A plenary of plenty
Synopsis: How we put together an open cast lab for the AAPA meetings in PortlandI've arrived in Portland, Oregon today for the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists....
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Our plenary session gets coverage
I don't have much time to come up for air this week, it's been an incredibly busy and exciting meeting so far. But I wanted to take a moment to pass along this link, in which Ann Gibbons describes last...
View ArticleSmall grants enhance exploration
Blogger "Prof-like substance" opens the curtain a bit on grant reviews: "What I learned at an NSF Bio preproposal panel". - Small proposals get killed. For a long time there has always been the party...
View ArticleKiller apes
Kate Wong reports on chimpanzee and bonobo presentations at the AAPA meetings: "Why chimpanzees kill". As for the bonobos, [Michael Wilson's] study bolsters the claim that they are less aggressive than...
View ArticleMaking science or making news?
Christopher Reddy, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, comments on his experience doing science around the Deepwater Horizon oil accident in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago: "How Science Failed...
View ArticleBetter posters
Every so often I remind readers about Zen Faulkes' "Better Posters" site. This is a good time for the reminder because this week the site features Kristina Killgrove's supremely cool poster about urban...
View ArticleQuote: David Thompson on the stars
This is maybe as good a definition of science as one could hope for, from the journals of early Canadian fur trader David Thompson: Both Canadians and Indians often inquired of me why I observed the...
View ArticleTurning around the profits
The absurdity of academic publishing is starting to get attention from the mainstream press. From The Economist: "Open sesame". PUBLISHING obscure academic journals is that rare thing in the media...
View ArticleRecombination in chimpanzees
Adam Auton and colleagues [1] sequenced a panel of chimpanzees to examine recombination in that species, thereby constructing a chimp-specific genetic map. This paper doesn't give any new information...
View ArticleCarnivores and early Homo
Ann Gibbons reports on a recent conference investigating the interaction of climate change and Plio-Pleistocene human evolution "Where's the beef? Early humans took it." I like her description of Lars...
View ArticleQuote: Ruth Benedict on pugnacity
From the classic anthropology text Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict [1], a striking case of the "culture over nature" position: Warfare is not the expression of the instinct of pugnacity. Man's...
View ArticleCulture in the brain
The Guardian has a dialogue between David Eagleman and Raymond Tallis in which the two authors debate the importance of culture as a constraint on behavior. This paragraph is from Eagleman:...
View ArticleArt appreciation
Jonathan Jones muses on two exhibitions of Leonardo's work, one on paintings and the other on anatomical drawings ("Is Leonardo da Vinci a great artist or a great scientist?"): Yet every vein he draws...
View ArticleInterdisciplinary disciplinarians
From Kate Clancy: "I Can Out-Interdiscipline You: Anthropology and the Biocultural Approach". Being interdisciplinary isn’t the same as being a little good at everything, consistent with the saying...
View ArticlePostmodernists are genetic determinists?
An article in The Awl by Russell Brandom sighs disappointedly about commercially available personal genome testing ("Everything I Didn't Learn From Taking A Personal Genome Test"). Misha Angrist, early...
View ArticleIndus health
Anthropology News interviews Gwen Robbins Schug and Veena Mushrif Tripathy on their work documenting health and mortality in the Indus Valley civilization: "South Asian Bioarchaeology:...
View ArticleZeigarnik, bane of bloggers
Maria Konnikova takes a psychological experiment on memory into an excursion on literature: "On writing, memory, and forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take on Zeigarnik". In this view, talking...
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Longitudinal sampling
This is cool, from Big Think: "563 - Pop by Lat and Pop by Long". More details and a map by latitude (even cooler) at the link. Tags: mapsinfographicspopulation sizedemography
View ArticleWhat the cat didn't drag away
Digging through some literature this afternoon, I ran into a 2007 paper by Denise Su and Terry Harrison [1], who mounted several explanations for why Laetoli, Tanzania, has a relatively low abundance...
View ArticlePerils of recycling
Today's public service announcement, by Virginia Postrel: "Recycling Eyeglasses Is a Feel-Good Waste of Money". In a paper published in March in the journal Optometry and Vision Science, four...
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