monkey's uncle

In the spirit of critics misunderstanding the life of university researchers that I started in my last post, I felt the need to chime in a bit on a story that has really made the social-media rounds in the last couple days. This kerfuffle stems from a Forbes piece by Susan Adams enumerating the 10 [...]

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This is a edited version of a post I sent out to the E-ANTH listserv in response to a debate over a recent paper in Nature and the response to it on the website “Clear Science,” written by Todd Meyers. In this debate, it was suggested that the Barnosky paper is the latest iteration of [...]

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Expert wrangler of predicaments Phillip Mendonça-Vieira has put together a very cool time-lapse movie from about 12,000 screenshots of the front page of the nytimes.com.  The movie is interesting to watch in a Koyaanisqatsi kind of way, but what I find most poignant is his commentary that accompanies the movie. Mendonça-Vieira writes, Having worked with and [...]

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There has been quite a brouhaha percolating through some Anthropology circles following the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Associate in New Orleans last month.  It seems that the AAA executive board, in all its wisdom, has seen fit to excise the term “science” from the Association’s long-range planning document. You can sample some of [...]

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I was thrilled to hear Dan Salkeld‘s excellent (and long!) radio interview on Colorado Public Radio about our recent paper on understanding plague epizootics in prairie dogs.  There is a remarkable amount of information contained in this interview.  If you want to learn about plague ecology, then this is an excellent introduction.

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Results from a recent Gallup poll are rather depressing. Based on telephone interviews with a sample of 1,012 Americans, more Americans think that the reporting on global warming is exaggerated than think its seriousness is under-estimated (41% vs. 28%).  This looks like a real change since it wasn’t that long ago (2006) that the numbers [...]

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OK, this isn’t really about population, infectious disease or human ecology, but I’ve been thinking about it this morning: Team handball Fencing Table Tennis Badminton Women’s Pole Vault I like beach volleyball as much as anyone, but the Olympics are really the only chance the average viewer has to watch any of these other cool [...]

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One of my favorite shows, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, today cited the ridiculous evolutionary psychology result that I discussed which was based on bogus curve-fitting.  I guess it’s reified now…

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