Some meaty favorites, an interdisciplinary fix of ethnography, resources for those of you interested in Colombia (including some great music!), and then the brain and anthropology. Enjoy.

Top of the List

Elizabeth Rudd et al., Social Science PhDs Five Years Out: The Anthropology Report
The pdf of a large-scale survey on early careers among recent PhD anthro grads

C. Liston et al., Psychosocial Stress Reversibly Disrupts Prefrontal Processing and Attentional Control
PNAS full-text paper by one of the leading groups in the field – one month of chronic stress produces impairment in human adults. And I am already thinking about summer break. But really another piece in the puzzle of how societal faultlines drive unequal outcomes.

Junk Food Science, What You Didn’t Hear about the Latest Study of Sudden and Unexpected Infant Deaths
Great meditation on statistics, measurements and ideology: “looking closely at the CDC study, there is a lot of missing data, negating the ability to soundly support much of the claims and conclusions being made in the media.”

David DiSalvo, Welcome to the Age of the Neuron Chip
Getting neurons to grow in detailed patterns on a silicon chip – is this the future of repairing or even augmenting brain function? Plus a couple cool videos.

Ethnography

Jack Katz, From How to Why: On Luminous Description and Causal Inference in Ethnography (Part 1)
Pdf of this luminous 2001 article. You can see more of Katz’s writings here.

Linden Ball & Thomas Ormerod, Putting Ethnography to Work: The Case for a Cognitive Ethnography of Design
Bringing ethnography and cognitive psychology together – pdf of the article

Danah Boyd, Choose Your Own Ethnography: In Search of (Un)Mediated Life
Doing ethnography in a networked world…

Cosma Shalizi, Naval Collective Intelligence
A review of Ed Hutchins’ book Cognition in the Wild

Neurophilosophy, The Neurological Basis of Intuition
So the latest brain research show that we can come to good global conclusions about the mass of information around daily life – sounds like ethnography to me

Deric Bownds, Worldwide Human Energy Networking
A macroscopic view coupled with a detailed understanding of structures and networks, plus the idea that the rate at which a system processes energy drives much of its “broad scale behaviour” and the inevitability of local phenomena as networks grow in size – the math finally catches up to decades of anthropological work

Colombia

El Tiempo, Colombia en Concierto
“Viaje a la raiz de la musica colombiana” – sample the best of Colombia’s many varieties of regional music.

Wikio – Colombia News

Newsvine – Colombia

PBS – e2, Bogotá: Building a Sustainable City
Enrique Peñalosa, the Transmilenio bus and bike paths, and the importance of public space

Dipnote, Bloggers’ Roundtable: Colombia Provides Lessons for the War of Ideas
State Department blog on how Colombia has been successful in demobilization

Vaughan Bell, The Myth of the Concentration Oasis
Daily life in Medellin shows that distracted attention is not just due to all these networked technologies

Mike Ceaser, The Peace Professor
A profile of John Paul Lederach and his work for peace

Frank Bajak, Who to Kill? Colombia Army Picks Soldier’s Brother
The scandal in Colombia – taking civilians from urban areas, murdering them, and then claiming “guerilla” to up body counts

Brain

Journal of Visualized Experiments, Functional Imaging with Reinforcement, Eyetracking, and Physiological Monitoring
Enjoy the video! And make sure you keep track.

Laurie Tarkan, For Mother and Child at Risk, Care That Includes a Psychologist
Protecting young children from psychological damage as they grow up in tough circumstances.

Natalie Angier, In Pain and Joy of Envy, the Brain May Play a Role
“the subjects who felt the greatest envy the first time around reacted to news of their rival’s misfortune with a comparatively livelier response in the dopamine-rich pleasure centers of, for example, the ventral striatum” And if you want to see envy in action, check out how utilities are making our neighbors our rivals in conserving energy.

Ed Yong, Beta-blocker Drug Erases the Emotion of Fearful Memories
Not quite the mind-wiper the headlines have made us believe. To see one of those salacious pieces, here’s The Mail’s Pill to Erase Bad Memories: Ethical Furor over Drugs ‘that Threaten Human Identity’

Julie Hail Flory, Looking Differently at ADHD
Looking not just at working memory, but also memory retrieval, as part of attention deficit disorder in adolescents

Michael Brooks, Born Believers: How Your Brain Creates God
The New Scientist on the new biology of belief. Time Magazine also gets into the game with its own Biology of Belief.

William Gilroy, Paper Sheds New “Light” on Fascinating Rhythms of the Circadian Clock
Genes and gene expression in the master clock in your brain

Bill Marsh, The Voice Was Lying. The Face May Have Told the Truth.
Paul Ekman, the pioneering emotion and faces researcher, analyzes Alex Rodriguez as he talked with Katie Couric and lied his ass off about using steroids.

Peter Buckland, The Nature vs. Nurture Debate? Update with new links
Critique of the nature via nurture formulation, and the specter of eugenics as we speak of something like intelligence

Carl Zimmer, The Crowd-Sourced Reading List
A selection of works, most of them online, that “work best for a class on the art of writing about science and nature.” So just a lot of great writing, with a focus on biology.

Anthropology

Susan Blum, Academic Integrity and Student Plagiarism: a Question of Education, Not Ethics
Preventing plagiarism – the old approaches of making it a moral issue or a crime aren’t working too well. What can ethnography and concerted action do? For more, you can read Susan’s newest book, My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture

Andrew Sullivan, The Expectations Game
“We have mistaken consuming for living.”

Esteban S., Lo falso y lo indecible
Creationism hits Latin America

Wray Herbert, Coming of Age on the Internet
Using the Internet and growing up – looks like the benefits outweigh the costs.

Associated Press, Scientists Discover Macaque Monkeys in Indonesia that Fish
Some of you may have already heard about this research – but I still thought it was cool.

Michael @ Nottingham, Michael Tomasello – The Origins of Human Communication (summary pt. 2)
Communicative displays, communicative signals, vervet monkey video, and chimpanzee gestures…