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...
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...
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”.
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...
A neat article in The Conversation by Justin Bradfield discusses new chemical approaches for identifying traces of poison in the archaeological record: “We’r...
Linking to a provocative piece that “VR Will Break Museums”.
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...
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...
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 paper: Wilkins J, Schoville BJ, Brown KS (2014) An Experimental Investigation of the Functional Hypothesis and Evolutionary Advantage of Stone-Tipped...
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 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...
A new paper by Meredith Carpenter and colleagues describes a novel method that can greatly enrich the yield of DNA from ancient samples:
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...
Mohamed Sahnouni and colleagues describe the archaeology of El-Kherba, Algeria. Sahnouni:2013. This locality is a paleontological exposure associated with th...
Two years ago, I wrote about the archaeological assemblages and evidence of symbolic behavior at Rhino Cave, Botswana (“Views from Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills,...
Primatologist Craig Stanford was interviewed about habitat threats to gorilla populations by a public radio station: “The Human Threat to Great Apes”:
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...
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...
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...
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…
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...
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...
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...
The Wall Street Journal profiles computer scientist and AI researcher Sebastian Thrun. The interview discusses his online education startup, Udacity:
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...
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...
Casts!
I saw this: “India launches Aakash tablet computer priced at $35” on Slashdot, which notes:
Last week, Computerworld reported that IBM’s famous “Watson” supercomputer is moving to its next challenge: prescribing cancer treatments for the WellPoint h...
Katy Meyers, graduate student in anthropology at Michigan State, has posted at the Chronicle of Higher Education her experience “hacking” the AAPA meetings i...
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:...
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...
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...
Archaeologists often define technology in terms of material products. People make stuff, and that stuff is technology.
Simon Armitage and colleagues Armitage:2011 describe archaeological remains from Jebel Faya, in the United Arab Emirates. The assemblages come from a rock sh...
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...
John Horgan writes “Why A.D. 2011 beats 100,000 B.C.: More choices, free will, freedom”.
Razib, pointing to others’ worries about Facebook and privacy, scores an interesting historical analogy:
A California pilot study is going to give students iPads with e-textbooks for algebra.
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...
Coming soon: elderly cyborg farmers?
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article by Jeffrey Young: “College 2.0: Teachers Without Technology Strike Back.”
Savage Minds’ crew has been discussing the future of publishing in the American Anthropological Association recently. Rex Golub compares Open Folklore to Ant...
Kent Anderson: “Do you really need all that website?”
From Dave Winer’s discussion of bootstrapping and Web 2.0 technologies:
Creepy:
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...
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...
An unexpected source of decompression sickness: the U-2 spy plane.
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...
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...
Clearly the human non-furry skin phenotype is meant for more efficient heat transfer energy generation:
Via a reader:
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...
John Timmer gives a great summary of the new paper in Science covering the Complete Genomics sequencing method.
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....
The coming trend in e-books: video.
IBM and Google want students to ditch their laptops and pick up some big iron:
IBM joins the next-gen sequencing race:
I read Chris Anderson’s book because it was, well, “Free”. The book’s thesis is simple: Sometimes people profit by giving things away.
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...
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...
Clearly I need hominid casts made of stainless steel:
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 ...
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...
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...
If you’re wondering what the story is behind the Michael Phelps super-swimsuit story, Alan Boyle covers the science pretty well.
Can I just say, Bertrand Piccard is awesome?
This is random, but John Dvorak writing about the portable phone craze had me laughing:
The physics arXiv blog from MIT Technology Review points to a paper that describes a way to use pulsars as an interstellar GPS system.
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...
This thing about the artificial muscles is incredibly cool:
Ray Kurzweil, Larry Page, and Peter Diamantis are teaming up with NASA to bring us the next step in graduate and postgraduate education:
“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...
Personally, I think the chances are not good that the NY Times will provide accurate and timely information about camouflage gear.
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”?