The vaccination lie and why you should get a booster shot nevertheless.

Vaccinated people think they are completely immune to Covid-19 and cannot infect others. This is a false assumption. In November 2020, Europe was on the brink of a triage situation. Now it’s November again, a year later, and the situation has worsened despite vaccination campaigns. What went wrong?

Fate of recycled tyre granulate used on artificial turf

The production of granulates as infill for artificial turf is able to process 21% of the end-of-life tyres in Europe, approximately 600 million kg per year. In doing so it avoids an annual CO2 emission comparable with the amount that could be absorbed by around 30 km2 of forest. However, dispersal of rubber infill to the environment is perceived as a problem. An amount of 3000–5000 kg granulate per field per year is currently used as underpinning for a European proposal to ban rubber infill as part of the intended restriction on intentionally added microplastics in 2021. By reviewing grey research reports, we found out that the dispersal rates are based on the false assumption that the annual granulate demand for refilling is necessary because of granulate losses to the environment. However, it has been ignored that part of the refill is needed because the infill layer settles and becomes more dense (compaction) and that part of the lost infill is collected and reused on the fields. In combination with unawareness and improper piling of snow in the past, these are the causes of the high estimates of infill dispersal per year. This paper shows the current state-of-knowledge about ELT granulate dispersal and shows that approximately 600–1200 kg refill is required annually to compensate for compaction and for some infill waste on pavements and in drainage sinks. Recommended mitigation measures are containment through optimized field and drainage construction, suitable maintenance equipment and practices and good-housekeeping rules for players and groundkeepers and handling end-of-life pitches. If these recommendations are implemented, the emission of ELT granulates to the environment can be reduced to virtually zero.

The birth of kindness

Kin-selection is sheer nonsense, based on the false assumption that the gene for helping is a rare gene, whose chance to be shared can only be provided by kinship. The gene for helping is instead universally shared within and across species with altricial young, invented to foster the survival of offspring. As begging and helping are complementary behaviors, both triggered by oxitocin ( mesotocin for lungfishes, amphibians, reptiles, and birds) begging is usually a reliable sign of the possession of the gene for helping. This is why helping is rewarding and allofeeding is widely diffused. Hence we can even see a sea gull feeding a penguin. It is not a mistake: it is the selfish gene for helping that recognizes itself in a gaping beak, not in an arbitrary tag as a green beard (Dawkins). If we have surplus of food and don't have offspring to feed, we too, as a sea gull, strive to bypass obstacles to energy flow, looking for someone else to feed, if not other humans, at least a pet.

LAW AND FAITH IN ANCIENT ISRAEL AND IN MODERN DEMOCRATIC STATEHOOD AS SEARCH FOR SOCIO-POLITICAL WELLBEING

In this contribution, the argument pits two cultural reflexes against one another. In modern democracies, religion is removed from the socio-political sphere; in ancient Israel, religion was inserted into the socio-political sphere. In both cases, the intention was the same: the socio-political wellbeing of the citizenry. Such a cultural comparison puts to question the false assumption in modern democracies, that a public sphere emptied of religion constitutes greater freedom.

Statistics used to infer inter-breeding between humans and Neanderthals are strongly predicted by flanking sequence heterozygosity

A large and rapidly expanding literature has grown out of the observation that humans carry a genetic legacy reflecting ancient inter-breeding with archaic hominins such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. However, a recent study suggests that a commonly used statistic used to assess legacy size, D, is driven mainly by heterozygous sites in Africa acting to increase divergence from our common ancestor rather than introgressed fragments outside Africa reducing divergence. To test this new model, I analysed how D is influenced by heterozygosity within a kilobase of each putative introgressed base. I find that flanking heterozygosity is a potent predictor of D, with introgression always being inferred as having occurred into the population with lower heterozygosity. This pattern cannot be driven by any introgressed fragments themselves, which simulations show create the exact converse pattern, but instead appears to be generated by heterozygosity acting to drive increased divergence from the ancestral sequence. This new model explains why introgression of haploid or semi-haploid regions is essentially lacking and why introgression is often inferred around immune genes and other regions under strong selection. More generally, these results raise the possibility that reported legacies are largely an artefact arising out of the false assumption that mutation rate is constant.

Aufklärung über die Sittlichkeit

Without doubt, Immanuel Kant's "Grundlegung" is one of the crucial documents of Western moral philosophy. However, it is sometimes considered to be one of Kant's – or even all of Western philosophy´s– "darkest" texts. The commentary makes it clear that the alleged darkness is essentially due to the fact that the text has long been read under a false assumption, insinuating that it was Kant´s foremost aim to provide a justification for the moral law in order to ward off moral skepticism. If one reads it instead with the understanding (which is also historically more appropriate) that with the invention of the categorical imperative Kant only wants to state and justify a new formula for the principle of morality in general in order to replace moral eudaimonism with a moral of autonomy –then it becomes readily apparent that the “Grundlegung” is not just a philosophical, but at the same time a literary masterpiece.

Forced Displacement and Broken Ties

Although most forcibly displaced persons are legal nationals of a state, they lack functioning citizenship with their governments. In fact, their governments are often responsible for the human rights abuses and conflicts that prompted their displacement to begin with. While some protections under international law are meant to fill the gaps created by these broken ties, in reality the displaced suffer widespread human rights abuses in the absence of a reliable state duty-bearer. Anti–Syrian refugee sentiments in Europe, refugee detention in Australia, and the stubborn refusal to acknowledge many “illegal immigrants” as asylum-seekers in North America are just a few examples of the severe challenges to basic human rights the forcibly displaced face in the absence of functioning citizenship. The inadequacies of refugee rights, including the false assumption that displacement is anything less than normal in our current system, lead to glaring denials of the rights to place and purpose for the displaced.

Invalid Interpretation of Passing Sequence Data to Assess Team Performance in Football: Repairing the Tarnished Legacy of Charles Reep

Background: The relative effectiveness of different styles of play at football has long been the source of heated controversy. The use of passing sequence data has recently been exploited as definitive proof that possession football is more efficient than direct play at producing goals. This has resulted in a number of high profile books, papers and websites claiming that the conclusions of Charles Reep, the founder of football performance analysis and a strong advocate of a direct style, were flawed. Objective: The first objective is to explain why passing sequence data cannot be used to give information about the relative merits of direct and possession play and hence why the recent harsh criticisms being made about Reep, his methodology and his conclusions are themselves flawed. The second objective is to review more logical and valid methods of analysis which can be used to assess the effectiveness of different tactics, strategies and playing styles. The third objective is to outline how this methodology has been put to practical and successful use for many years by a handful of performance analysts, but largely ignored by the academic community Conclusion: A short passing sequence cannot be used as a proxy for direct play. The uncritical way in which flawed conclusions based on this false assumption have multiplied has unjustly tarnished the legacy of Charles Reep. Other methods exist to examine the relative merits of different playing styles. These should be revisited, especially at a time when more and more performance data is becoming available.

The Aims and Structures of Ecological Research Programs

Neutral Theory is controversial in ecology. Ecologists and philosophers have diagnosed the source of the controversy as: its false assumption that individuals in different species within the same trophic level are ecologically equivalent, its conflict with Competition Theory and the adaptation of species, its role as a null hypothesis, and as a Lakatosian research programme. In this paper, I show why we should instead understand the conflict at the level of research programs which involve more than theory. The Neutralist and Competitionist research programs borrow and construct theories, models, and experiments for various aims and given their home ecological systems. I present a holistic and pragmatic view of the controversy that foregrounds the interrelation between many kinds of practices and decisions in ecological research.