Posts earlier than this one are from my old “Culture Evolves!” blog (evolutionaryanthropology.wordpress.com). I’ve ported them here for longevity and archiving as they contain nine years worth of blogging activity, give or take the last three years of dormancy! At the very least they will give new members of my research group something to giggle over from the … Read more
This week I started my new position as a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Bristol. I’m in the Department of Archaeology & Anthropology (which is quite a mouthful when you’re introducing yourself!). Very happy to be here, “here” being the UK, Bristol, and in a department not too dissimilar to the one where … Read more
I’ll be giving the following talk in the Bristol Archaeology and Anthropology Research Seminar on February 8th 2012. To the Manor Born? The cultural evolution of land tenure, residence and labour in Austronesian societies. Cross-cultural differences in norms of land tenure may reflect both individual and population-level adaptations to ecological and social factors. A complex … 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
The not-blogging-because-I’ve-not-anything-meaningful-to-say phenomena has really got to stop. Email’s become like that, too. I put it off and then it’s three months later and I feel like I have to write a mini autobiography, when really, two lines at the time would’ve been sufficient. So, in points, some interesting things of late: 1. Modern Approaches … Read more
Matt B. asked the Nature Network bloggers a couple of questions. I meant to answer them on Friday but I couldn’t decide the first one! Who’s your favourite scientist (dead or alive) and why? The reason I couldn’t decide was I couldn’t figure out what my criteria for “favourite” should be! There are scientists who … Read more
Huzzah, have submitted the magnum opus to the Ministry, and am now gainfully employed in one of those fabulous postdoc things. More on the exact nature of that later. I started composing a list in my head of things NOT to say to PhD students in the final death throes of writing up, but decided … Read more
I finally updated my academic website. Updated CV with two publications 🙂 Changed old diary to point here. Updated the Links page to point to my del.icio.us bookmarks, as keeping that kind of thing current is a time-vortex best left unvisited. In the process, discovered that my site counter/stats tracker code was incorrect, and hasn’t … Read more