~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
Jay Rosen has written a fascinating article in the Guardian today about Johns Hopkin’s response to this blog post by Professor Matthew Green.
The short version of the story is that Green wrote a blog post about the NSA and cryptography on September 5th. Last Monday, Green received a takedown request from the dean of the engineering school claiming that his blog post contained “classified” information and that his use of the NSA logo was a violation of some kind.…
I am helping re-translate Max Weber’s classic essay „Politics as Vocation“ from the original German into English. One problem that emerged regards how to translate the German word Führer, which is key to the essay, into English. Führer is of course a word that most English-speakers are aware of because of how Adolf Hitler used it between 1933-1945. But Max Weber though wrote in 1919, and had (presumably) never heard of Hitler who at the time was simply a washed-up Austrian corporal beginning to take an interest in politics.…
There is a report from AAA that Horace/Harold Miner’s 1956 article “Body Image Among the Nacirema” is the most downloaded from the AAA journals for 2012. It was downloaded over 11,000 times in 2012.
Missing from AAA’s statement about the Nacirema article is a basic distinction about the article which is that it is not “science,” but “fiction,” or maybe “satire.” Yep, the Nacirema are a made up “tribe,” as legions of delighted undergrads who have read the article have discovered for 57 years.…
Nicholas A Christakis’ story in the NY Times is serious food for thought.
Christakis starts “Let’s Shake Up the Social Sciences” with the following:
TWENTY-FIVE years ago, when I was a graduate student, there were departments of natural science that no longer exist today. Departments of anatomy, histology, biochemistry and physiology have disappeared, replaced by innovative departments of stem-cell biology, systems biology, neurobiology and molecular biophysics. Taking a page from Darwin, the natural sciences are evolving with the times.
Rex at savageminds.org has written a nice post “How to Explain Anthropology to a Physicist.” The explanation applies equally to evolutionary psychologists, geneticists, and others who are likely to dabble in anthropology.…
by Scott Freeman
I was recently at a bar and jokingly attacked by a couple of friends about non-quantitative data. Consultants love them some numbers. While their jests were well taken, the underlying point was also well taken. As Hervè Varenne addressed in his position paper on anthropology and education, students of anthropology often find themselves kowtowing to quantitative research, apologizing for ‘sampling limitations’. This is to say that the type of modernity that insists on brevity and a numerically constructed objectivity may be the current that we swim against most.…
Given the discussion of MOOCs that has been occurring in the blogosphere over the last year, I thought it might be helpful to get a longer perspective on technology and education. In that spirit, I have dug up this 30 minute conversation between Lawrence Cremin of Teachers College and Mara Mayor of the Annenberg CPB project on the role of technology in education.
The conversation is here.
The conversation demonstrates that the question surrounding the interplay of technology and education haven’t changed much in the last 25 years, or the last 50.…
David Brooks, the center-right columnist at the New York Times today published a column about the limitations on neuron research. He’s not against neural research, just the hubris that tends to collect around it. Like research on DNA, research on neurons is great stuff—but no matter how enthusiastic the scientists may be, it does not explain the products of culture, sociality, or humanity. And this conclusion is not the result of a political bias, but is a critique widely shared in anthropology, sociology, and beyond. …
I will be in Thailand this summer for five weeks teaching a course for the University of Nevada, Reno, as a Visiting Professor. As part of the employment procedure, I had to sign a loyalty oath indicating “I will support, protect and defend the Constitution and Government of the United States, and the Constitution and Government of the State of Nevada, against all enemies, whether domestic or foreign…” Unlike the other papers I signed for the employment, thisone needed to be notarized. …
I want take up Tony’s question about this Dennett quote:
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination (Dennett 1995)
One way to answer this is through recourse to the literature on Science and Technology Studies (STS). We could weave our way through a dense web of philosophical and empirical work on scientific practice that demonstrates time and again that value-free inquiry is an illusion.…
I just came across this article about elite education, and the habits of the Ivy Leaguers. I really like the opening paragraphs which asks why the author, who is an Ivy League grad has so much trouble talking to the plumber who will fix his pipes.
This has a lot to do with what Pierre Bourdieu and the “habitus” of social class. As the author, William Deresiewicz points out, this is tightly connected to how “intelligent” you are.…
There are two blogs I have read recently which make the good point that reading “classics” is important . At the New York Times, Philosopher Gary Gutting makes the point that a college education is not so much about “the content,” (or presumably the major) but about the habits of reading and inquiry developed. Or as he writes: “We should judge teaching not by the amount of knowledge it passes on, but by the enduring excitement it generates.”…