Anthro research hit the news: Don’t trust the number of Facebook friends:)

Well, as a person who has more than a thousand friends in Facebook, I had already experienced that, now we scientify it (!):

Brain Can’t Handle More Than 150 Facebook Friends Finds Oxford Boffin
ITProPortal
A professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University has found out that human beings are physically limited to being able to link up and manage up

Facebook Effect
Ub News
Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University has carried on a research disclosing that while social networking sites allow us
OMG: brains can’t handle all our Facebook friendsTimes Online
Facebook friends are virtual, finds Oxford University studyTelegraph.co.uk
Brain can’t handle more than 150 Facebook friendsTimes of India

Barabara Miller to David Brooks: It’s time for Anthropology 101

from ethnografix by Ryan Anderson

A little more than a week ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an op-ed about Haiti. In it, he explains why he thinks Haiti is so plagued by poverty and corruption:

As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book ?The Central Liberal Truth,? Haiti, like most of the world?s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.

New medical anthropology blogs

from Somatosphere by Eugene Raikhel
A couple of new medical anthropology blogs have been launched recently.

The SMA has started up “Voices from Medical Anthropology” — which aims to foster discussions on disciplinary self-definition.  In a recent post, SMA president Carolyn Sargent asks “Who are we in the public imagination?” and asks readers to comment on how they explain their work to non-anthropologists.  Additionally, she writes, “I hope that on this blog we can exchange thoughts about ?what is at the core of medical anthropology??


Anthropologists unite to aide Haiti victims
Daily Illini
Professor Virginia R. Dominguez, President of the American Anthropological Association, or AAA, reached out to Anthropology majors across the nation by

Why Siberian nomads cope so well with climate change

from antropologi.info – anthropology in the news blog by Lorenz

The tundra ecosystems in Siberia are vulnerable to both climate change and oil/gass drilling. Yet the Yamal-Nenets in West Siberia have shown remarkable resilience to these changes. ?Free access to open space has been the key for success? says Bruce Forbes of the University of Lapland, Finland, Environmental Research Web reports.

More on exporting American madness

from Somatosphere by Eugene Raikhel

Ethan Watters, whose recent article in the New York Times Magazine was discussed at length here and at Neuroanthropology, has a new piece on the globalization of US mental illness diagnoses.  This one appears in New Scientist and focuses on a couple of themes not addressed by the Times Magazine article: namely, the transformation of psychiatric ideas about depression in Japan and the worldwide dissemination of the PTSD diagnosis.

Margaret Mead, 1901-1978: A Public Face of Anthropology
Voice of America
Today we tell about one of the most influential social scientists of the last century — the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead.

How cooking made us human

from kottke.org by Jason Kottke

Not all calories are created equal, says Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham…humans get many more calories from cooked food than from raw.

John Stanton: The New Face of the Human Terrain System

from OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY by Maximilian Forte

The New Face of the Human Terrain System: Goin? to Kansas City on 1 April 2010.

by John Stanton

US Army Human Terrain System (HTS) principals recently produced a number of briefings adding up to a total of 133-pages of MS PowerPoint slides (pdf 3.6 Mb). For convenience?s sake here, we?ll use the title of the first presentation titled The Future: Training Directorate Executive Overview, 08 January 2010 (The Future) as the overall title for the series. The presentations contain a dizzying array of information, mostly in living color.

Science, Human Rights and the Military
Miller-McCune.com
Scientists ought to consider, he argues, the broader question of human rights in work that ranges from weapons development to anthropology.

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