Author: dlende

Wednesday Round Up #51

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.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #51”

What Is American Cuisine?

waiting-by-melissa-b
Mundane Ethnography is a site I enjoy, an interdisciplinary mix of anthropology, food, and everyday life. Melissa recently sent me a post that she cherishes with pride and frustration: Cuisine vs. Food: What Is American Cuisine?

As she wrote to me, “I think this post sums up what anthropology should be: deep critical analysis leading to more, pretty much, unanswerable questions. That is the beauty of the discipline.”

In asking What is American Cuisine?, Melissa writes “the term “cuisine” means more than just food, but rather means the big picture around food–the form of expression through food and cooking and how people use food and cooking and eating as a way of expressing identity, even if it is an unconscious or understated form of affiliation and identity.”
apple-pie-by-melissa-b
By way of answering, I will use some photos from Melissa’s own Flickr site (with a whole range of photos, not just food) – the old cliche of American pie and our signature holiday, Thanksgiving.

So go enjoy more of What is American Cuisine?

Anthropology News on the Web

anthropology-newsAnthropology News is the monthly newspaper put out by the American Anthropological Association. Anthro News or AN, as many people call it, is one of the main places that American anthropologists discuss pertinent issues of the day, as well as providing updates on what’s happening in American anthropology.

They also run the AN Blog, also called In Focus: Reflections on Anthropology News. The AN Blog provides occasional features, information and the like, including our recent Best of Anthro initiative, the Flickr photostream from the San Francisco AAA Meeting, and a feature of Michael Wesch and the Anthro of YouTube. I encourage you to chech the blog out.

If you’re interested in knowing more about the AN Blog, have ideas that you want to share about the site, or would like to propose something as a feature, please contact Dinah Winnick at dwinnick @ aaanet.org [remove the spaces].

Wednesday Round Up #50

This week it’s back to normal – some favorites, then brain and anthropology, rounded out with sports.

Top of the List

Pink Tentacle, Edo-Period Kappa Sketches
The Japanese creature of legend seen in fantastical illustrations

BrainHood Project – Neurocultures
The intersection of neuroscience and artistic production – a collaborative endeavor

Doomsday Lab, The Enteric Nervous System, Our Gastrointestinal Overlord
One billion neurons at work! Brings new light to the old adage, The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach

Sean Mallin, If Bailed-Out Bankers Were Treated Like Welfare Recipients…
One of the funniest and most apt cartoons I’ve seen about the financial crisis

Brain

Pam Beluck, In New Procedure, Artificial Arm Listens to Brain
It’s all about connections, connections, connections

Becoming Human: Brain, Mind and Emergence
Videos from the Stanford conference with some heavy hitters

PhysOrg, Readers Build Vivid Mental Simulations of Narrative Situations, Brain Scans Suggest
Lots of other fields have already told us this – but it’s nice to see those brain areas light up anyway

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #50”

Round Encephalon

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The carnivals Grand Rounds of medical blogging and Encephalon of mind/brain blogging are out this week.

Not Totally Rad is hosting Grand Rounds Vol. 5, No. 20. First off, happy first anniversary to the samurai.

The recommended read is Val Jones’ piece on How the Health Blogosphere Was Scammed by Wellsphere, now sold to the HealthCentral Network.

Alvaro Fernandez gives us Ten Reflections on Cognitive Health, Dr. Shock speaks to derogatory humor towards patients (“it’s mostly about culture”), and David Williams tells us why we should ban pharmaceutical companies from funding continuing medical education.

All that, and more, at the latest Grand Rounds.

Of Two Minds is hosting Encephalon… The Late Prize-Winning February Edition. So what was the strategy, the person who laughs last laughs hardest?

Teasing aside, it’s a great edition. Channel N gives us a video with Dieter Meyerhoff discussing the neurobiology of why people both smoke and drink. If that doesn’t float your boat, you might try the debate over Better Thinking through Chemistry (i.e., brain doping), with Ouroborus seeing this debate as similar to the one we’ll have soon enough about further extending our lives.

And what better way to end than some sexual sweating?

If you don’t need a cold shower after that, just surf on over to the latest Encephalon.