This week it goes top, placebo, neuro, anthro, and Colombia.

Top

Mo Costandi, Evolutionary Origins of the Nervous System
Starting with one common worm ancestor 600 million years ago

Colleen Morgan, The Utility of Various Social Networking Tools for Archaeology
Middle Savagery’s comprehensive coverage and tips applies to whatever field you’re involved in

Owen Wiltshire, Ethnographic Blogging
See what people have to say and join the discussion over at the Open Anthropology Cooperative

Greg Laden, The Synaptic Cleft Rap
B. Bobby Voltage and the Glut-Tang Clan lay it out!

Eugene Raikhel, Somatosphere: Our First Year and Greatest Hits
The medical anthropology blog outlines the best of its first year

Placebo

Sharon Begley, How Placebos Really Work
Newsweek article on placebo effects. Nice update on recent research, but I disagree with this line, “it is possible to think yourself out of pain.” Not really – the procedure itself matters, not just the resultant thinking.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #72”

So this week, we’ve got a bunch of short things up front – faves, science & health journalism, brain health, book recommendations, and the environment. Then I go onto anthropology and neuroscience.

Top of the List

Bruno Latour, What Is the Style of Matters of Concern?
Latour’s Spinoza lectures – one on our understanding of nature, the other on aesthetics and active philosophy (or, stop committing violence to our common sense…)

Jason Mitchell, Contributions of Functional Neuroimaging to the Study of Social Cognition
Pdf of a 2008 paper from the Harvard psychologist – a nice overview that also addresses some of the critiques

Nicolas Baumard, In Praise of Neuroscience (for once)
Looking at how parts of the brain are specialized for culture, seen through the localization of the Visual Word Form area (part of how you read) across subjects and societies and in neuronal constraints on writing systems

Alex Golub, Golublog
Alex has been writing on his return to fieldwork in Papua New Guinea – great to read the series of posts sharing the trials and dilemmas of doing ethnographic work

Incubus, Are You In?
Just a song I enjoyed

Bob Herbert, Behind the Façade
The best thing I read this past week -the NY Times columnist discusses Michael Jackson and our culture of immaturity and irresponsibility.

Troublemaker’s Fringe – Problems in the Journalism of Science and Health

Petra Boyton, Reporting Back from Last Night’s Troublemaker’s Fringe
Petra, Vaughan Bell and Ben Goldacre get together to discuss bad journalism of science and health. What an event. Petra slants her comments towards the eight problems she sees in today’s journalism.

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #71”

So the favs first, then a great round-up of recent evolution stuff. Then onto anthropology, neuroscience and health.

Top

David Dobbs, What If You Could Predict PTSD in Combat Troops? Oh, Who Cares…
You actually can. And it has to do with general health – the bottom 15% account for 58% of PTSD cases. But will anything be done about it?

Le Monde, Le Corps Incarcéré
Amazing interactive feature of the French paper, featuring reporting and social scientists on the whole process of incarceration

Walter Glannon, Free Will and Moral Responsibility in the Age of Neuroscience
Pdf on neuroethics that appeared in 2006 in the journal Medical Ethics

Ellen Dissanayake, If Music is the Food of Love, What about Survival and Reproductive Success?
Music as a behavioral and emotional capacity and its link to ritualization. Pdf of a compelling 2008 article.

Michael Smith, Green vs. Gold Open Access
What’s the best way to go? Creating open journals or open repositories?

Evolution – or Men Fighting Back against Sharon Begley vs. Other Men Just Getting on with Things

Sharon Begley, Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?
“The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves” – Begley bashes evolutionary psychology

David Sloan Wilson, Evolutionary Psychology and the Public Media: Rekindling the Romance
Huffing over at the Huffington Post – what evolutionary approaches to mind and behavior might do better to keep the fickle public’s eye

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #70”

Time for some fun. That’s just below what’s on top. Then neuro and anthro mix it up.

Top

Lance Gravlee, Bones and Behavior Protocols
Get your basic method protocols here for biological anthropology! Want to measure growth, nutrition, human variation and more? Now you’ve got a great set of guidelines.

Joe Carroll, The Adaptive Function of Literature and the Other Arts
A substantive effort to get beyond evolutionary psychology in thinking about creativity – but still a bit caught up in the debate of specialized vs. general mental function (i.e., nature vs. nurture). Still, a great read over at On the Human.

R. Howard Bloch, What Words Are Worth: In Defense of the Humanities
“Humanists are specialists in an activity upon which we daily depend, consciously or not, in everything we do: the making and assessment of meaning.”

PsychLectures, Michael Merzenich on Re-wiring the Brain
Great discussion of neuroplasticity by one of the founding fathers of this area of work

Daniel Goldberg, On Neuroreductionism
A glowing recommendation for a new article by Walter Glannon, Our brains are not us

Fun

Annette’s Blog, The Other AA
AssAholics Anonymous – there is a video out there just for you!

Mark Strauss, A Harvard Psychiatrist Explains Zombie Neurobiology
This is your brain on zombies. Including Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #69”

Besides what you expect, I’ve included a selection on health care reform at the end.

Top of the List

Lera Boroditsky, How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?
Testing how different languages literally shape the way people think. Great essay at Edge.

Adam Kirsh, Vistas of Perfection
A biography of James Agee. I was really struck by the description of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which seems like it could teach a lot to modern-day ethnographers

Peter Stromberg, Why You Can’t Help But Care about Brad and Angelina, Part III
Ah, the desire for fame. A good kick-off to Peter’s Sex, Drugs and Boredom series over at Psychology Today – an anthropologist invades some popular turf!

Jim Schnabel, Media Research: The Black Box
Assessing the effects of television on young children. Cartoons don’t help, but edutainment doesn’t seem to hurt. Vaughan Bell and David Dobbs provide reaction.

Julia Douthwaite, Trompe-l’œil: A Metaphysics of Observing
The Mysterious Urn in Paris and our developed ways of seeing. Revolution in Fiction also has a great student piece, Shards of History

Nature – Killers in Eden
Fascinating documentary on killer whales and whale hunters’ interactions, including long-term cooperative behavior, in Eden, Australia – a “remarkable and mysterious partnership” between orcas and humans

Neuro

Linda Nordling, Africa Calls on World’s Richest to Curb Brain Drain
One third of all African scientists live and work in developed countries

David DiSalvo, Can You Outsmart Your Genes? An Interview with Author Richard Nisbett
Taking on the “genes determine intelligence” argument – an intelligence optimist speaks

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #68”

Simple this week – top, anthro, neuro

Top

Natalie Angier, Brainy Echidna Proves Looks Aren’t Everything
Did you know they give birth to puggles? And 50% of their brain is neocortex, compared to our measly 30%

Robert Sawyer, All Screens Are Not Created Equal
Yes, the internet and computing are good for you – we shouldn’t cast things in older ideas about attention

Harvey Whitehouse, Anthropology in Crisis – What, Still?
“Imagine a domain of scholarly enquiry that based its theories on multiple and conflicting intuitions about the basic nature of the phenomena under study. It would struggle to get off the ground because of interminable turf wars among competing coalitions with widely differing foundational assumptions about the nature and purpose of scholarly enquiry. Unfortunately, we don’t have to imagine it. That is exactly the problem, or at least has been the problem historically, with social and cultural anthropology.
Since we lack dedicated cognitive machinery for reasoning about social complexity, we are prone to borrowing intuitions proper to alien ontological domains. Consequently social scientists at turns reify institutions, biologize social categories, anthropomorphise offices, and mentalize corporate groups.”

Mike the Mad Biologist, Behavioral Economics: Not Everything Is Irrational
As someone on the irrationality train (I study addiction, after all), it’s refreshing to have a well-considered critique

Anthro

Jean Jackson, Awá Human Rights Report
Indigenous groups in Colombia caught between right-wing paramilitaries, leftist guerillas, and the Colombian army

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #67”