I hope all of you are having a great New Year! Here’s the mash-up.

Jay Sosa, Savage Minds Rewind: The Best of 2009
A whole slew of great posts from last year from Savage Minds, the leading cultural anthropology site

Ed Yong, Not Exactly Rocket Science Review of 2009
One of my favorite science journalists online covers the best stories of his Not Exactly Rocket Science site

Dave Munger, TV’s Unintended Consequences
It makes us fat, but can benefit women’s equality – are societal benefits at individual costs the new trend?

Scott Christian, The Journalist of the Future
Is Interactive! Web 2.0, building from the ground up (okay, okay, branding), and including the reader (informant?) as the source of stories

Greg Laden, Your Future in Cyberspace: Artificially Intelligent Journalism
The journalist and the consumer still matter – the media are changing…

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #97”

An end of the year mash-up! Enjoy the New Year!

Brian McKenna, Even If Obama Passed Single Payer, Primary Care Doctors Still Wouldn’t Get It
CounterPunch weighs in on real health reform – Jim McKenna the anthropologist and advocate for co-sleeping as pushing the need for communal ideas and population health, not simply biomedical and financial reform

Abigail Zuger, Resilience, Not Misery, in Coping With Death
A new book, The Other Side of Sadness, shows us the new science of bereavement based on interviews, systematic observation, and experimental psychology

Drake Bennett, The Loneliness Network
It’s contagious! And it’s about meaning, or “perceived social isolation” and not actually being alone

Mark Liberman, Framing a Poll
Metaphors are about concepts, not words, and those concepts are embodied. A great new set of experiments from Mark Landau et al. on how metaphors shape political and social attitudes

Stephanie Zvan, Readings in IQ and Intelligence
Quiche Moraine has an excellent set of resources on concepts, measures and debates around IQ measures and intelligence

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #96”

I’m going with a different organization this week, but the result is still lots of great neuroanthropology stuff, broadly conceived. Happy Holidays!

Mind Hacks

Vaughan Bell has really been on a roll recently, both on site and off.

Vaughan Bell, Understanding Witchcraft
E.E. Evans-Pritchard and his work on witchcraft among the Azande, now a documentary you can sample at YouTube

Vaughan Bell, The Addiction Habit
Over at Slate, Vaughan asks, “Do we really need rehab centers for people who spend too much time shopping or using the Internet?”

Vaughan Bell, The Ancient Mind Was Planning Earlier Than Thought
The pattern of artifacts in the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site, which dates back to almost 800,000 years ago – people were creating social spaces already (the Times also covers the same research below)

Vaughan Bell, The Stress of Ancient Peru
Cortisol and stress – using hair samples to get at ancient patterns of stress

Vaughan Bell, Dealing with Data of the Damned
When bad data becomes good theory – scientific progress, reasoning and our brain

The New York Times

Benedict Carey, Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them
Children can grasp concepts earlier than we had ever imagined

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #95”

After the top selections, a great selection of research papers on primate cultures, human evolution and the like (including a lot of pdfs). And then mind and anthro.

Top of the List

Lisa Wynn, CEAUSSIC Publishes Final Report on HTS
The American Anthropological Association committee examining the Human Terrain System provides its final say, emphasizing the incompatibility of the HTS with disciplinary ethics

Harvey Whitehouse, Anthropology in Crisis – What, Still?
The Oxford professor lays out the case against borrowed intuitions while arguing for a scientific framework for the field

Michael Thomas & Victoria Knowland, Sensitive Periods in Brain Development – Implications for Education Policy
Take functional plasticity, add more sensitive periods (“maximal plasticity”), and think about how to teach children better

Juan Dominguez et al., The Brain in Culture and Culture in the Brain: A Review of Core Issues in Neuroanthropology
Juan and colleagues publish their latest overview of the field, this time in Progress in Brain Research, looking at how cultural practices are manifest in the brain and how brain processes contribute to socially shared meanings and practices. If the title link doesn’t work for you, here’s the doi link for Brain in Culture.

The New York Times Magazine, Ninth Annual Year in Ideas
A wonderful review of eclectic ideas and ingenuity from 2009. The Social Science and Health sections are particularly relevant.

Primates: Cognition & Culture

Peter Kappeler & Joan Silk, Mind the Gap: Tracing the Origins of Human Universals
Google Books title page for this 2009 edited volume. Looks excellent, with contributions from the leaders in the fields of primatology, psychology and evolutionary anthropology. You can also go right to the Amazon page for Mind the Gap.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #94”

This week it’s music, anthropology and mind once we get the highlights out of the way.

Top of the List

Ed Yong, How Our Skin Helps Us To Listen
How your skin, along with your ear, is also involved in listening. So, can you hear me now? Your body matters to your brain, and our old concept of dedicated mental modules, encapsulated for specific functionality, just doesn’t match up with the reality of how the brain works.

Lisa Maruka & HotBook, Class Schedule: History of the Book: Literacy, Technology, Culture
Get a whole semester’s worth of reading on reading! Some fascinating links to understanding books using an interdisciplinary approach.

Neuroskeptic, Mental Illness vs. Suicide
Do countries with more mental sickness have more suicides? The assumption has often been yes, but worldwide data doesn’t support that. A good consideration of both the data and the assumption

Dr. X, Happy Thanksgiving
I loved these photos of a small boy at Thanksgiving

Scicurious, Mapping the Glutamate Receptor
Neurotopia with some pretty pictures and great description of a new paper in Science that gets all colorful (and structural too) with glutamate

Independent Lens, Journals of a Wily School
This documentary is amazing. It shows what anthropologists often hope to illustrate – the impact of both inequality and meaning, in this case for a young pickpocket in Kolkata who is part street leader, part police informer – and you get to see him caught up in both realities at once.

Music

Jonah Lehrer, Creation on Command
How does an act of imagination come about? Looking at how jazz improv and brain scans help reveal our internal artist

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #92”

Top of the List

Jamil Zaki, The Two Human Natures
The view of human nature as violent and anti-social has a long social history, according to Marshall Sahlins, and a new blog looking at a more social view of ourselves and society

Fabiana Kubke, Making Science Culturally Appropriate
Fascinating snippet on using human brain tissue in New Zealand and intersections with the Maori concept of tapu (where our word taboo comes from)

Steven Mithen, The Music Instinct
Online article in the Annals of the NY Academy of Science that examines the evolutionary basis of musicality. The title above links to the abstract. Though it doesn’t always load, here’s a link that can hopefully get you the full text.

Online Tools

Erkan Saka, Online Tools for My Students
One of the early leaders of anthropology online puts up his list of all the online software he uses, complete with tricks and insights into a wide variety of programs

Kerim, House Cleaning
A list of links about Anthropology, including a list of anthropologists on Twitter and another list of anthropology blogs

Alexandre Enkerli, Vague Experience
Google Wave – looking at its uses (reflections in French)

John Postill, Still Networking in Iran
Keeping in touch with Iran via Facebook and Twitter

Thanksgiving

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #91”