Round Encephalon

brain-coralThe Neurocritic has posted a fine post-presidential Friday the 13th Darwin Day Encephalon, rounding up the best mind/brain blogging.

This edition is as super-sized as its name! We have a book review of Embracing the Wide Sky where the author, an autistic savant, explores the way his mind works. Then there is The Mouse That Couldn’t Get High, discussing a paper about dopamine transporter knock out mice, which leaves the dopamine theory of addiction intact but raises interesting questions about how supposedly identical mice have different levels of drug self-administration. Plus neuroplasticity, livetweeting, nature/nurture, Dan Ariely, brainbows and more over at the latest Encephalon.

Emergiblog is hosting the medical Grand Rounds this week. And we have a Napoleon Dynamite theme – so keep him away from the coral, because that’s no way to fish. But really, a stand-out effort – working movie quotes into the entire carnival. Lots of fun.

Junkfood Science cuts the obesity virus down to size, Doc Gurley takes down the stereotype that being mentally ill means being violent, and other things amanzi, the blog of a surgeon in South Africa, struggles being philosophical about a horrific outcome.

Those and much more at Emergiblog’s Napoleon Dynamite Grand Rounds.

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”

Science news in crisis

There’s a fascinating piece at the science reporters’ blog at Nature, In the Field: ‘AAAS: Science journalism in crisis?’ The story has a mix of sad news leavened with just a bit of optimism. The bottom line is that, with newspapers suffering badly from the economic crisis, many are cutting budgets for their science reporting.

A panel at the AAAS meeting was inspired when CNN announced last December ‘to axe its entire space, science and environment unit.’ Christine Russell, a former science reporter for the Washington Post, now president of the US Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, reported that ‘the number of dedicated science pages in US newspapers has fallen from a peak of 95 in 1989 to 34 in 2005, and is still dropping–with a big shift toward consumer and health reporting in those remaining.’ The piece at In the Field discusses the shrinking space for science news at the Boston Globe and the accompanying shrinkage of the science reporting staff.

I’ve leveled a fair bit of criticism at science writing on this blog, but the unfortunate thing is that as the field becomes less professional, less practiced, it’s only going to get worse. So many of the science issues facing the public — genetics, neuroscience, climate science, stem cells, energy policy, ecosystem change, nuclear proliferation, developmental biology — are complex and require a pretty sophisticated set of analytical lenses to sort the significant discoveries from the dross. They aren’t the sort of science stories that your business reporter is going to be able to write astutely about (unless your business reporter was previously downsized when the science page was dissolved).

Continue reading “Science news in crisis”

What Is American Cuisine?

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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].