Fiona What with the interdisciplinary thing, I know some delightful and interesting people in quite disparate fields. Starter for 10 will be a semi-regular (fortnightly) series of peer interviews, with questions both serious and trivial for your edification. I’m starting off with my friend and colleague Dr Simon Greenhill, from the University of Auckland. 1. In … Read more
Around May, I somehow ended up with a whole glut of projects and publications that were in revision, near completion, in draft, or fully designed and just waiting for words on paper. All that each of them needed were some short chunks of time: a day, two or three, or a week. Concentrated, non-disturbed time. … Read more
I’m going to be resurrecting my blog over the next few weeks, with new content to reflect new directions and interests. In the meantime, I’ve taken to Twitter as a way of foisting my observations on my public and getting to know new people. To follow me there: fiona_jordan
… to The Netherlands! I’m now at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, as part of a new research group called Evolutionary Processes in Language and Culture. The academic blog-urge has dwindled this last year; it seems to take a focussed person* to keep a blog going for more than 18 months or … Read more
[This post has been lurking about since, oops, May, so I thought I better put it out there!] I’m sure everyone has favourite inductive hypotheses about the world that they mull over as potential research questions–if only they weren’t so utterly trivial. Besides, I usually only notice the confirmatory evidence for mine. The co-incidence of … Read more
My friend and colleague Simon Greenhill handed in his PhD thesis today. Having read bits of it, seen the results of other bits of it, and generally parasitised off his hard work in creating and maintaining the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database, I feel quite certain it’ll be a bestseller. But seriously: congratulations, Simon, bloody great job!
That’s the Journal of the Polynesian Society, if you were wondering. It’s been a sad wrench for me at UCL, browsing the e-journals list of our library and always feeling a little empty spot in my heart right here: The Society is only up to the 1930s, but seeing as the really good ethnographic stuff … Read more
From Sunday’s Observer, Split over health risk to cousins who marry: A major medical row will erupt this month when scientists and health experts hold two key meetings to discuss the controversial subject of marriages between cousins and their impact on health in Britain. Really? I love the clairvoyance afforded to newspaper journalists. They obviously also … Read more
Nine month teaching fellowship in Biological Anthropology at the University of Bristol. The position is in a joint Archaeology/Anthropology department and will provide sabbatical cover for Dr Mhairi Gibson. Deadline for applications May 16th. Apply through the link above.
Mike Dickison’s blog Pictures of Numbers is fab. It’s all about clear, simple, effective data visualisation for scientists. Three posts that I thought were particularly useful were: Better Axes: improving readability, increasing the information content and decreasing the clutter in your graphs. Fixing Excel’s Charts: Surgery for the annoying defaults that Excel has, and how … Read more