how to have a mini-sabbatical

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’ve moved …

… 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

Job opportunity

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.

science and design are both about communication

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

too many ideas, not enough blog

I have been blog-blocked since before December last year and need to make a concerted effort to move beyond it. Part of the problem has been journalistic–I’ve not wanted to write about anything that isn’t (a) news and (b) an exclusive. Considering the proliferation of science blogs, and considering that I too like to read … Read more

looks are everything

The Smithsonian Institute Libraries have this wonderful resource available: Portraits from the Dibner Library of Science and Technology Everyone loves pictures of the scientific personalities behind abstract concepts. The wackier the better! In general, images are an absolute neccessity for academic talks. I’m pretty strict that my slides contain an image (be it a picture, … Read more

evolution 2007

Radio silence for the last couple of weeks as I was in New Zealand at the Evolution 2007 meeting. Yes, there is internet access on my small island home, but I’m not one of those superstars who can multitask a big conference and blogging. So before it all dribbles out of my brain, here’s a … Read more

the two cultures revisited (ad nauseum)

A short while ago I attended one of a series of talks set up to create some dialogue between evolutionary and interpretive approaches in archaeology. I was only able to attend the last of the series, but others who attended earlier talks reported that the presentations themselves (one from each of the two “styles”) were interesting and informative, but that the discussions that took place afterwards, where, ostensibly, the dialogue was to get into full swing, were quite fraught, full of misunderstandings and tense “science versus post-modernism” exchanges.

Which is, as always, a shame. I think to most scientifically-minded archaeologists and anthropologists–indeed anyone in the social sciences who appreciates the scientific method–the lack of useful dialogue, collaboration, and proper communication with our colleagues who have other approaches is felt as a keen deficit. From afar, we can observe the wealth of rich material (dare I say “data”?) collected by social anthropologists (for instance). More importantly, we can observe their ability to contextualise, interpret and suggest new or alternative hypotheses for what we, with the necessity of abstract or simple models, are sometimes missing in our approaches.

However, after attending the last talk, I don’t think that they (“they” being in this case those in the social sciences who probably prefer the term humanities) really feel any keen need for such dialogue in the other direction. I could be (and would be delighted to be) very wrong about this. I got the sense of a lamentable misunderstanding how science as applied to human affairs. Misunderstanding the scientific method is of course a more general malady, from the sub-editors at the Evening Standard right on through to nutritionists with dodgy qualifications.

But at this talk there were some SHOCKERS.

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the shape of things to come

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for me, what with conferences and talks and meetings and trying to settle into a post-thesis work routine. As always with meetings I came away with my mind buzzing about potential ideas for the future, and as is usual with me, I just assume I will remember all … Read more