monkey's uncle

I have recently read the latest book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile. I read his famous The Black Swan a while back while in the field and wrote lots of notes. I never got around to posting those notes since they were quite telegraphic (and often not even electronic!), as they were written in the [...]

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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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Well, it certainly has been a while since I’ve written anything here. Life has gotten busy with new projects, new responsibilities, etc. Yesterday, I participated in a workshop on campus sponsored by the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Young Environmental Scholars Conference. I was asked to stand-in for a faculty member who had to [...]

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The FAO Food Price Index (FPI) remains at near record-highs, and this at a time when record droughts and calamitous famine threaten the Horn of Africa. Using the latest data from the FAO FPI page, I plot here the FPI time series from 1990-2011. World food prices are high and have remained so since the [...]

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Nicholas Wade, who normally writes really terrific stuff on science in the New York Times, has a brief piece on our Anthropology fracas du jour. It’s good to see an expression of concern for the place of science in anthropology in such a prominent place and by such an important science writer.  I just wish [...]

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A major challenge in science writing is how to effectively communicate real, scientific uncertainty.  Sometimes we just don’t know have enough information to make accurate predictions.  This is particularly problematic in the case of rare events in which the potential range of outcomes is highly variable. Two topics that are close to my heart come [...]

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How do we evaluate the quality of published work?  This has become an issue for me recently for one general and two more specific reasons.  The general reason is that as one approaches one’s tenure decision, one tends to think about the impact of one’s oeuvre. The specific reasons are, first, I have a paper that [...]

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As a follow-up to my post on science and the Obama Inaugural, I wanted to note a terrific essay  by Dennis Overbye on the civic virtues of science in the New York Times. He argues that virtue emerges from the process of science: “Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.” [...]

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This is something you don’t typically see in the editorial pages of the New York Times, viz., advocacy for reinstating US Air Force investigations of unidentified flying objects.  Pope has a point; closed-mind policies are probably never a good idea.  This is not to say that we have little green men coming to cut crop [...]

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