The tops, anthro, mind, health, and then some good stuff at the end – technology and some interesting videos.

Top of the List

Isabelle Winder, It’s Official – Fathers ARE Important to Their Childrens’ Upbringing
Going Ape provides an in-depth review of Lee Gettler’s new American Anthropologist article, “Direct male care and hominin evolution: why male-child interaction is more than just a nice social idea.”
To see the popular version, MSNBC carried the short and not quite so sweet Prehistoric Dads Helped with Child Care

Bill Moyers, Jane Goodall
Great video interview with Dr. Goodall, which explores her career with chimpanzees and her present humanitarian work

Colin Blakemore, Plasticity of the Brain: The Key to Human Development, Cognition, and Evolution
How do our genes program the complexity of our brains? The development of connections in our brains. The Royal Society’s Ferrier Lecture for 2010.

Jovan Maud, Greg Downey in The Australian
Greg gets his Australian interview, and provides his thoughts on the present course of anthropology. Commenting on his experience learning capoeira in Brazil and his research on sports and socialization, Greg also raises the problem of anthropology’s lack of public recognition.

Anthropology

Ciaran Brewster, The Incredible Shrinking Brain
Digitally scanning the inside of the Cro-Magnon skull.

Society for Linguistic Anthropology Blog, Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #2: Our Man at the Times, Ben Zimmer
A special edition of the Linguistic Anthropology Roundup to introduce Ben Zimmer, a Yale and Chicago-trained linguistic anthropologist, linguist and lexicographer, now at the New York Times

Rex, Questioning Collapse
Over at Savage Minds, the professionals take subject with Jared Diamond’s reading of their area of expertise: the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) specialist discusses Diamond’s use of the Rapa Nui data, the Incan specialist discusses Diamond on Pizzaro and Atahualpa, and so forth.

Bruce Bower, Farming’s Rise Cultivated Fair Deals
Market economies may be indebted more to cultural evolution than to Stone Age nature.

Max Liboiron, Genealogies of Garbage: Historical Meanings and Practices of Garbage and their Impacts on Trash Activism Today
The garbage crisis, yesterday and today – it’s a material world

Colin Marshall, What I Can Tell You about Interviewing After Conducting, Editing and Broadcasting 100 of Them
This week’s Marketplace of Ideas, a dialogue about the arrow of time with academic physicist Sean Carroll, marks the program’s 100th meeting. Savage Minds has a running commentary where anthropologists also offer tips.

Drake Bennett, Who’s Still Biased?
“Diversity training has swept corporate America. Just one problem: It doesn’t seem to work.”

Adam Weinberg, “Summit on Global Citizenship: Fostering Global Citizenship in Higher Education”
Get the video of Adam Weinberg, president and CEO of World Learning, giving a popular lecture at Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns

Mind

Joe Keohane, Imaginary Fiends
In 2009, crime went down. In fact it’s been going down for a decade. But more and more Americans believe it’s getting worse. Why do we refuse to believe the good news?

Mo Costandi, Brain Scans Read Memories
The concept of the memory trace, over at Neurophilosophy

Vaughan Bell, Scanning for Murder Raps
Mind Hacks on functional brain scans in court, specifically on people charged with killing people and categorized as psychopaths.

h-madness, An Interview with Jonathon Metzl
Metzl summarizes the main points of his recent book “The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease”

Neurowhoa, 700 Year Old Brain Found Preserved
And it’s rather pickled

Annie Murphy Paul, How to be Brilliant
We have a “latent talent abundance” in each of us, the author of this new book argues.

Amy Lavoie, It’s All in the Cortex
After a domestic fall out, brain activity seems to foretell resiliency

Ed Yong, Pocket Science – A Psychopath’s Reward, and the Mystery of the Shark-Bitten Fossil Poo
A tale of what goes on in the brain of psychopaths.

Jonah Lehrer, Mayan Morality
Moral scenarios are given…you be the judge of if what the person in the situation did is right or wrong around the world

h-madness, DSM-5 – Or What are You and Were They Thinking?
The DSM series – Why each new edition is worse than the last.

LiveScience Staff, Babies are Born to Dance
Babies love a beat, according to a new report that found dancing comes naturally to infants.

Jonah Lehrer, Why We Need to Dream
Why do we dream? How is it beneficial to us?

Health

Kelli Whitlock Burton, Efforts to Prevent Childhood Obesity Must Begin Early
Efforts to prevent childhood obesity should begin far earlier than presently thought, maybe even before birth

The British Psychological Society, Reminder of Disease Primes the Body and Mind to Repel Other People
When it comes to evading infection, a mounting body of facts suggests we don’t just have a physiological immune system, but a behavioral immune one as well.

Gene M. Heyman, Addiction: A Disorder of Choice
Heyman puts forth the notion that extreme drug or alcohol use is a tempting act completely beyond the user’s control, as the term “addiction” is commonly understood as, is a cop out.

Technology

Tim Hunkin, Technology Is What Makes Us Human
The author wants to argue that, “Humans are uniquely talented at ‘thinking with our hands’, and its wrong to discard ‘intuitive’ engineering as a historical curiosity.”

Brandon Keim, Your Computer Really Is a Part of You
Everyday tools become part of ourselves – at Wired Science of course

Patrick J. Deneen, Science and the Decline of the Liberal Arts
A rather more entertaining and interesting version of “science killed the humanities” argument than most, part of The New Atlantis series on higher ed

Michiko Kakutani, Texts Without Context
A review of Reality Hunger: “Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in the world.”

Josh Rose, SXSW: Life is But a Stream
“Activity Streams, Social Objects and a little glimpse into how the data that is our lifestream will grow. And soon.”

Vaughan Bell, Lords, Ladies, and Video Games
What is the probable impact of technology, such as computer gaming, on the mind?

Niall Gordon, Posthuman Lifestyles: Has the Future Arrived?
“Professor Miah’s inaugural Professorial lecture will discuss his contribution to imagining the future and critiquing the present, by outlining the successes and failures of an emerging technological culture that marks the end of humanism.”

Videos

Leblogducorps, Soumission à l’autorité
A new French reality TV series recreates Milgram’s infamous experiments. For the English review, head over to John Hawks, The dictators will be televised

Joe Brewer, How Video Games Pave the Way to Solving Global Problems
A TED video: How cognitive science is creating a revolution in the ways we think about solving problems.

Henry Barnes, My Bright Idea: Robin Dunbar
Video of Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary anthropologistspeaking with Aleks Krotoski about our social brain, its natural limits, and the nature of Facebook.

Chris Clark, Video Humor for Spring Break
Humorous YouTube videos for people on spring break to enjoy.