These researchers are not only brilliant, creating a compound which looks and functions like pain but generates electricity in much the same way as a solar panel, they make terrible puns as well! The name of this potentially revolutionary new product? Sun-believable!

This is a terrific article from the Times which reveals some very unsettling truths about how little we know about how we digest food and the tremendous leaps the government is willing to make without any real evidence when it comes to telling us what we should consume.

After reading, the main point I got is that carbs are worse than fat. Both should probably be consumed in moderation, but fats are actually useful while carbs really are not. Considering the environment of evolutionary adaptation which our bodies are based on, that makes perfect sense. Then again, I won’t be going paleo diet any time soon.

A little over a week ago, Florida Governor Rick Scott called for the state to reduce funding for social science (History, psychology, anthropology, etc.) departments within its universities and divert the funds toward STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) departments. He specifically singled out Anthropology as a field Florida “has enough of” and he doesn’t think should be a priority.

Well to start with, Anthropology is a science. It’s even in the name for you, Scott - “logy” from the Greek “logia” means SCIENCE. You would think that fancy law degree you have, which by the way places you well outside the realm of STEM, further than the Social Sciences by a significant margin, would have helped you realize that. Many prominent geneticists, bio-engineers and other STEM professionals are professed anthropologists from an anthropological background, whose holistic education helped give them exceptional insight in an often rote, technical field.

Second, as the article linked goes into depth on, creative, liberal arts curricula are an important pillar in the foundation of an intellectual economy, which is what the United States is and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. We are a nation in which ideas are the most valuable commodity, not natural resources or manufacturing capacity.

Do you know that in many STEM fields the technical aspects of a student’s first year or two in college are already considered outdated by the time they graduate? Or that staying relevant in these fields requires continuing education for the rest of one’s working life? To be successful in any critical field requires an individual to constantly update his or her knowledge. Degrees which emphasize the learning process enable a person to do so quickly and efficiently.

Lets return to Mr. Scott for a moment. Mr. Scott is a politician. A politician’s job, his supposed useful function to society, is to organize the nation in such a way as to most effectively benefit his people. In other words, to protect their rights, not infringe on their freedoms, and keep things as simple, representative and secure as possible. Obviously, Americans are in general agreement that our politicians are terrible at this. Do you know who is tasked with finding ways to do this in a better way, to create a more perfect union and ideal society? Social scientists.

Psychologists study tirelessly to reduce crime, and have been very successful.

Sociologists study large population dynamics and through understanding help theorize improved policies.

Political Scientists study politics itself and how it relates to the people and how the political world can be improved.

Historians look at both past and present and draw from each to illuminate the other.

And Anthropologists, which Florida needs no more of? They do a little bit of all of this, with some good old fashioned STEM research thrown in because the goal of American Anthropology, with its four fields and holistic vision is to understand humanity in all aspects, perhaps under a unified theory in much the same way Mathematics and Physics pursue their own U.T.s

One last point: Spend more money on education, cheap ass. Education budgets in this country are tiny compared to areas like the military or healthcare and guess what - education actually gives a return on investment! Military spending is important to the extent that it protects our interests and provides jobs and industry, but it is non-productive outside its own existence. Healthcare spending is overwhelmingly reactive or, in the case of insurance, non-productive by definition and premised on the transfer of risk, not the production of anything even remotely useful. Education fuels every other sector of the economy is and is one of, if not the most important factors which make a country internationally competitive in business and general influence. Florida has an economy the size of Iran, you can afford to throw a few million dollars more to your schools and, you know, not cripple a future generation’s ability to confront social issues and develop new industries which draw on creativity more than obsolete technical knowledge.

P.S. John Locke and some of the founding fathers are considered social anthropologists, among other things. The field did not exist under that name at the time, but their subject matter is anthropological. Think about that.

When Erez Lieberman Aiden’s most advanced degree was a Master’s in History, he solved the mystery of the shape of the human genome. Now, with several advanced degrees from institutions such as Harvard and MIT, he is creating his own interdisciplinary fields such as “Culturonomics” and drawing on a wide range of skills to create data sets which have never been seen before.

Basically, I want to be him.

Did rationality evolve to be a pathway toward the truth, or a tool to bludgeon those we argue against with?

That is the question circulating among psychologists, anthropologists an philosophers lately, after French researchers published a potentially revolutionary way of looking at logic and explaining why confirmation bias and other flawed rationalizations are so prevalent.

Sadly, like many debates it must be pushed in order to capture the essence of the moment we are in today - regardless of what purpose reason originally served, can we use it now to discover truth? Thankfully, there are those who consider these questions, and hope that this theory, if correct, could be used to help teach children mathematics or to improve the criminal justice system.

You know those lists creationists love to circulate of “scientists” who doubt evolution? Well, there are of course many problems with those lists. First of all, many of those on them are not and never were scientists. Others are no longer practicing for whatever reason, and their views have changed since they were part of the scientific community. Others are simply fictional.

But what has the scientific community done in response to this? Not much, it would seem. There are few lists of “Scientists who support evolution”, perhaps because making anything close to a full list would take hundreds of hours and would be an exercise in pointing out the obvious.

So the National Center for Science Education came up with a brilliant idea - they’d make their list, but only sample from people in the Scientific Community named Stephen, Stephanie or some variation of those names. Only about 1% of the US population has one of these names, so one can take the size of the list, multiply it by 100 and have a reasonable estimate of how many scientists support evolution. Currently, there are over 1100 signatures.

Oh, and each signatory is cited, with their education and current position listed, unlike creationist lists.

This is a pretty disheartening article which examines the financial devastation of higher education over the last 40 years, most notably the way departments refuse to higher new tenure-track professors and are slowly ridding themselves of the humanities and social sciences.

Considering that my goal is to become a Professor of Anthropology, this is very much relevant to my interests, but no matter your goals in life, it is also relevant to yours. Higher education is one of the primary drivers of social and economic growth in American society, and we are changing it in all the wrong ways. There is still time to turn things around before we lose a generation of talent, but significant steps must be taken.

A friend of mine posted this on facebook a short while ago and I found it very interesting - some psychologists analyzed song lyrics from 1980-2007 to see if they were becoming more narcissistic, hypothesizing that this correlates with society as a whole. It’s an intriguing topic, and an interesting way of approaching it.

You should probably read the article before finishing this entry.

Of course, I have a bunch of issues with this study:
1) They are sampling lyrics from the Billboard 100 songs. These songs are popular, but not necessarily representative of the way people engage with music. B100 songs are what we listen to on the car radio, in clubs, etc. but what about when we are alone at home? What about when we sit down, close our eyes, and just listen to the music? Are these songs the ones which really matter to us?

2) They controlled for the rising popularity of rap and hip hop in their study, but by taking out these genres they are giving a highly skewed image of what “popular music” today is. Try extrapolating this to compare with music from 70 years ago - are we only going to allow popular modern lounge singers and the blues? The rise of rap and hip hop as genres should not be ignored in a study which assumes song lyrics to be of great importance.

3) The study also assumes that music lyrics are a bellwether for society, but doesn’t substantiate this claim - and I find it highly suspect. To many people, music is an escape, a means to experience something they do not in their ordinary lives, something to relax with, something to pump yourself up with. Music in the 50s and 60s was light and poppy, but it was a time of paranoia and fear of nuclear war. Who is to say today’s violent music isn’t simply a mask to hold on to aggressive urges which we no longer feel free to express in the real world? It is true that many forms of music emerged from conditions reflected in the lyrics - rap from violent urban areas, for example, but the vast majority of people who listen to it don’t experience or live that lifestyle. In a very real way, music is a healing mechanism for society - allowing outsiders to understand on a deep level the trials of a particular group and to then empathize with them.

4) The study also points to some surveys which hint that narcissism is growing in youth - college students specifically. But the questions include such items as “I am going to be great”. Is that narcissism, or hope? And what of the possibility that people are simply being more honest about how they’ve always felt? The study acknowledges this as a possibility but attempts to dismiss it without actually providing a reason why.

5) The study attempts to examine narcissism throughout society, an intensely difficult trait to measure, through self-absorbed and aggressive song lyrics, then ignores many real trends in society which run counter to the hypothesis. Violent crime has plummeted, civic engagement is increasing. The study notes that loneliness and depression are increasing, but leaves it to the reader to assume that is somehow connected to music when there a number of other factors which could be responsible (including an increased diagnosis rate of depression for symptoms that have always existed, because doctors are more apt to diagnose and people more likely to seek help in the first place).

This study could well have the correct conclusion - society is becoming more narcissistic, and song lyrics reflect and/or cause that. It could also be entirely wrong. I’m not convinced and the methods used by these psychologists don’t impress. This is one set of statistics, which are deeply flawed, above Fox News claiming that video games and violent movies are causing our children to become serial killers. Popular culture has always been a scapegoat for societal problems, but in this case, like many others recently, popculture is being blamed for a problem which may be decreasing significantly!

…and this is why I need to get back to academia.

And it chronicles all of history from the Big Bang to today! Check it out~