All posts; Tags Include "Sociocultural Anthropology"
- August 18, 2016
- 08:54 AM
- 272 views
Wait, let me google it. On the fall (and rise?) of human memory.
by gdw in FictionalFieldwork
Ruins of a memory palace Once upon a time, there were no computers. And yet, even in the ancient days when writing was not widespread, people told gigantic tales or recited poems of epic proportions. Often more than once. Admittedly, they probably changed a bit along the way, but still the plot remained intact. How […]... Read more »
Carvalho JT, & Nolfi S. (2016) Cognitive Offloading Does Not Prevent but Rather Promotes Cognitive Development. PloS one, 11(8). PMID: 27505162
Risko, E., & Gilbert, S. (2016) Cognitive Offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676-688. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002
Storm, B., Stone, S., & Benjamin, A. (2016) Using the Internet to access information inflates future use of the Internet to access other information. Memory, 1-7. DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2016.1210171
- July 28, 2016
- 08:34 AM
- 313 views
Game of Farmers: Agriculture is coming
by gdw in FictionalFieldwork
Gron gazed across the plain from inside a tuft of long grass. There. Just in front of the far hillock. Gazelles. Meals on legs. He vaguely remembered mother carrying him through cooler forests when he was not yet old enough to walk. He had never understood why they had left. But he had learned, had […]... Read more »
Zeder MA. (2008) Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: Origins, diffusion, and impact. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(33), 11597-604. PMID: 18697943
Lazaridis, I., Nadel, D., Rollefson, G., Merrett, D., Rohland, N., Mallick, S., Fernandes, D., Novak, M., Gamarra, B., Sirak, K.... (2016) Genomic insights into the origin of farming in the ancient Near East. Nature. DOI: 10.1038/nature19310
- July 21, 2016
- 10:08 AM
- 355 views
The decline of biodiversity: Past the point of no return?
by gdw in FictionalFieldwork
Mohi looks up at her mother. Confused. Afraid. Mother had always said that she had to keep her filtration veil on when they left their housedome. But now, here stood her mother, unveiled. The woman gifted an encouraging nod to her young daughter. Mohi removed her veil. Air! Light! The freshness of the breeze and […]... Read more »
Steffen W, Richardson K, Rockström J, Cornell SE, Fetzer I, Bennett EM, Biggs R, Carpenter SR, de Vries W, de Wit CA.... (2015) Sustainability. Planetary boundaries: guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347(6223). PMID: 25592418
Newbold T, Hudson LN, Arnell AP, Contu S, De Palma A, Ferrier S, Hill SL, Hoskins AJ, Lysenko I, Phillips HR.... (2016) Has land use pushed terrestrial biodiversity beyond the planetary boundary? A global assessment. Science, 353(6296), 288-91. PMID: 27418509
Oliver TH. (2016) How much biodiversity loss is too much?. Science, 353(6296), 220-1. PMID: 27418489
- June 16, 2016
- 08:30 AM
- 325 views
An omelette of extinction
by gdw in FictionalFieldwork
~50 000 years ago He wakes. The first sunrays slowly crawl over the horizon. As he gets up, the others in his family group stir. He surveys this new land. His stomach grumbles… # Present day Born in an African cradle, humanity has spread across the globe. And almost everywhere we went, we managed to […]... Read more »
Miller G, Magee J, Smith M, Spooner N, Baynes A, Lehman S, Fogel M, Johnston H, Williams D, Clark P.... (2016) Human predation contributed to the extinction of the Australian megafaunal bird Genyornis newtoni ∼47 ka. Nature communications, 10496. PMID: 26823193
- May 6, 2016
- 10:04 AM
- 267 views
Book Review: Curating Biocultural Collections
by Farid Pazhoohi in Epistemophil
Curating Biocultural Collections: A Handbook is edited by Margaret Jan Salick, Katie Konchar, and Mark Nesbitt, and the volume’s contributors are practicing researchers and experts in biocultural curating. The editors of this volume argue that many specimen and biocultural collections—which are repositories for plants and animals used by people, products made from them, and the […]... Read more »
Farid Pazhoohi. (2016) Curating Biocultural Collections: A Handbook (Salick, Konchar and Nesbitt, eds.). Museum Anthropology Review, 10(2). info:/
- April 26, 2016
- 08:57 AM
- 442 views
Human sacrifice, inequality, and cycles of political power
by gdw in FictionalFieldwork
Human sacrifice to preserve inequality Statistically speaking (wait, wait, don’t click away, I know this is not the most enticing opening, but bear with me), you and me, we are not part of the 1%, or the 0.01%, that in most Western societies holds a disproportionate amount of influence and resources. Secretly, though, we want […]... Read more »
Watts J, Sheehan O, Atkinson QD, Bulbulia J, & Gray RD. (2016) Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies. Nature, 532(7598), 228-31. PMID: 27042932
- March 29, 2016
- 11:30 AM
- 500 views
Do you wanna be in my clan? Moralising gods encourage long-distance sharing with co-religionists
Most gods that have been invented don’t give a damn about what us mortals get up to. Researchers think that belief in the few that do, the ones that can be thought of as moralising gods, might have a significant effect on behaviour. For example, more complex societies are more likely to believe in moralising [Read More...]... Read more »
Purzycki, B., Apicella, C., Atkinson, Q., Cohen, E., McNamara, R., Willard, A., Xygalatas, D., Norenzayan, A., & Henrich, J. (2016) Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality. Nature. DOI: 10.1038/nature16980
- March 1, 2016
- 11:10 AM
- 775 views
Shame on You, Shame on Me: Shame as an Evolutionary Adaptation
by Jalees Rehman in The Next Regeneration
Can shame be good for you? We often think of shame as a shackling emotion which thwarts our individuality and creativity. A sense of shame could prevent us from choosing a partner we truly love, speaking out against societal traditions which propagate injustice or pursuing a profession that is deemed unworthy by our peers. But if shame is so detrimental, why did we evolve with this emotion? A team of researchers led by Daniel Sznycer from the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University ........ Read more »
Sznycer D, Tooby J, Cosmides L, Porat R, Shalvi S, & Halperin E. (2016) Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PMID: 26903649
- February 14, 2016
- 12:25 AM
- 682 views
Week Six In Review: Open-Access Science | 8 to 14 Feb
by TakFurTheKaffe in Tak Fur The Kaffe
Migrants to ancient Rome, more advanced Mesolithic Swedish communities, delayed transatlantic flights, expanding bird populations, and greener deserts thanks to climate change. Here are five of the latest scientific studies published open-access this week.... Read more »
Killgrove, K., & Montgomery, J. (2016) All Roads Lead to Rome: Exploring Human Migration to the Eternal City through Biochemistry of Skeletons from Two Imperial-Era Cemeteries (1st-3rd c AD). PLOS ONE, 11(2). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147585
Williams, P. (2016) Transatlantic flight times and climate change. Environmental Research Letters, 11(2), 24008. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/11/2/024008
Stidham, T., & Eberle, J. (2016) The palaeobiology of high latitude birds from the early Eocene greenhouse of Ellesmere Island, Arctic Canada. Scientific Reports, 20912. DOI: 10.1038/srep20912
Boethius, A. (2016) Something rotten in Scandinavia: The world's earliest evidence of fermentation. Journal of Archaeological Science, 169-180. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2016.01.008
Lu, X., Wang, L., & McCabe, M. (2016) Elevated CO2 as a driver of global dryland greening. Scientific Reports, 20716. DOI: 10.1038/srep20716
- December 8, 2015
- 12:46 PM
- 893 views
The Dire State of Science in the Muslim World
by Jalees Rehman in The Next Regeneration
Universities and the scientific infrastructures in Muslim-majority countries need to undergo radical reforms if they want to avoid falling by the wayside in a world characterized by major scientific and technological innovations. This is the conclusion reached by Nidhal Guessoum and Athar Osama in their recent commentary "Institutions: Revive universities of the Muslim world", published in the scientific journal Nature. The physics and astronomy professor Guessoum (American University ........ Read more »
Guessoum N, & Osama A. (2015) Institutions: Revive universities of the Muslim world. Nature, 526(7575), 634-6. PMID: 26511563
Romanowski, M., & Nasser, R. (2010) Faculty perceptions of academic freedom at a GCC university. PROSPECTS, 40(4), 481-497. DOI: 10.1007/s11125-010-9166-2
- Anthropology
- Psychology
- Social Science
- Research / Scholarship
- Health
- Educational Psychology
- Science Communication
- Industrial/Organizational Psychology
- Policy
- Career
- Geography
- Political Science
- Public Health
- Sociology
- Sociocultural Anthropology
- Funding
- Behavioral Economics
- Ethics
- Decision-Making
- Education
- October 14, 2015
- 09:53 AM
- 1,184 views
Feel Our Pain: Empathy and Moral Behavior
by Jalees Rehman in The Next Regeneration
"It's empathy that makes us help other people. It's empathy that makes us moral." The economist Paul Zak casually makes this comment in his widely watched TED talk about the hormone oxytocin, which he dubs the "moral molecule". Zak quotes a number of behavioral studies to support his claim that oxytocin increases empathy and trust, which in turn increases moral behavior. If all humans regularly inhaled a few puffs of oxytocin through a nasal spray, we could become m........ Read more »
De Dreu, C., Greer, L., Van Kleef, G., Shalvi, S., & Handgraaf, M. (2011) Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(4), 1262-1266. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1015316108
Shalvi S, & De Dreu CK. (2014) Oxytocin promotes group-serving dishonesty. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(15), 5503-7. PMID: 24706799
Xu X, Zuo X, Wang X, & Han S. (2009) Do you feel my pain? Racial group membership modulates empathic neural responses. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 29(26), 8525-9. PMID: 19571143
- Anthropology
- Biology
- Medicine
- Philosophy
- Psychology
- Social Science
- Neuroscience
- Abnormal Psychology
- Behavioral Economics
- Learning
- Decision-Making
- Biological Anthropology
- Emotion
- Sociocultural Anthropology
- Human Factors
- Applied Anthropology
- Social Psychology
- Behavioral Biology
- Affective Neuroscience
- Sensation and Perception
- Behavioral Neuroscience
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Molecular Neuroscience
- Endocrinology
- Affective Psychology
- March 24, 2015
- 07:00 AM
- 1,299 views
A Universal Translator By Any Other Name…
by Mark E. Lasbury in The 'Scope
Star Trek wouldn’t have been possible without the universal translator. Who would want to watch a show where characters don’t understand each other – of course, that doesn’t stop people from watching political debates. The technology of a universal translator is easy, we have camera phones that will show you a foreign sign in your own language. It’s the software to decipher a previously unencountered language that’s proving tough to overcome. Are there any uni........ Read more »
Sproat, R. (2014) A statistical comparison of written language and nonlinguistic symbol systems. Language, 90(2), 457-481. DOI: 10.1353/lan.2014.0031
Dunn, M., Greenhill, S., Levinson, S., & Gray, R. (2011) Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals. Nature, 473(7345), 79-82. DOI: 10.1038/nature09923
Rao, R., Yadav, N., Vahia, M., Joglekar, H., Adhikari, R., & Mahadevan, I. (2009) Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script. Science, 324(5931), 1165-1165. DOI: 10.1126/science.1170391
Snyder, Benjamin, Regina Barzilay and Kevin Knight. (2010) A Statistical Model for Lost Language Decipherment. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2010. info:/
- Anthropology
- Computer Science / Engineering
- Philosophy
- Social Science
- Neuroscience
- Software Engineering
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Linguistics
- Languages and Compilers
- Behavioral Neuroscience
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Applied Anthropology
- Life History Theory
- linguistics
- Algorithms
- Sociocultural Anthropology
- March 9, 2015
- 08:58 AM
- 2,005 views
“She’s strong for a girl”: The Negative Impact of Stereotypes About Women
by Jalees Rehman in The Next Regeneration
We have all heard the stereotypes: women can’t drive, they don’t understand computers, and how many blondes does it take to screw in a light bulb? But those are all in good fun, right? But what if gender stereotypes actually bring about the observed differences between men and women that supposedly underline these stereotypes? A recent study by the psychologist Marina Pavlova at the University of Tübingen tested this idea.... Read more »
Pavlova, M., Weber, S., Simoes, E., & Sokolov, A. (2014) Gender Stereotype Susceptibility. PLoS ONE, 9(12). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0114802
- February 2, 2015
- 06:00 AM
- 780 views
Prehistoric Temples on Maui Reveal Origins of Island’s First Kingdom
by Blake de Pastino in Western Digs
A new study of indigenous temples, or heiau, on the island of Maui has set out to identify when the island’s native population — initially spread out over several small chiefdoms — first came together under a single ruler.
... Read more »
Kirch, P., Mertz-Kraus, R., & Sharp, W. (2015) Precise chronology of Polynesian temple construction and use for southeastern Maui, Hawaiian Islands determined by 230Th dating of corals. Journal of Archaeological Science, 166-177. DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2014.09.025
- October 6, 2014
- 04:13 AM
- 934 views
Not-So-Green Men
by Viputheshwar Sitaraman in Draw Science
The Webb Telescope searches for alien life on exoplanets by analyzing CFC pollution from potentially advanced civilizations. [Infographic]... Read more »
Lin, H., Abad, G., & Loeb, A. (2014) Detecting industrial pollution in the atmospheres of earth-like exoplanets. The Astrophysical Journal, 792(1). DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/792/1/L7
- October 5, 2014
- 01:18 AM
- 518 views
Book Review: Listen, Here is a Story: Ethnographic Life Narratives from Aka and Ngandu Women of the Congo Basin
by Farid Pazhoohi in Epistemophil
When you look in the news for the Central African Republic you encounter stories about rebels, terror, civil war, murder, and bloodshed. But what are the other aspects of life in the region that no news agency covers? A journey to the center of the African rainforest reveals what happens and has been happening for […]... Read more »
Farid Pazhoohi. (2014) Book Review: Listen, Here is a Story: Ethnographic Life Narratives from Aka and Ngandu Women of the Congo Basin. African Studies Quarterly, 14(4), 97-98. info:/
- August 31, 2014
- 05:20 PM
- 903 views
Heroin’s Anthrax Problem
by Rebecca Kreston in BODY HORRORS
Anthrax is a deadly disease with high rates of morbidity and mortality. Because it is, thankfully, also quite rare, it is relatively easy to track its whereabouts and going-ons when an outbreak occurs. Typically, outbreaks of anthrax have been traced to groups of people involved in high-risk activities involving grazing animals and their byproducts: anthrax favors shepherds, butchers, wool-sorters, leather workers, and even the odd drum-playing hippies. In 2009, however, an outbreak upended this........ Read more »
Berger, T., Kassirer, M., & Aran, A. (2014) Injectional anthrax - new presentation of an old disease. Eurosurveillance, 19(32), 20877. DOI: 10.2807/1560-7917.ES2014.19.32.20877
- June 5, 2014
- 06:00 AM
- 1,031 views
Vinyl Records Excavated at Famous ’60s Commune Challenge ‘Hippie’ Stereotype, Study Says
by Blake de Pastino in Western Digs
the country estate known as Rancho Olompali in Marin County, California was best known as the site of a social experiment that lasted all of 600 days: a commune called The Chosen Family, where at one point nearly 90 people sought refuge from the tumult of San Francisco street life in the late 1960s.
And if their musical tastes were any indication, archaeologists say, its members were surprisingly diverse.... Read more »
Parkman, E. (2014) A hippie discography: vinyl records from a Sixties commune. World Archaeology, 1-17. DOI: 10.1080/00438243.2014.909103
- May 7, 2014
- 02:58 PM
- 1,126 views
Does Literary Fiction Challenge Racial Stereotypes?
by Jalees Rehman in The Next Regeneration
Reading literary fiction can be highly pleasurable, but does it also make you a better person? Conventional wisdom and intuition lead us to believe that reading can indeed improve us. However, as the philosopher Emrys Westacott has recently pointed out in his essay for 3Quarksdaily, we may overestimate the capacity of literary fiction to foster moral improvement. A slew of scientific studies have taken on the task of studying the impact of literary fiction on our emotions and thoughts. Some of t........ Read more »
Johnson, D., Huffman, B., & Jasper, D. (2014) Changing Race Boundary Perception by Reading Narrative Fiction. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 36(1), 83-90. DOI: 10.1080/01973533.2013.856791
- December 12, 2013
- 12:06 PM
- 574 views
Little Red Riding Hood and the Second Wave Phylomemeticists
by Joe Roe in On Prehistoric Man
Jamie Tehrani has a great paper in PLOS ONE on The Phylogenetics of Little Red Riding Hood: Researchers have long been fascinated by the strong continuities evident in the oral traditions associated with different...... Read more »
Jamshid J. Tehrani. (2013) The Phylogenetics of Little Red Riding Hood. PLOS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0078871
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