Stone Age minds in internet time
The journalist Kenneth Miller has an article in the current Discover magazine on “How Our Ancient Brains Are Coping in the Age of Digital Distraction”. I mak...
All posts tagged with technology
Some cool bone tools from an ancient Chinese site
Today’s reminder that stone tools are not all that matter in human behavior: “Discovery of circa 115,000-year-old bone retouchers at Lingjing, Henan, China”.
Link: Robots in retail
MIT Technology Review has an interview with an exec from a company making robots for Walmart: “Walmart’s new robots are loved by staff—and ignored by custome...
Probing the origins of poison arrows
A neat article in The Conversation by Justin Bradfield discusses new chemical approaches for identifying traces of poison in the archaeological record: “We’r...
Will virtual reality compete with museums or help them?
Linking to a provocative piece that “VR Will Break Museums”.
Link: People on the receiving end of misaimed vigilante justice due to poor database design
This is a fascinating story of the age of massive databases and loss of human privacy: “How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a dig...
Artificial intelligence with the biases of its designers
Nice piece from Kate Crawford in the New York Times about how predictive technologies used by Google and others go wrong when applied outside the context the...
Synthetic DNA with extra ‘unnatural’ bases
Yesterday at the Radcliffe Symposium on the Present and Future of DNA, I got to hear a lecture by Floyd Romesberg, whose lab has been working to create DNA w...
Notable: Ballistic study of hafted points
Notable paper: Wilkins J, Schoville BJ, Brown KS (2014) An Experimental Investigation of the Functional Hypothesis and Evolutionary Advantage of Stone-Tipped...
Link: Does ‘singularity’ have the right meaning for technology?
Many futurists and not a few science fiction writers hold the idea that computer technology is developing toward a point where artificial intelligence will b...
Notable: Raw material choice may not matter to handaxe shape
Notable paper: Eren MI, Roos CI, Story BA, von Cramon-Taubadel N, Lycett SJ. 2014. The role of raw material differences in stone tool shape variation: an exp...
Baiting ancient DNA with RNA
A new paper by Meredith Carpenter and colleagues describes a novel method that can greatly enrich the yield of DNA from ancient samples:
Fishing for white elephants
Barbara King notes the recent characterization of fish cooking residues on early Japanese pottery: “What 15,000 Years Of Cooking Fish Tells Us About Humanity...
Behavior of the first North African humans
Mohamed Sahnouni and colleagues describe the archaeology of El-Kherba, Algeria. Sahnouni:2013. This locality is a paleontological exposure associated with th...
Transport distance in MSA Botswana
Two years ago, I wrote about the archaeological assemblages and evidence of symbolic behavior at Rhino Cave, Botswana (“Views from Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills,...
Quote: Craig Stanford on gorilla habitat threats
Primatologist Craig Stanford was interviewed about habitat threats to gorilla populations by a public radio station: “The Human Threat to Great Apes”:
Social media, social dynamics, and the Dunbar number
Drake Bennett in Businessweek takes on evolutionary anthropology this week in a profile of Robin Dunbar (“The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks...
Finding sequencing methods in the library
Jay Shendure and Erez Lieberman Aiden have a recent review in Nature Biotechnology that provides some recent data on the falling cost and increased use of ge...
Early Stone Age hafted spear points from South Africa
This week in Science, Jayne Wilkins and colleagues report on part of the lithic assemblage from Kathu Pan, South Africa, which includes 210 points Wilkins:ha...
Who did what to whom
A confluence of stories, one from the New York Times fashion section, by Henry Alford: “A Web of Answers and Questions”, about Googling people you meet…
Enmeshed in technology
Anthropology and technology combine in a Sarah Bakewell piece about the most recent Channel swimmer, Karen Throsby: “Man is a work in progress, constantly ad...
Students and technology in the classroom
Another school year is about to start for those of us who teach college courses. More and more, students are coming to classrooms and actively using technolo...
Ceramics in the Epigravettian of Croatia
I’ve had a paper on my desktop for more than a week expecting to write a comment on it, and now happily I discover that the first author, Becky Farbstein, ha...
Online education and Silicon Valley
The Wall Street Journal profiles computer scientist and AI researcher Sebastian Thrun. The interview discusses his online education startup, Udacity:
Brittannia 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 id...
Computing past
The Guardian has an interview with George Dyson about his new book, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. The book reviews the early histo...
3D printing, faster, please
Casts!
The box isn't nearly as big, either
I saw this: “India launches Aakash tablet computer priced at $35” on Slashdot, which notes:
Can Watson navigate the medical literature?
Last week, Computerworld reported that IBM’s famous “Watson” supercomputer is moving to its next challenge: prescribing cancer treatments for the WellPoint h...
The new wired physical anthropologists
Katy Meyers, graduate student in anthropology at Michigan State, has posted at the Chronicle of Higher Education her experience “hacking” the AAPA meetings i...
Stone age selectivity
I’m pointing this morning to a nice recent post by Brigid Gallagher, discussing the importance of raw material and processing steps for stone age technology:...
Monkey numerical distractions
This study has been out for a few weeks, and I’ve been meaning to put up a short comment about it: “Representational format determines numerical competence i...
Did humans colonize the northern latitudes without fire?
Wil Roebroeks and Paola Villa Roebroeks:Villa:2011 review the evidence for human control and use of fire in the archaeology of Europe during the Middle Pleis...
Number as cognitive technology
Archaeologists often define technology in terms of material products. People make stuff, and that stuff is technology.
Jebel Faya and early-stage reduction
Simon Armitage and colleagues Armitage:2011 describe archaeological remains from Jebel Faya, in the United Arab Emirates. The assemblages come from a rock sh...
Genomes too cheap to meter
Matthew Herper is a science and medicine contributing writer at Forbes.com. He has just written a series of posts themed as “Gene Week”, focusing on advances...
Modern hairshirts
John Horgan writes “Why A.D. 2011 beats 100,000 B.C.: More choices, free will, freedom”.
Give me a letter
Razib, pointing to others’ worries about Facebook and privacy, scores an interesting historical analogy:
iPad textbooks march forward
A California pilot study is going to give students iPads with e-textbooks for algebra.
Social media in education
Krystal D’Costa (Anthropology in Practice) links to a mini-documentary about the role of social media in the education of “Gen-Y”: “Decade 2: Encouraging Edu...
Robot geriatrics
Coming soon: elderly cyborg farmers?
Professors who reject technology
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article by Jeffrey Young: “College 2.0: Teachers Without Technology Strike Back.”
AnthroSource sleeps furiously
Savage Minds’ crew has been discussing the future of publishing in the American Anthropological Association recently. Rex Golub compares Open Folklore to Ant...
"Why do I need a big Web site to benefit from this?"
Kent Anderson: “Do you really need all that website?”
Quote: Dave Winer on bootstrapping
From Dave Winer’s discussion of bootstrapping and Web 2.0 technologies:
Silk electrodes
Creepy:
Twitter thinking
Not a comment on anyone in particular, but I’m beginning to wonder if some Twitter users are actually robots. I mean, how exactly does one follow thousands o...
iPad tryout
Tried out an iPad this afternoon. It’s a slick little device, very nice looking for games. Some people have commented on iPhone apps looking ugly on the larg...
Bending spy planes
An unexpected source of decompression sickness: the U-2 spy plane.
Computer composer
An article about classical composer David Cope and the AI programs he wrote to make original music. It’s not new news, but a nice profile with many “what doe...
iPad freedom train
After last week’s unveiling of Apple’s iPad, there has been a quiet current of dismay by people looking for a not-yet piece of hardware. I have some sympathy...
Heat wave
Clearly the human non-furry skin phenotype is meant for more efficient heat transfer energy generation:
A virtual walk into the past
Via a reader:
Upgrade?
For obscure reasons, I’m installing Windows 7 on one of my MacBooks. The installation has gone pretty smoothly. But the first thing I wanted to do was instal...
Complete genomes
John Timmer gives a great summary of the new paper in Science covering the Complete Genomics sequencing method.
High-tech honey extraction, chimpanzee-style
Most people know that hunter-gatherer men hunt meat. Fewer people know the major secondary target for male foraging in many hunter-gatherer societies: honey....
Vooks
The coming trend in e-books: video.
Data mining
IBM and Google want students to ditch their laptops and pick up some big iron:
DNA tech
IBM joins the next-gen sequencing race:
Book notes: Free, by Chris Anderson
I read Chris Anderson’s book because it was, well, “Free”. The book’s thesis is simple: Sometimes people profit by giving things away.
Keep flax from fire
The paper about the flax fibers found by Eliso Kvavadze and colleagues in Dzudzuana Cave, Republic of Georgia, is a one-pager. The good kind of one-pager – t...
Billable hours for professors
Yesterday’s post on MIT OpenCourseware touched on some of the difficulties of independent study using online tools. Three barriers stand in the way – one pra...
Stainless casts
Clearly I need hominid casts made of stainless steel:
Out of prints
Errrgh…I’m beginning to think that there are around five out of print books that I would gladly spring for a Kindle if they were available, because each one ...
Writing upward
Since I’ve already contributed to bellyaching about student writing assignments, it’s only fair to point to a Wired article that says students are getting b...
Machine memory
John Zogby polled Americans on whether they’d like to become cyborgs. Some of the questions are about brain implants for health, others for information or “e...
Phelps and the supersuit
If you’re wondering what the story is behind the Michael Phelps super-swimsuit story, Alan Boyle covers the science pretty well.
Round the world solar flight plan
Can I just say, Bertrand Piccard is awesome?
Quote: Real men don't compare phones
This is random, but John Dvorak writing about the portable phone craze had me laughing:
Pulsar navigation
The physics arXiv blog from MIT Technology Review points to a paper that describes a way to use pulsars as an interstellar GPS system.
Kindling my interest
I follow technology here once in a while, but I actually follow it pretty closely personally. As a research tool, the new Kindle DX is getting close to somet...
Artificial nanotube muscles
This thing about the artificial muscles is incredibly cool:
Summer school at Singularity University?
Ray Kurzweil, Larry Page, and Peter Diamantis are teaming up with NASA to bring us the next step in graduate and postgraduate education:
Cloaking
“Cloaking” is like the physics version of the hobbits – catchy name from a fantasy story and fascinating to the press. But there came a time reading “invisib...
Digital fractal camouflage to fool deer
Personally, I think the chances are not good that the NY Times will provide accurate and timely information about camouflage gear.
A new "Wizard"?
Am I the only one who noticed the irony of a car company named “Tesla” opening its premier dealership in a city called “Menlo Park”?