Welcome back to the Carnival of the Africans - a carnival of Scepticism and Science, with posts supplied by Africans. I have scoured posts that have been submitted to me and harvested the web for suitable African fruit. Enjoy the African tastes that are spread before you. Also, because the Carnival has experienced an hiatus, I thought that I would extend the time limit to the past two months, rather than only the past month. Consequently, there are a fair number...

The Carnival of the Africans is returning on the 28th of June and I am hosting. If you're an African science blogger or have blogged about African-related science, please check out the guidelines, then link to your post in the comment section. I will do my best to respond to you promptly.I had to remove my email address from this post as I began to receive emails from random spammers to my personal address soon after posting. This was highly frustrating and motivated...

I have read a number of blog posts and articles on Sam Bowles's recent paper in Science, 'Did warfare among ancestral hunter-gatherers affect the evolution of human social behaviors?' Apparently, many people who are hostile to the idea for some reason (i.e. that humans, for whatever reason, might have had a violent past, or that our ancestors had behaviour patterns similar to chimpanzees) try to argue against it from poor grounds.Yet others seem to worry that 'Group...

I recently commented on how increasing food prices weren't getting enough press. Well, it looks like The Economist was reading my mind.  Take a look at their graph below, published in their graph-a-day series. As you can see, food prices in many developing countries have had increases in the past 3 months.  But, even for those that have had decreases in the last 3 months, the year-on-year increase in food prices is substantial.  For some reason China...

Non-fictionWilliam Zinsser - Writing About Your Life - With Writing About Your Life - a pleasurable and instructional book - Zinsser brandishes his skill with words, while exposing the practice required to hone such skill.  He focuses on writing memoir. He maps the challenges you face when writing a memoir and he provides tactics to avoid common problems, to improve your focus, and to clarify your intentions.  He makes a case study of several texts along the...

Because of the depths of poverty in South Africa, and many other African & Asian economies, I don't sympathise enough with discussions of 'poverty' in the developed world. I think that the kinds of poverty are different, are culturally embedded, and often reach different depths of privation on different scales. Moreover, and particularly in the US, the persistence of inequality over time is immense, yet still people believe that America is the 'land of opportunity'....

An article in this week's Economist covers a recent paper by Steve Levitt and John List where they investigate the data from the original factory studies that elicited the so-called 'Hawthorne Effect'. The basic idea of the Hawthorne Effect was that being studied directly affected the productivity of the women in the factory.  It turns out the effects may not have been so strong, if it even existed at all.  Levitt and List found that the light intensity was...

I am now a research affiliate for the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (SALDRU) based at the University of Cape Town.  I worked with SALDRU previously when I was in Cape Town, working on the Quality of Life Survey (a survey of land reform projects in South Africa, which is still under embargo from the World Bank, more on this later this year when the data are released).  With the upcoming release of the first wave of the National Income...