what to do with a girl passed out drunk on a couch.
the american anthropological association announced on monday that it will be converting the journal cultural anthropology to an open-access format, accessible free of charge to anyone, as of january 2014.
In addition to current material, the new format will also provide a 10-year backlog. Cultural Anthropology is the journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, a section of the AAA.
The announcement reflects something of a shift for the association. Some members of the association have in the past urged it to embrace the open-access movement, criticizing the subscription-based model used by the association’s journals.
Leaders of the association said that they have been looking for ways to experiment with new models of publishing. “It started back in August 2012 when the association invited [idea submissions for] journal publishing models” from the association’s various sections, said Edward Liebow, the association’s executive director, in a telephone press conference Monday afternoon. Of these submissions, the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s idea — to convert to open access — won out.
read the rest here, six more paragraphs and your done.
romancing the stones: archaeology in popular cinema.
Article: Romancing the Stones: Archaeology in Popular Cinema http://wp.me/s2MdZS-2563
Reblogged from The Archaeology of Tomb Raider:
In his article Romancing the Stones: Archaeology in Popular Cinema, historian Mark A. Halllooks at how archaeology and archaeologists are depicted in popular cinema and considers how the recurring themes of…
Psychology Prof. Richard Russell reveals a new sign of aging in perception research
The contrasting nature of facial features is one of the signals that people unconsciously use to decipher how old someone looks, says Psychology Prof. Richard Russell, who has been collaborating with researchers from CE.R.I.E.S. (Epidermal and Sensory Research and Investigation Center), a department of Chanel Research and Technology dedicated to skin related issues and facial appearance.
“Unlike with wrinkles, none of us are consciously aware that we’re using this cue, even though it stares us in the face every day,” said Russell.
The discovery of this cue to facial age perception may partly explain why cosmetics are worn the way they are, and it lends more evidence to the idea that makeup use reflects our biological as well as our cultural heritage, according to Russell.
In one study, Russell and his team measured images of 289 faces ranging in age from 20 to 70 years old, and found that through the aging process, the color of the lips, eyes and eyebrows change, while the skin becomes darker. This results in less contrast between the features and the surrounding skin – leaving older faces to have less contrast than younger faces.
The difference in redness between the lips and the surrounding skin decreases, as does the luminance difference between the eyebrow and the forehead, as the face ages. Although not consciously aware of this sign of aging, the mind uses it as a cue for perceiving how old someone is.
In another study involving more than a hundred subjects in Gettysburg and Paris, the scientists artificially increased these facial contrasts and found that the faces were perceived as younger. When they artificially decreased the facial contrasts, the faces were perceived as older.
The image shows two identical images of the same face, except that the facial contrast has been increased in the left image and decreased in the right image. The face on the left appears younger than the one on the right.
Cosmetics are commonly used to increase aspects of facial contrast, such as the redness of lips. Scientists propose that this can partly explain why makeup is worn the way that it is – shades of lipstick that increase the redness of the lips are making the face appear younger, which is related to healthiness and beauty.
More on Russell’s study is available from PLOS ONE, an open-access publisher that makes the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource.
(via theolduvaigorge)
Carbonised Wooden Cradle
Roman
From the House of M.P.P. Granianus
Herculaneum
1st Century AD
Source: British Museum
i’m pretty sure i saw this at ikea.
(via anthrocity)
Racist Depictions of Human Evolution
This image showed up on my Facebook feed today. I think it’s problematic for a few reasons. Not only is this idea of evolutions vs. devolution fallacious, but the figure on the right is representative of a racial stereotype. Baseball cap, hoodie, baggy pants. The exaggerated facial prognathism of the figure seems to be meant to represent the facial morphology of earlier hominin forms, but when combined with the silhouette of the clothing, the figure comes off as a racist depiction of an African-American man. The image is equating certain forms of African-American culture to biological devolution.
Here’s some context. Exaggerated depictions of facial prognathism have been used historically AND today to justify racism against people of African descent by implying that they were “less evolved.”
This isn’t the first time casual racism has shown up in the ape-turning-into-modern-man meme either. Images like this almost always display a gradation from dark to light skin and hair, as if to say that white people are the “most evolved.”
Science fact: humans won’t reach their full potential until they are nine foot tall nudists with flowing auburn hair which gleams in contrast to their ashy, lily-white skin.
What do you think? Is the topmost image intentionally racist? Or it just an insensitive (and fallacious) attempt to condemn youth culture in general?
(via bellaesprita)
a new archaeological theory explains how so many died in pompeii. they were all looking down at their ipads.
no really…
This page is meant to give some more details on the use of iPads to document our excavations. This is being explored in greater depth at the blog Paperless Archaeology.
There have been many infrastructural changes at PARP:PS over the past year, many of which center on the closure of excavations in VIII.7.1-15 and the opening of excavations across the road at insula I.1.1-10. This expansion of the project - its aims and responsibilities - led to the reorganization of the team and the way in which we do things. The most immediate of these changes saw the introduction of a completely electronic workflow for digital recording centered around iPad tablet computers; a veritable ‘paper-less project’.
The iPads helped us replace field notebooks, clipboards of forms, large drawing boards with piles of A3 paper for drawing, and even little things like calculators and To Do lists.
The recent interest that Apple took in the ways we have revolutionized our field-work resulted in a feature article at their website (the original URL, http://www.apple.com/ipad/pompeii, is no longer active but you can see a pdf of the page here). Given the massive volumes of traffic to that story, and thus to our project, we thought it could be useful to outline a little more fully the ways in which this new technology is helping us to document our excavation of a complex urban neighborhood.
We can outline some of the uses of the iPads here, but we are still gathering some usability information from the trench supervisors and hope to have a more formal presentation this winter. Come back soon as we will also upload some of our training materials so that you can experiment with these methods (or improve them) on your own.
is there a window to getting a tenure track job?
One of the questions that Matt Thompson and I had going into the surveys of adjuncts and past adjuncts was whether or not there is a window of opportunity for getting a tenure track job. In other words: is there some cutoff point where the likelihood of getting a tenure track job is greatly diminished? We don’t have a hard and fast answer — the surveys were too limited — but there’s some data to think about. Of the 50 respondents to the post-adjuncting survey, 32 now hold tenure track positions. Of the 13 that provided answers to clarify what kinds of jobs they currently work in, most were in full-time research, consulting, or non-tenure track instuctorships. Of those same 50 respondents, the vast majority adjuncted as their principle means of income for four years or less (43); the other seven have all been adjuncting for six or more years, with two respondents doing so for 10 or more years. (Based on the data, it looks like the two long-term adjuncters are half of a two-income household, which might explain why they have continued to adjunct for so long.) When compared to the current adjuncts, the numbers are pretty similar. Of the 36 respondents who provided an answer to how long ago they received their Ph.D.s, most were in the five years or fewer category (31 of 36). The other five are all in the nine years or more category.
keep reading here, it is a short article.
the making of a cultural neuroscientist… see even the neuroscientists want to be cool like anthropologists
My name is Liz Losin and I’m a social and cultural neuroscientist. I’m currently a postdoctoral researcher in Tor Wager’s labat the University of Colorado in Boulder. I’m delighted and honored to be joining Neuroanthropology!
Here, in my first post, I’ll tell you how I came to study cultural neuroscience and give you an insider’s perspective on how the field has grown. I’ll also tell you a bit about my specific research interests and give you an idea of what I’ll be blogging about.
continue reading here
my greatest fear is that i’ll end up a social and cultural parking lot attendant.
all this faith is making me nauseous.
Being from Argentina, I spent all day elucubrating about pope related matters, and haven’t finish my project for tomorrow. It’ll be a long night.
I had to look up elucubrating to determine if this was an offensive post.
i blog about anthropology, with a few personal opinions and anecdotes thrown in. i try not to make posts about subjects that are already trending on tumblr. i make an effort to share information that may be of interest but has been missed by the radar. dig my archives like an archaeologist with a new trowel. i do this because i have anthropological super powers bestowed upon me by the gods of academia. none of which are that powerful, aside from the mind bullets.
