With the title “Cooperation between Pentagon and Anthropologists a Fiasco?,” Antropologi.Info has a great summary and take on the Newsweek’s article just out, “A Gun in One Hand, A Pen in the Other.”
The hat tip goes to Erkan’s Field Diary, who has a whole collection of links on this theme under the title “Reviewing the AAAs Report on Anthropology and the Military.”
Iraq and War Trauma
Thom Shanker, Army Worried About Rising Stress of Return Tours to Iraq
More tours, more anxiety, depression and stress…
Emory Wire, Fellowship Project Explores PTSD’s Effect on Families
Returning home and the ravages of post-traumatic stress; see Erin Finley’s description of her research here
Leslie Kaufman, After War, Love Can Be a Battlefield
“He used to tell jokes and funny stories and now he doesn’t do that anymore. I could tell he was different right away, but I thought it would pass.”
Dana Foundation, The Brain Injured Soldier
Two-part series of podcasts, with an accompanying press release
Jared Tanner, Traumatic Brain Injury: A Silent Epidemic
Covers brain injuries in general in the US—IEDs work similar and equally glaring damage in Iraq
Ginger Campbell, Treating Vets with Mirrors
Mirror box therapy and Iraq veterans who are amputees
Sharp Brains, TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury), Iraq and Neuropsychology
Good coverage, with links, about the problem
Associated Press, Army Creates New Unit to Help Wounded Soldiers Get Better
“Warrior transition units” and a “culture of healing within this organization”
William Grimes, Empathy for the Brain, After Insult and Injury
Review of Michael Paul Mason’s book Head Cases: Stories of Brain Injury and Its Aftermath
Susan Okie, Traumatic Brain Injury in the War Zone
New England Journal of Medicine article on the how’s and the recovery from this type of injury
Theo Francis, Pentagon Seeks Battlefield Device to Diagnose Brain Injury
A camera and eye-tracking device to be developed; article also has good links to relevant work
RAND, Invisible Wounds of War
New study by the research group: “Psychological and cognitive injuries, their consequences, and services to assist recovery.” Comprehensive report on the overall problem
Mental Health
Stephen Dubner, How Much Progress Have Psychology and Psychiatry Really Made? A Freakonomics Quorum
A great discussion, with varying viewpoints and supporting evidence
The latest version of Encephalon, the collection of the best and brightest of brain-related blogging, is up over at Brain Blogger. Two favorites include Pure Pedantry’s Sound Encoding in the Rat and Cognitive Daily’s Consonants Tell Us Where Words Begin, What about Vowels?
Sharp Brains is also hosting student essays, including this one on Alzheimer’s, which is fun for me to point out. My undergraduate students have their own blog writing tasks for the end of the semester, so over the next month I will be posting stuff that they have written.
Some new people have been linking into our site. Searching for Mind provides a running list of interesting posts around the blogosphere, as well as some relevant news stories.
Putting People First at experientia.com focuses on “user experience, experience design, and person-centered innovation.” Here’s a good one on Tom Austin, an applied anthropologist, who argues that IT needs the social sciences.
There are now a couple blogs on open access in anthropology that I wanted to point out:
Anthropology News also had a recent issue with articles covering open access in anthropology (can download pdfs).
Savage Mind’s Rex provides us some very useful guidelines on how to get the information we need about new articles and books through online alerting in his post, Total Information Awareness (for anthropologists). Especially useful for people not linked into mainstream academia or off doing fieldwork or just interested in staying up to date.
Rex also describes the Mana’o Project, an open access repository for anthropology, and actively encourages people to use it.
If you are interested in more from Savage Minds, they have a whole Open Access Open Source category. CKelty in particular has been posting on a regular basis recently in this area.
Yesterday in Cellphones Save The World I wrote about Jan Chipchase, who is featured in the New York Times piece by Sara Corbett, Can The Cellphone Help End Global Poverty. My piece summarized four themes that summarize changes we often do perceive but that are happening worldwide: people-driven processes, change for the rest of us, human-centered science, and emerging methods.
Chipchase has his own blog, Future Perfect, and a website at The Nokia Research Center. He also has a TED video presentation (I featured TED just a few days, see here), which is worth a look. I’d paste it in below, but WordPress limits us to big sites like YouTube, at least in my understanding.
ELearnSpace has a critical take on the Corbett article. I include an edited version here, because it is a different and equally valid perspective: “I don’t care for the general concept of this article—solving complex issues like poverty requires more than just a new technological tool… [T]he bigger issue for me relates to where the money flows and who will have control over the new infrastructure. As I was reminded by a participant in an online presentation I delivered this morning, technology cuts both ways. It opens and it closes. It frees and it imprisons. That’s why we [need] an ideological shift in how we interact with developing nations.”
So it’s not all cellphones. But Chipchase is not all about technology either. He puts technology in context. He speaks of “delegation in practice” in the TED talk, and how to tackle the problem of illiteracy, which is as much about social practices and social trust as it is about technology. So he is just speaking to a different ideological shift than most of us think about.
Check out his video if you’re interested, and also the post I did awhile back on Social Entrepreneurship, which addressed development and anthropology. And Antropologi has a fun piece too, Why The Head of IT Should Be An Anthropologist.
The American Anthropological Association has some open-access content for its monthly Anthropology News around the theme of Children and Childhood.
Some highlights:
John Bock, Elizabeth Gaskins and David Lancy write on A Four-Field Anthropology of Childhood.
Robert LeVine, the dean of this area, speaks of Re-Visualizing Childhood in Cultural Context
Jill Korbin addresses Children and Families in Neighborhood Contexts
And Tom Weisner brings us his engaged and applied anthropology in Understanding New Hope
Neuroanthropology 