Anthropology, Demography, Human Ecology, Teaching

New Formal Demography Workshop: Migration and Adaptation

10 March 2011 jhj1 1 Comment

We will be having another of our occasional Stanford Workshops in Formal Demography this April 28th-30th. The theme this time will be "Migration and Adaptation," and we have a terrific lineup of speakers coming. As in the past, the workshop is funded by NICHD and receives substantial suport from the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS). What is somewhat different this time is that we actually have our own center now, The Stanford Center for Population Research (SCPR). Here's the basic idea for the workshop:

Mobility is a common form of human adaptation to social or environmental risks. Forms of human mobility vary with regard to permanency and spatial scale. For example, foragers or pastoralists may move seasonally in response to resource scarcity and opportunity throughout a more or less stable greater home range. Smallholders and agrarian peasants might be displaced on a more permanent basis as a result of conflict or extreme resource scarcity, migrating internally to cities or other relatively nearby localities perceived to be less risky. International economic migrants may travel long distances on a more or less permanent basis in search of economic opportunity abroad.

Global climate change is predicted to increase migration rates substantially by the middle of the 21st century. This increase in migration is likely to result from multiple, interacting causal mechanisms including an increase in adverse weather events (e.g., droughts, floods), an increase in resource-related conflicts, or declining viability of local environments arising from various forms of land-use/land-cover change. These increases will add to the already substantial movement of human population from rural to urban areas, in response to internal social displacement, and from other economic migration.

Understanding human migration requires the input from scientists from a wide range of disciplines. We are particularly interested in approaches that combine the formalism of demography, on-the-ground social research, and remotely-sensed information of the biophysical environment, the so-called "pixels to people" approach.

In this workshop, we will bring together demographers, anthropologists, economists, and geographers to develop a methodological toolkit for understanding migration as an adaptation to risk. The specific aim of the workshop is to promote knowledge of methods and perspectives from different disciplines, disseminate information about the growing wealth of demographic data on the biophysical environment and human migration, and to foster collaborative and interdisciplinary work. The format will consist of lectures by invited researchers to an audience of other researchers, selected graduate students, and junior faculty. The three-day workshop will have approximately ten faculty and 20 students, whose travel, lodging, and meals will be covered. The format provides substantial time for discussion. The workshop will be held at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), Stanford 28-30 April 2011.

Confirmed speakers include:

James Holland Jones, Department of Anthropology and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University (organizer): Formal Models;
Population Projection
Shripad Tuljapurkar, Department of Biology, Stanford University (organizer): Stochastic Forecasting
Eric Lambin, Environmental and Earth Systems Science and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Pixels to People
David Lobell, Environmental and Earth Systems Science and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Global Climate Change and Food Insecurity
William H. Durham, Department of Anthropology and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University: Smallholder Responses to Risk and Uncertainty
Ronald Rindfuss, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina and The East-West Center: Population and Environment; Microsimulation
Amber Wutich, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Water Insecurity
Lori Hunter, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado: Migration and Health
David Lopez-Carr, Department of Geography, University of California Santa Barbara: Migration and Fertility on the Forest Frontier

A (rather large) printable flier for the workshop can be found here. It includes information on how to apply. Hopefully, we will soon have an all official-like webpage through IRiSS as well, which I will point to when it goes live.

Anthropology

Anthropology: A Bittersweet Love Story

16 February 2011 jhj1 7 Comments

Rex from Savage Minds laid out a St. Valentine's Day challenge. He asked for love letters to anthropology, in part, as a follow-up to the #aaafail fracas of December last. He notes "there is a strong chance that I'm opening the flood gates for endless cynical, bodice-ripping parodies." But I'll play it straight. It just so happens that the topic plays into many of the ongoing conversations I am having with friends and colleagues these days. So, here it goes in all earnestness...

For me, anthropology is the science charged with explaining the origin and maintenance of human diversity in all its forms. To acheive this end, anthropology must be unapologetically grand in its scope. How can we explain human diversity without documenting its full extent, through both time and space, and across cultures? This is the thing that drew me to anthropology, the thing that really made me fall in love with it. The great story of humanity. Our great story. Where did we come from? What makes us human? Where does the tapestry of human diversity come from and how is it that we continually manage to resist powerful homogenizing forces and hang on to our diversity? What commonalities transcend local difference to unite all humanity? How is it that civilizations rise and fall? And what is the fate of humanity?

This vision of anthropology relies on a simultaneous focus on difference and universality -- reminiscent of Scott Fitzgerald's famous take on true intelligence, "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." It isn't about making hyperbolic claims on flimsy or otherwise highly situated evidence. It is about relentlessly examining the commonplace with an eye to universal, the grand.

As a practitioner who came of age after the worst of the anthropology culture wars was over, what breaks my heart about the current state of our discipline is its smallness. Anthropology has become substantially less ambitious yet so many practitioners seem utterly satisfied with this state of affairs, in large measure because we fail to engage with other disciplines. We ask trivial questions about absurdly particularistic topics. We hesitate to make even the most unproblematic generalizations or, worse (?), make absurd generalizations on the most meagre of evidence. We complexify rather than analyze. We theorize rather than understand. We demonize and pigeonhole our colleagues. We prefer the clever to the correct, a trait that our know-nothing discipline ironically seems to share with our hyper-rationalist colleagues in economics.

I worry for my beloved discipline's future. If we continue failing to connect with humanity's big questions -- if we fail to engage a broader community -- we are relegated to doing poorly-funded and theoretically unsophisticated biology, literary criticism without any texts, and telling stories that no one outside our immediate circles either believes or even cares about.

For anthropology to thrive, we need to not be afraid to learn the tools that help us answer questions we want answered, rather than simply the ones that are expedient. Better still, we should have the confidence to create our own methods and develop our own theories, rather than perpetually borrowing them from our ostensibly better-endowed cognate disciplines.

One of my great intellectual heroes is Gene Hammel. Gene is an anthropologist who has published in all four subfields of anthropology; an anthropologist who gave talks to statistics departments; an anthropologist who developed new computational tools to analyze kinship and social structure long before any social scientist had a computer on his or her desk. Gene is also an anthropologist who left his anthropology department after 40 years to join a demography department because he could no longer stand the nonense of anthropology.

I wonder if this isn't also my fate. Was my infatuation with the immensity of anthropology simply a passionate affair of youth? Does the mature me move on to a more sane, more stable disciplinary home? It's a question to which I've given no small amount of thought recently...

...But, as I've said before, and I imagine I will say again, I really believe that anthropology can play a role in meeting the enormous challenges our species now faces. Diversity is the foundation of adaptation and adpatation is always local. Understanding how different people in different places and different times solve(d) real problems provides the raw material for finding adaptive solutions to a rapidly changing world. Despite all the rhetoric one hears about living in a global world, the need for multiculturalism, blah, blah, blah, ethnocentrism and imperialist conceit are so pervasive in the contemporary academy that I seriously doubt any other discipline is likely to pick up this particular challenge. So it's up to anthropology. However, to make this vital contribution, anthropology needs to care about the larger picture of humanity and the planet in which we are enmeshed, and anthropologists need to have the confidence to make their marks. Maintaining love after the first blush of passion has passed takes effort. Whether my discipline/lover and I are up for the joint challenge is an open question, but regardless of the outcome of couples therapy, our early relationships shape who we are and who we can become. At the very least, I will always have this vision of a grand anthropology to help guide whatever I become.

For me, anthropology is the science charged with explaining the origin and maintenance of human diversity in all its forms. To achieve this end, anthropology must be unapologetically grand in its scope. How can we explain human diversity without documenting its full extent, through both time and space, and across cultures? This is the thing that drew me to anthropology, the thing that really made me fall in love with it. The great story of humanity. Our great story. Where did we come from? What makes us human? Where does the tapestry of human diversity come from and how is it that we continually manage to resist powerful homogenizing forces and hang on to our diversity? What commonalities transcend local difference to unite all humanity? How is it that civilizations rise and fall? And what is the fate of humanity?

As a practitioner who came of age after the worst of the anthropology culture wars was over, what breaks my heart about the current state of our discipline is its smallness. Anthropology has become substantially less ambitious yet so many practitioners seem utterly satisfied with this state of affairs, in large measure because we fail to engage with other disciplines. We ask trivial questions about absurdly particularistic topics. We hesitate to make even the most unproblematic generalizations or, worse (?), make preposterous generalizations on the most meagre of evidence. We complexify rather than analyze. We theorize rather than understand. We demonize and pigeonhole our colleagues. We prefer the clever to the correct, a trait that our know-nothing discipline ironically seems to share with our hyper-rationalist colleagues in economics.

...but, as I've said before, and I imagine I will say again, I really believe that anthropology can play a role in meeting the enormous challenges our species now faces. Diversity is the foundation of adaptation and adaptation is always local. Understanding how different people in different places and different times solve(d) real problems provides the raw material for finding adaptive solutions to a rapidly changing world. Despite all the rhetoric one hears about living in a global world, the need for multiculturalism, blah, blah, blah, ethnocentrism and imperialist conceit are so pervasive in the contemporary academy that I seriously doubt any other discipline is likely to pick up this particular challenge. So it's up to anthropology. However, to make this vital contribution, anthropology needs to care about the larger picture of humanity and the planet in which we are enmeshed, and anthropologists need to have the confidence to make their marks. Maintaining love after the first blush of passion has passed takes effort. Whether my discipline/lover and I are up for the joint challenge is an open question, but regardless of the outcome of couples therapy, our early relationships shape who we are and who we can become. At the very least, I will always have this vision of a grand anthropology to help guide whatever I become.

Diet & Nutrition, Human Ecology

Food Prices Continue to Rise

3 February 2011 jhj1 Leave a comment

Newly released data by FAO show that food prices continued to rise, up 3.4% from the last month of 2010. This is yet another record high. Here is a plot based on the FAO data (click to enlarge):

An article in today's New York Times attributes much of the rise in price to uncertainty over coming harvests. It also notes the four main factors that contribute to increased price: weather, higher demand (from larger population size and greater demand for meat and dairy), smaller yields, and the diversion of food crops to biofuels.

Human Ecology

Winter Weirding

12 January 2011 jhj1 Leave a comment

As I listen to the deluge of reports of horrible winter weather from friends back on the east coast, I came across this video by Peter Sinclair from his YouTube series, "Climate Denial Crock of the Week." The part I find most compelling is the animation toward the end of this short video showing what looks an awful lot like the displacement of cold Arctic air down into North America and Eurasia by much warmer (as high as 20 degrees F) in the Arctic.

Diet & Nutrition, Human Ecology

Worrying Trends

6 January 2011 jhj1 Leave a comment

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization's food price index is at an all-time high, meaning that the food security of millions of people is in jeopardy. In the plot below (click to enlarge), we can see that the FPI currently just exceeds its previous high in June of 2008, when riots over food shortages were widespread. This is something to keep an eye on for the new year.

Anthropology, science

That's How Science Works

29 December 2010 jhj1 5 Comments

The RealClimate blog has a very astute entry on how the controversy surrounding the recent report in the prestigious journal Science that bacteria living in the arsenic-rich waters of Mono Lake in California can substitute arsenic for phosphorous in their DNA. If true, this would be a major finding because it expands the range of environments in which we could conceivably find extraterrestrial life. In effect, this result would suggest a wider range of building blocks for life. Pretty heavy stuff. Now, I am way out of my depth on this topic, but it sounds like the paper published in Science suffers from some fairly serious problems. Some of the problems noted by experts in the field have been assembled by Carl Zimmer on his blog. Carl also provides a pithy treatment of the controversy in an article at Slate.com. John Roach has a similarly excellent review of the controversy, including what we learn about science from it on his Cosmic Log blog.

Regardless of the scientific merits of this work, this episode is actually an instructive example of the way that science works. As the RealClimate folks write,

The arseno-DNA episode has displayed this process in full public view. If anything, this incident has demonstrated the credibility of scientists, and should promote public confidence in the scientific establishment.

The post then goes on to list three important lessons we can draw from this whole incident:

"Major funding agencies willingly back studies challenging scientific consensus." It helps if the challenge to scientific consensus is motivated by carefully reasoned theoretical challenges or, even better, data that challenge the consensus. Some yahoo saying that evolution is "just a theory" or that climate change isn't real because it was really cold last winter isn't enough. In the case of arseno-DNA, as Carl Zimmer notes, the National Academy of Sciences published a report in 2007 that suggested the theoretical possibility of arsenic-based biology. Carl also notes that some of the authors of this report are highly critical of the Science paper as well. The report challenged the orthodoxy that phosphate was a necessary building block of DNA, and the report's author's later called out NASA (the major funding source for this kind of extreme biology) for publishing sloppy science. Lots of orthodoxy being challenged here...
"Most everyone would be thrilled to overturn the consensus. Doing so successfully can be a career-making result. Journals such as Science and Nature are more than willing to publish results that overturn scientific consensus, even if data are preliminary – and funding agencies are willing to promote these results." Individual scientists have enormous individual and institutional incentives to overturn orthodoxies if it is within their power. You become a star when you pull this feat off. And you better believe that every funding agency out there would like to take credit for funding the critical research that helped overturn a fundamental scientific paradigm.
"Scientists offer opinions based on their scientific knowledge and a critical interpretation of data. Scientists willingly critique what they think might be flawed or unsubstantiated science, because their credibility – not their funding – is on the line." As a scientist, you have to do this if you are going to be taken seriously by your peers -- you know, the ones who do all that peer review that climate deniers, e.g., seem to get their collective panties in a wad about?

The RealClimate piece summarizes by noting:

This is the key lesson to take from this incident, and it applies to all scientific disciplines: peer-review continues after publication. Challenges to consensus are seriously entertained – and are accepted when supported by rigorous data. Poorly substantiated studies may inspire further study, but will be scientifically criticized without concern for funding opportunities. Scientists are not "afraid to lose their grant money".

Read the RealClimate post to get the full story. Obviously, these authors (who do excellent science and amazing public education work, a rare combination) are interested in what this controversy has to say about accusations of bias in climate science -- check out the RealClimate archives for some back-story on this. However, the post is so much more broadly applicable, as they note in the quote above. Science is not a monolithic body of information; it is a process, a system designed to produce positive (as opposed to normative) statements about the world around us. When it works correctly, science is indifferent to politics or the personal motivations of individual scientists because results get replicated. Everything about a scientific paper is designed to allow other researchers to replicate the results that are presented in that paper. If other researchers can't replicate some group's findings, those findings become suspect (and get increasingly so as more attempts to replicate fail).

So what does this mean for Anthropology as a science? You may remember that there has been some at times shrill "discussion" (as well as some genuine intellectual discussion) about the place for science in Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association in particular. For me, replicability is a sine qua non of science. The nature of much anthropological research, particularly research in cultural anthropology, makes the question of replication challenging. When you observe some group of people behaving in a particular way in a particular place at a particular time, who is to say otherwise? I don't claim to have easy answers here, but there are a few things we can do to ensure the quality of our science.

First, we need to have scientific theories that are sufficiently robust that they can generate testable predictions that transcend the particularities of time and place. Results generated in one population/place/time can then be challenged by testing in other populations/places/times. Of course, it is of the utmost importance that we try to understand how the differences in population and place and time will change the results, but this is what our research is really about, right? When we control for these differences, do we still see the expected results?

Second, we need to be scrupulous in our documentation of our results and the methods we employ to generate these results. You know, like science? It's never easy to read someone else's lab notebook, but we need to be able to do this in anthropology, at least in principle. Going back to the raw data as they are reduced in a lab notebook or its equivalent is probably the primary means through which scientific fraud is discovered. Of course, there are positive benefits to having scrupulously-kept field notes as well. They serve as a rich foundation for future research by the investigator, for instance.

Third, we need to be willing to share our data. This is expected in the natural sciences (in fact, it is a condition for publication in journals like Science and Nature) and it should be in Anthropology as well.

I think that the points of the RealClimate post all apply to anthropology as well. Surrounding the latest brouhaha on science in anthropology, one hears a lot of grousing about various cartels (e.g., the AAA Executive Board, the editorial boards of various journals, etc.) that keep anthropologists of different strips (yes, it happens on both sides) from receiving grants or getting published or invited to serve on various boards, etc. Speaking from my experience as both panelist and applicant, I can confidently say that the National Science Foundation's Cultural Anthropology Program funds good cultural anthropology of a variety of different approaches (there are also other BCS programs that entertain, and sometimes fund, applications from anthropologists) and the panel will happily fund orthodoxy-busting proposals if they are sufficiently meritorious. The editorial position of American Ethnologist not in line with your type of research? If you've done good science, there are lots of general science journals that will gladly take interesting and important anthropology papers (and, might I add, have much higher impact factors). I co-authored a paper with Rebecca and Doug Bird that appeared in PNAS not too long ago. Steve Lansing has also had a couple nice papers in PNAS as does Richard McElreath, or Herman Pontzer, or ... a bunch of other anthropologists! Mike Gurven at UCSB has had some luck getting papers into Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Mhairi Gibson and Ruth Mace have papers in Biology Letters and PLoS Medicine. Rebecca Sear has various papers in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and a boat-load of other anthropologists (and at least one economist) have a paper in Science. Ruth Mace has papers in most of these journals as well as at least one in Science. Rob Boyd, Richard McElreath, Joe Henrich, and I all even have papers about human social behavior, culture, etc. in theoretical biology journals such as Theoretical Population Biology and the Journal of Theoretical Biology. There's lots more. As with my previous post, this is a total convenience sample of work with which I am already familiar. The point is that there are outlets for good scientific anthropology out there even if people like me are unlikely to publish in journals like PoLAR.

So, I'm sanguine about the process of science and the continuing ability for anthropologists to pursue science. My winter break is drawing to a close and I'm going to try to continue some of this myself!

Infectious Disease

A New Vector for Leishmania

28 December 2010 jhj1 Leave a comment

It isn't every day that we learn about the discovery of an entirely new vector for an important vector-borne disease. A new report by the Australian Department of Agriculture and Fisheries has identified a new species of Leishmania that is transmitted by midges, not the usual vector, sandflies. Leishmania is a vector-borne protozoan parasite that causes an ulcerative disease known as Leishmaniasis or Kala-azar. Leishmaniasis is a disease primarily of the tropics and subtropics and is considered one of the most neglected infectious diseases in the world. The usual vectors are phlebotomine sandflies.

Australia (along with Antarctica) was thought to be the only continent free of Leishmania when locally-acquired infection was detected in kangaroos in Northern Territory in 2003. Researchers investigating this infection thought that the local sandflies (Sergentomyia spp.) seemed highly unlikely vectors because they show a strong preference for feeding on reptiles. Indeed, screening for Leishmania in 3046 Sergentomyia sandflies yielded none infected with Leishmania. This led the researchers to expand the vectors tested. What they found was an unnamed species of day-feeding midge (Lasiohelea sp.) that was infected with a prevalence of up to 15 percent. This is the first identified vector for Leishmania that is not a phlebotomine sandfly. Not much is known about this midge. The researchers were unable to find breeding sites, for example. The presence of prolegs on the midge larvae suggest that it is not aquatic but is terrestrial or semi-acquatic. The authors suggest looking for midge breeding sites in the moist soil near water troughs where kangaroos drink.

Finding a totally new vector for a disease carries with it implications for eradication and control. One possibility raised by this work is that the difficulty some control programs have experienced may reflect the fact that Leishmania is being transmitted by multiple vectors. This is an hypothesis well worth investigating in areas other than Australia.

This work formed the basis of the Ph.D. dissertation for Annette Dougall at Charles Darwin University, Menzies School of Health Research. Nice work, Annette!

Anthropology, Demography

Typologies of Critique

24 December 2010 jhj1 2 Comments

Greg Downey over at Neuroanthropology has a fantastic post on the most recent flare-up of the anthropology-is-it-science-or-is-it-literature wars. There is an awful lot of wise prose to be found in this post (and some disturbing information about the labor action at Macquarie University), but the thing that tickled me more than anything was his typology of criticism. I love these sort of typologies as intellectual play-things and have lots of my own (that probably any of my grad students or post-docs would be happy to tell you about over a beer some time). Greg's typology of stupid criticisms:

Critique for incompleteness, "where the critic points out something tangentially related to the author’s topic or argument and then asserts that this missing element is THE most important consideration, so the argument is hopelessly, fatally flawed."
Critique from creative misunderstanding, where "the critic latches onto a single term or phrase, intentionally misunderstands it or comes up with an interpretation that could only occur to the most hostile, cranky, ill-disposed reader, and then projects the misunderstanding onto a straw version of the presenter."
Critique from guilt by association, where "the critic sees some sort of link between what the author writes and some deeply loathed intellectual villain, draws some sort of tenuous connection, and then just substitutes the villain’s ideas for the argument, essay or analysis in question.

Awesome. I will need to get to work thinking of other willfully bone-headed modes of critique. I will think of this post every time I review a paper or grant proposal from now on...

A similar typology that I came up with attending demography talks, first at the Harvard Center for Population and Development and later at the Population Association of America meetings, deals with discussants. The phenomenon of the discussant is still something I find a bit bizarre, as I find having a discussant adds absolutely nothing to the intellectual merit of a talk or panel in the vast majority of cases. It also chafes a bit at my science-as-meritocracy ethos (why exactly do I need to have the talk I just sat through explained to me by some guy in a suit?).

The different flavors of discussant that I have identified include:

The redundant discussant: "Author #1 said this. Author #2 said this other thing. Author #3 said something else..." Snooze.
The bitchy discussant: "The author claimed to use a Mann-Whitney U when he really used Kendall's tau. It's not clear why they used Coale-Demeny West 5 when a UN life table would have clearly been preferable. The assumptions of the stable model are not exactly met. And you didn't cite me!"
The pandering discussant: "In brief, this paper will change the course of human affairs. I feel an extraordinary privilege just being in the same room as this author on this day. Hosanna."
The orthogonal discussant: "Well, we just heard a number of very interesting talks, now let me tell you about my work..."

Very rarely (so much so that it doesn't really merit a category), a discussant does what he or she is supposed to do: synthesize and provide novel insight about how the papers in a session relate to each other. I have personally experienced all of the forms of discussant except the panderer (at least in its fullest form). I did witness a friend receive the panderer's treatment much to her embarrassment and, frankly, that of everyone in the room. I think it's fair to say that everyone thought she had indeed given a very fine paper, though had not quite changed history. I think I actually prefer the orthogonal discussant to all the others because that way you get to see another talk rather than just hearing a bunch of [redundancy, bitchiness, pandering], which is not the best use of time at academic meetings. As anyone who has ever been to an academic meeting knows the best use of one's time is, as Greg notes in his post "drink[ing] heavily with my friends, sneak[ing] off repeatedly for Mexican food, and spend[ing] most daylight hours in the publishers’ expo." Honestly, this is one of the reasons why I've decided I actually like the AAAs. True, there is generally very little in the program that actually interests me. However, there are lots of people who interest me who attend. I can hang out and have long lunches and long dinners and even longer sessions drinking and talking anthropology with cool people and not feel the slightest bit of guilt at missing all those sessions! What could be better?

Anthropology, Human Ecology, Infectious Disease

Measuring Epidemiological Contacts in Schools

17 December 2010 jhj1 1 Comment

I am happy to report that our paper describing the measurement of casual contacts within an American high school is finally out in the early edition of PNAS. Stanford's great social science reporter, Adam Gorlick, has written a very nice overview of our paper for the Stanford Report (also here in the LA Times and here on Medical News Today). The lead author, and general force of nature behind this paper, is Marcel Salathé, who until recently was a post-doc here at Stanford in Marc Feldman's lab. This summer, Marcel moved to the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State, a truly remarkable place and now all the better for having Marcel. From the Penn State end, there is a nice video describing our results as well as well as a brief note on Marcel's blog. This paper has not been picked up quite like our paper on plague dynamics this summer, probably because measuring casual contacts in an American high school generally does not involve carnivorous mice.

With generous NSF funding, we were able to buy a lot of wireless sensor motes -- enough to outfit every student, teacher, and staff member at a largish American high school so that we could record all of their close contacts in a single, typical day. By "close contact," we mean any more-or-less face-to-face interaction within a radius of three meters. As Marcel was putting together this project, we were (once again) exceptionally lucky to find ourselves at Stanford along with one of the world authorities on wireless sensor technology, Phil Levis, of Stanford's Computer Science department. Phil and his students, Maria and Jung Woo Lee, made this work come together in ways that I can't even begin to fathom. This actually leads me to a brief diversion to reflect on the nature of collaboration. As with our plague paper or SIV mortality paper, this paper is one where collaboration between very different types of researchers (viz., Biologists, Computer Scientists, Anthropologists) is absolutely fundamental to the success of the work. In coming up for tenure -- and generally living in an anthropology department -- the question of what I might call the partible paternity of papers (PPP) comes up fairly regularly. "I see you have a paper with five co-authors; I guess that means you contributed 17% to this paper, no?" Well, no, actually. I call this the "additive fallacy of collaboration." When a paper is truly collaborative, then the contributions of the paper are not mutually exclusive from each other and so do not simply sum. To use a familiar phrase, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Our current paper is an example of such a truly collaborative project. Without the contributions of all the collaborators, it's not that the paper would be 17% less complete; it probably wouldn't exist. I can't speak particularly fluently to what Phil, Maria, and Jung Woo did other than by saying, "wow" (thus our collaboration), but I can say that we couldn't have done it without them.

I'll talk more about our actual results later. For now, you'll either have to read the paper (which is open access), watch the video, or read the overview in the Stanford Report.

monkey's uncle