Hamsters in the wood shavings
Karen Kelsky gives more advice on how to navigate graduate school to get the job you want: "Graduate school is a means to a job". Never forget this primary rule: Graduate school is not your job;...
View ArticleBrittannia rules the waves
Ars Technica has an engrossing article by James Grimmelmann about the rise and fall of HavenCo. The firm promised data security and anonymity based on the idea that it was located on the independent...
View ArticleQuote: Jack Stern, Jr., on the origin of bipedalism
From the conclusion of [1]: Moreover, a significant number of people still hold to the view that early australopithecine bipedalism was fully human-like. I have often felt there is a bias in favor of...
View ArticleQuote: Hunter Rawlings on undergraduate education
Hunter R. Rawlings, in Inside HIgher Ed: "Why Research Universities Must Change". The professionalization of the professoriate has been crucially beneficial for research and graduate training at many...
View ArticleQuote: Johanson and White on comparing samples
Don Johanson and Tim White, writing in their 1979 paper on the phylogeny of early hominins (and introducing Australopithecus afarensis as an ancestor of later hominins) [1]. They faced the problem of...
View ArticleThe Woody Allen of animals
I've been offline for the past several days on a family vacation. So I get back and what do I find in my feed reader? Giant pandas fail to mate The unsuccessful end to one of the briefest but most...
View ArticleWiki into journal
PLoS Computational Biology has started a new collaboration with Wikipedia, in which short review articles called "topic pages" will be peer-reviewed, given journal references, and simultaneously put on...
View ArticleCutmarks under the microscope
I'm trying to figure out why Science this week has a "perspective" piece on the identification of cutmarks on archaeological bone. It's a nice brief but lacking in context -- why are cutmarks a...
View ArticleQuote: E. E. Evans-Pritchard on social anthropology and humanities
From "Social anthropology: Past and present" [1]: The thesis I have put before you, that social anthropology is a kind of historiography, and therefore ultimately of philosophy or art, implies that it...
View ArticleSome definitions of science collected
From Maria Popova of Brainpickings: "What Is Science? From Feynman to Sagan to Asimov to Curie, an Omnibus of Definitions". So, what exactly is science, what does it aspire to do, and why should we the...
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Sex in the Stone Age
I've just gotten word that the long-awaited Denisova documentary on the National Geographic Channel is running next Thursday night at 10:00 pm Eastern in the U.S. Yes, they called it "Sex in the Stone...
View ArticleAgainst simplistic stories
Erika Check Hayden reflects usefully on an overhyped science story last week: "What the ‘limits of DNA’ story reveals about the challenges of science journalism in the ‘big data’ age". She gives a list...
View ArticleFailure to replicate
What if you set out to replicate a series of 53 "landmark" clinical trials in cancer treatment and found you could confirm only 6 of them? If you're C. Glenn Begley, you write about it in Nature [1]....
View ArticleNew animal communication books
Anthropologist Barbara J. King reviews two new books on animal communication in the Washington Post: "'Calls Beyond Our Hearing: Unlocking the Secrets of Animal Hearing' by Holly Merino and 'The Song...
View ArticleConference criticisms
Science News has a piece that gives a critical view of our practice of flying thousands of people to a distant city just for scientific sessions: "Weighing the costs of conferencing". Much of the...
View ArticleAnthropology 105, lecture 13: Milk
Synopsis: A lecture on energy expenditure, costs of pregnancy and lactation, and lactase Technical issues caused me to miss lecture 12, which was about metaphyses and the growth of the skeleton, as...
View ArticleAnthropology 105, lecture 14: Brains
Synopsis: Our large brains have many energetic and life history consequences This lecture covers the evolution of human brain size with its energetic and developmental consequences. I focus on the...
View ArticleAnthropology 105, lecture 15: Hips
Synopsis: The human pelvis provides a unique solution to the dual constraints of bipedality and birth. This lecture reviews the distinctive shape of the human pelvis and its role in bipedal locomotion....
View ArticleFaculty salaries
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on faculty salaries in a fascinating way: "Interactive Table: Average Faculty Salaries, 2011–12". This is good information for people on the job market,...
View ArticleQuote: Alok Jha on the cost of journals
Alok Jha, in The Guardian: "Academic spring: how an angry maths blog sparked a scientific revolution". Academic publishers charge UK universities about £200m a year to access scientific journals,...
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