Neuroanthropology is a collaborative weblog created to encourage exchanges among anthropology, philosophy, social theory, and the brain sciences.
We especially hope to explore the implications of new findings in the neurosciences for our understanding of culture, human development, and behaviour.
If you would like more information, please contact Greg Downey at Macquarie University greg.downey (at) mq.edu.au (remove spaces).
I just came across a fascinating site worthy of some gourmet exploration. Foodspotting is a site that allows readers to upload photos of food linked to geographic information and also to short descriptions of the food featured in said picture. As they say:
It’s just about the food: It’s not about the place, the price, the surroundings, the crowd or the nutritional value — it’s just about good food and where to find it.
Good food can be found anywhere: We built Foodspotting to work in any city, small town or country from the start. It encourages exploration — trying new things vs. following the crowd.
So there is a great new aggregrator out there – Science Blogging! It provides a live feed on some of the best science content from blogs around, including Scienceblogs.com, Discover Blogs, and Scientopia.
Science Blogging is the creation of Anton Zuiker, Dave Munger, and Bora Zivkovic. Here Bora describes the initiative:
The page will aggregate RSS feeds from all the major (and some minor) science blogging networks, group blogs, aggregators and services. As the site develops further, it will also encompass other online (and offline) science communication efforts, including Twitter feeds, links to major scientific journals and magazines, ScienceOnline annual conference, and the Open Laboratory annual anthology of the best writing on science, nature and medical blogs.
If you’re more inclined to the humanities, Sympoze might be more to your tastes. Sympoze has the tagline of “social bookmarking for academics,” and while it does have categories for the natural and social sciences, most of the content/aggregation seems focused on philosophy on present.
Here is what Sympoze is about:
Sympoze is a fast and easy way for academics to collectively share, promote, and find high quality online content.
How It Works
The process starts when an academic finds something online that they like (e.g, a blog post or a paper) and submits it to Sympoze.
Once a user submits a link, the rest of the Sympoze community (also academics) can promote the content by voting it up if it’s in their discipline. Popular submissions will automatically be promoted to the front page so everyone (including non-users) can see what’s popular in various academic fields.
Since voting accounts are limited to academics who have (or are currently pursuing) graduate degrees in the various academic disciplines, the popular stories reflect the opinions of actual academics. However, everyone will be able to view the content that academics vote up and down.
The Society for Linguistic Anthropology is featuring its round up #12, which has a great collection of posts which fall under the broad domain of language and culture, or more specifically “comparative study of the ways in which language shapes social life.”
Lots of quality posts to check out, but really it’s the collection of videos included in the round up that is the stand out. Worth it for that alone.
Another great Four Stone Hearth, the round up of anthropology on the net, this time over at A Very Remote Period Indeed.
Check out Sidewalk Radio – off course a videoblog in today’s age!
Islamophobia, ethnic differences in testing deconstructed (methodologically, no less), Visayan sorcery, cheek pouches, and much more. A stand out collection!
Big update on the Marc Hauser affair, and the seriousness of the research misconduct allegations and the irony of this from the author of Moral Minds. The Chronicle for Higher Education has a piece out today which sheds light on the internal investigation and the assertions by research assistants in Hauser’s Harvard lab of misconduct.
The research assistant who analyzed the data and the graduate student decided to review the tapes themselves, without Mr. Hauser’s permission, the document says. They each coded the results independently. Their findings concurred with the conclusion that the experiment had failed: The monkeys didn’t appear to react to the change in patterns.
They then reviewed Mr. Hauser’s coding and, according to the research assistant’s statement, discovered that what he had written down bore little relation to what they had actually observed on the videotapes. He would, for instance, mark that a monkey had turned its head when the monkey didn’t so much as flinch. It wasn’t simply a case of differing interpretations, they believed: His data were just completely wrong.
Harvard University said Friday that it had found a prominent researcher, Marc Hauser, “solely responsible” for eight instances of scientific misconduct.
Hours later, Dr. Hauser, a rising star for his explorations into cognition and morality, made his first public statement since news of the inquiry emerged last week, telling The New York Times, “I acknowledge that I made some significant mistakes” and saying he was “deeply sorry for the problems this case had caused to my students, my colleagues and my university.”
At present this database includes more than 11,500 entries. These represent a large fraction of the historical and contemporary literature in human evolution…
The bibliography has a search filter, search terms will match author, keyword, title or abstract (where present). With more than 11,000 entries, you want to be a little selective about how you search. Author names work really well, and yield a list separated by year of publication.
You’ll find each reference preceded by a unique citation key in brackets. I did this purely for my own convenience, but for those who may want to download lists of citations, it may also prove useful.
A list of search results can be exported to BibTeX or RTF format for download.
There is also a “filter” tab that allows keyword, author, and year filtering of the list. This is really not very useful; the size of the database makes it much simpler to search than to filter all entries.
One of my students, Nikolas Dawson, hipped me to these nifty animated videos developed from lectures at the RSA, the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, ‘a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress.’ My student was pointing out a video about recent financial crises, RSA Animate – Crises of Capitalism, that combined an edited version of a David Harvey lecture with great animation, but in the process of poking around their website, I realized that there’s an interesting clip for readers at Neuroanthropology.net.
The video is ‘RSA Animate Matthew Taylor: Left brain, right brain,’ and fortunately, it has virtually nothing to say about ‘left brain’ or ‘right brain,’ but is instead a very interesting discussion of the relation between human psychology and the possibility of social and political change. In addition, the animation is great!
The RSA website also has a piece by our colleague, Joan Chiao, ‘Face Value.’ Chiao discusses why some societies seem to prefer hierarchical governments, and others prefer leadership that promotes great egalitarianism, as well as some of the relationship between research on facial preferences and democratic decision making. She concludes:
This cultural diversity in political preferences and structures is proof that our evolutionary instincts for social hierarchy are not cultural destiny and that, through knowledge of where we come from and imagination about whom we may become, we can come closer to building a society with consideration and compassion for all.
For more information about the RSA, especially the Social Brain project, you can read below.
The Foundation for Psychocultural Research is offering a post-doctoral fellowship in interdisciplinary studies with a focus on “Culture & Disability: Autism Spectrum Disorder in India & the United States.” The start date is as early as the selected candidate can begin. The post-doc will work with Dr. Thomas Weisner, and be a part of the FPR-UCLA Culture, Brain, Development and Mental Health Program.
Applicants must have a doctoral or M.D. degree and should have interest in pursuing a career involving interdisciplinary research in psychology, culture, human development, family research, neuroscience and psychiatry. The research will involve substantial engagement in the new FPR-UCLA Culture Brain, Development, and Mental Health program, which includes integrative research on neurobiology, culture, child development, and psychopathology. The focus of this call for applications is the project on Culture & Disability: Autism Spectrum Disorder in India & the United States, Thomas S. Weisner, director, Tamara Daley, co-PI.
For more information, you can find all the details on the project, application process, and more at the Culture & Disability website.
Lots of people are pointing to the new collection of blogs over at Scientopia.org, which came to life in part due to the problems over at ScienceBlogs. Scientopia is ad-free, and also explicitly about science:
Scientopia is a collective of people who write about science because they love to do so. It is a community, held together by mutual respect and operated by consensus, in which people can write, educate, discuss, and learn about science and the process of doing science. In this we explore the interplay between scientific issues and other parts of our lives with the shared goal of making science more accessible.
Scientopia has global categories in Brain & Behavior and in Humanities & Social Sciences, as well as other ones like environment & biology, medicine & pharma, and information & communication. No way (yet, I am hoping) to go directly to those categories – they are simply collections of relevant pieces right there on the front page of Scientopia blogs.
I particularly wanted to do a shout-out to the blog The Urban Ethnographer. It’s fabulous to see anthropology right there in the middle of Scientopia. Krystal D’Costa’s most recent post is Meeting Montauk: The Summer Trade, which takes us out to the eastern tip of Long Island to examine tourism, fishing, and life in a beautiful little town.
On the brain side we’ve got some favorites who’ve migrated over from ScienceBlogs. So Scicurious has her own blog now, Neurotic Physiology, with her most recent post being the irresistible What Is Sweeter Than Cocaine? DrugMonkey is also there, and is looking at the recent debate on synthetic marijuana.
Child’s Play is all about development and cognition, and their latest post is Don’t Bite: A Cognitive Primer, which examines delay of gratification with a focus in this post on cognitive control and neural architecture.
I just came across a fascinating site worthy of some gourmet exploration. Foodspotting is a site that allows readers to upload photos of food linked to geographic information and also to short descriptions of the food featured in said picture. As they say:
