Lots of small categories this week – sport, placebo, digital anthropology, and Elinor Ostrom – before the mind and anthropology finish it off.

Top of the List

PsyBlog, How Rewards Can Backfire And Reduce Motivation
Intrinsic rewards matter, unexpected rewards too. Getting something you expect? Not so much.

Maximilian Forte, Welcome To ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY: The End Of The Beginning Of The End
Open Anthropology reflects back and looks forward – what does it mean to do open anthropology?

Margarita Alegria et al., Prevalence of Mental Illness in Immigrant and Non-Immigrant U.S. Latino Groups
2008 full-access American Journal of Psychiatry article that both shows lower overall rates for Latinos of mental illness, and tries to examine more closely what that means for specific lives and specific groups

Pamthropologist, Making Anthropology “Relevant”: Do We Really Want To Go There?
Relevance only so students can understand themselves? An argument for a different sort of relevance, with good discussion in the comments

Larval Subjects, Deluze On Assemblages
Assemblages of ideas, rather than singular fields, as the important basis for understanding, whether individual, academic, or social. Some good implications for this project here.

Sport

Mo Costandi, Kicking Performance Affects Perception Of Goal Size
So, is it skill or is success that makes the goal seem larger? Really fascinating research

Dan Peterson, How to See A 130MPH Serve
Seeing as a cognitive, and thus athletic, skill

Gretchen Reynolds, Phys Ed: Does Exercise Boost Immunity?
Yes but… Moderate exercise is good, exercising to exhaustion comes with a cost.

Gretchen Reynolds, Is Running Barefoot Better for You?
Reminiscent of Greg’s post on barefoot running – the NY Times looks at the science and the advocacy around barefoot running

Placebo

Neuroskeptic, Deconstructing The Placebo
Putting the placebo effect out of its misery – time to start looking at what actually makes a difference

Ed Young, The Placebo Effect Affects Pain Signalling In The Spine
A propos, here’s research that looks at how belief changes pain signaling.

Sam Harris et al., The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief
PLoS ONE article using functional neuroimaging to examine two types of belief

Eduardo Robredo, Las bases neurales del efecto Placebo
La Revolución Naturalista cubre lo último sobre cambios en los nervios de la cuerda espinal con el efecto Placebo. Another great one is Cuando la ciencia necesitaba la religión, where you can access a pdf of Peter Harrison’s paper, Religion, the Royal Society, and the Rise of Science.

Digital Anthropology

Daniel Miller, Coming Of Age In Digital Anthropology
Four books that signal the scholarly coming of age of the field

Talk Talk, Welcome to the Talk Talk Digital Anthropology Report
Find out about the different digital tribes that are out there – futurology meets ethnography. Lorenz at Antropologi provides a useful summary and analysis

The New York Times, Does The Brain Like E-Books?
Not as much as people do. Or, thinking about how a new medium changes the way we read.

Amanda Gardner, Web Surf to Save Your Aging Brain
Searching, deciding, interactive – it challenges your brain to be online

Jarno Koponen, The Rise of the Multilinear Existence
Interesting analysis, and a great graph. But being multilinear is not necessarily new (Songlines, anyone?), but the forms that is taking today, certainly so.

Michael Wesch, Toward a New Future of “Whatever”
Video of the YouTube maestro discussing anew his work and ideas on “The Machine Is Changing Us”

Owen Wiltshire, A Changing Anthropology? Some Notes And Quotes
The nineteenth century and now

John Postill, Why Not Call Them Personal Network Sites?
media/anthropology captures an important idea in one line: “It is is the ‘logic’ of personal networks that drives Facebook, not the logic of whole networks”

Elinor Ostrom and the Nobel Prize

Jim Johnson, Toward Political Economy? Elinor Ostrom Wins the Nobel Prize
Not economics as usual here – will change come to neoliberal economics through a prize?

Nicolas Baumard, Elinor Ostrom: Nobel Prize In Anthropology!
The Cognition and Culture take, emphasizing the inherent anthropology in her work

Paul Dragos Aligica, Rethinking Institutional Analysis: Interviews With Vincent And Elinor Ostrom
Before the Nobel – a good discussion of Ostrom’s thought

Mind

Jonah Lehrer, Smart Mice
Is this the real start of cognitive enhancement? Some scary and important research over at The Frontal Cortex

Carina Storrs, Sight Unseen: People Blinded by Brain Damage Can Respond to Emotive Expressions
Or, empathy matters more than imitation!

Paul Levy, Are We Possessed?
So asks Reality Sandwich

Andrew Gelman and David Weakliem, Of Beauty, Sex, And Power
Statistics matter – or taking small effects for something bigger. Caught behind a pay window, but nevertheless an important topic.

Katherine Harmon, Rare Procedure Pinpoints the Location, Speed and Sequence of the Brain’s Language Processes
Broca’s area and language processing revealed

Vaughan Bell, Around the Brain in 40 Years
The Journal of Neuroscience offers retrospective accounts by leading figures to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Society for Neuroscience

Anthropology

Meghan Meyer, How Culture Shapes Our Mind And Brain
Brain Blogger gets it! Now we just need a more robust notion of culture on the neuro side…

Lisa Wynn, Teaching Through The Body (C.F. Mauss)
Or the importance of embodied experiences for learning

Alvaro Fischer, Darwin In Chile
Edge gives us some great videos of leading evolutionary theorists down in Chile. Or the aging evolution rock stars take their tour to South America.

PBS, Unnatural Causes
New documentary series that asks, Is inequality making us sick? I enjoyed the second hour, particularly on Becoming American and how Latino immigrants come to get sicker (like the rest of the US) based on how long they are in the country

David Berreby, Religion and Teen Pregnancy – Perfect Together?
Whoops – teen pregnancy rates are highest where the most evangelical Christians live