies can be broadened to the mammalian brain in general. For instance, spontaneous mirror self-recognition occurs with the 350 g chimpanzee’s brain (Gallup, 1970), the 2000 g dolphin brain Tursiops truncatus (Reiss and Marino, 2001) and the 4000 g elephant brain Elephas maximus (Plotnik et al., 2006) but also with the small 5 g magpie brain Pica pica (Prior et al., 2008). More generally, the complex cognitive abilities of several bird species (Emery and Clayton, 2004; Emery, 2006; Kirsch et al., 2008), suggest that the brain architecture of birds is particularly efficient. This is interesting, given the relatively recent misconception that bird intelligence was limited and their behaviors only stereotyped (Emery, 2006) and the still widely accepted postulate that the mammalian brain is the most complex and efficient structure in term of cognitive abilities. In fact, the highest ratio of cognitive abilities to neuron number could possibly be found in non-vertebrate taxa such as cephalopods (e.g., Hochner et al., 2006; Grasso and Basil, 2009; Ikeda, 2009) and insects (e.g., Menzel and Giurfa, 2001; Chittka and Skorupski, 2011).

Finally, it is particularly striking to note [as Griffin (1976) did more than twenty-five years ago] that the subjective part of behavior, that is, the way animals experience the world, has been systematically put aside in comparative studies of animal behavior. As stated byShettleworth (2001): “it is possible, indeed usual, to study the ways in which animals acquire information about the world through their senses, process, retain and respond to it without making any commitment about the nature of their subjective experience or awareness.” Yet, what makes a bird or mammal flee danger is fear or pain, to search for food is hunger, what makes it look for mates is sexual arousal and for a place to sleep is fatigue, so that the subjective dimension of animal mind; consciousness, is the fundamental link between brain, cognition, and behavior. Studying animal brain and behavior without raising the question of how animals experience the world is likely to be as incomplete as was studying biology without evolution. In fact, this is one of evolutionary neuroscience’s principal challenges.

Full Study