Quote: Sapir on the slipshod
From Edward Sapir's response to Alfred Kroeber's 1917 essay on "The Superorganic" [1]: Nothing irritates a student of culture more than to have the methods of the exact sciences flaunted in his face as...
View ArticleQuote: Boring robot squeezes
From the conclusion of Edwin Boring (1946), "Mind and mechanism" [1], which is an exposition of the philosophical value of operationalist methods in psychology: I believe that robotic thinking helps...
View ArticleQuote: Malinowski's Metropolis
Bronislaw Malinowski, in his 1936 article, "Culture as a determinant of behavior" [1]: Since in my opinion anthropology should begin at home, let me give you an anthropological impression of modern...
View ArticleNeandertal upgrade
Kyle Jarrard of the Huffington Post visits the current science about Neandertals, with a nice piece focusing on David Frayer's work: "Neanderthals getting a colorful upgrade". No more can we say that...
View ArticleLearning by app
From the Boston Globe: "Study suggests online courses as good as classroom". A new study compared two versions of an introductory statistics course, one taught face to face by professors and one mostly...
View ArticleNew yeti genetics specialists
The BBC reports that Oxford geneticist Brian Sykes is getting into the hunt for sasquatches, yetis and other creatures: "DNA to shed light on yeti claims". "It's an area that any serious academic...
View ArticleBig data, no access, no replication possible
The New York Times has an article by John Markoff today, pointing to several disputes over the standards for data release with scientific papers. "Troves of Personal Data, Forbidden to Researchers"....
View ArticleShoelaces tied together
Zen Faulkes comments on last week's National Academies meeting on Science Communication: "Self-defeating prophecy". Here’s a screenshot of day two of the Sackler colloquia on science communication from...
View ArticleNo paradigm will suffice
John Horgan reminisces about his experience interviewing the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn: "What Thomas Kuhn really thought about 'scientific truth'". He includes a long excerpt from his book,...
View ArticleWarp and woof
James Gorman stirs the pot on dog domestication, by comparing the new review article by Greger Larson and colleagues [1] with Pat Shipman's American Scientist piece [2] ("What-If and What-Is: The Role...
View ArticleMelungeon genetic roots
The AP is running a story about a recent genetic study probing the ancestry of the Melungeons. NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — For years, varied and sometimes wild claims have been made about the origins of a...
View ArticleTransit tokens
Jennifer Ouellete takes a timely dip into astronomical history: "Sic Transit Venus". Kepler thought the next transit wouldn’t be until 1761, predicting a near miss in 1639. But Horrocks found an error...
View ArticleRichard Leakey profile
The Associated Press profiles Richard Leakey: "Scientist: Evolution debate will soon be history". The article gives a bit of Leakey's biography and discusses how he came to join the faculty at Stony...
View Article"We don't need a master"
The Boston Globe has a a story about a new institute, founded by Jon F. Wilkins, that aims to solve some of the administrative problems facing independent scholars: "The Ronin Institute for wayward...
View ArticleMy foray into online education
Synopsis: A short update on my open courseware experiment, with some thoughts on online educationI pass along for consideration this essay by Robert Tracinski "Bigger than Facebook". Let's put it this...
View ArticleIf snowflakes could talk
Cool thing of the week: Little tiles of DNA, programmed by sequence to bind themselves into letters, numbers and other text-messaging necessities: "DNA drawing with an old twist". In their simplest...
View ArticleA little more on online learning
Following up on my post from this weekend ("My foray into online learning"), I wanted to share more widely part of a conversation. Larry Moran is a biochemist at the University of Toronto and blogger...
View ArticleHow I got into anthropology
I was noodling around online and found a video interview from last year's Darwin Day event here at UW. Regular readers won't learn anything new in the first few minutes, but at around 4:20, I start...
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The ruby slippers
I'm on the road this week in Washington, D.C. I'm participating in a workshop involving biology education in high school, at the National Museum of Natural History. It's a great project and I'm looking...
View ArticleMouse brain mapping
This merits some attention: "Neuroscientists reach major milestone in whole-brain circuit mapping project". The data consist of gigapixel images (each close to 1 billion pixels) of whole-brain sections...
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