Around the Web Digest

With all the lively debate here at the blog, maybe you’ve missed the fun we’ve been having on the @savageminds twitter feed and Facebook page. There you’ll find fresh daily links to internet flotsam that’s semi-interesting and even occasionally relevant to anthropology! Once a month I collect all the tweets and post them here. Below are some of the news stories, blog posts, book reviews, and more that we read in the month of January. If you’ve seen something you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community send email me at MDTHOMPS at ODU.EDU.

• Survey: Favorite #Anthropology Blogs announces a top dozen /KF
• For Pinker, the two world wars are “horrifically unlucky samples from a statistical distribution” /KF
• In Memoriam of #AAA President Elizabeth Brumfiel /KF
• C of William and Mary had slaves. They harvested crops to raise scholarship money, among other things. //MT
• Wikileaks revealed US espionage of Indigenous People in US, Canada, Peru & elsewhere. /KF
• Andaman Islands tribe threatened by lure of mass tourism—brace yourself before you read. /KF
• Police Demographics Unit Casts Shadows From Past /KF
• Wallerstein: “2011 was a good year for the world left” //MT
• American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year award goes to (drum roll) “Occupy” //MT
• Color photographs from the Great Depression. From rural America to industrial landscapes. //MT
• Paul Stoller: “One way to confront the spread of corporate culture on our campuses is to organize” /KF
• Orin Starn describes use of online message boards in ethnographic methodology for new book on race and sports. //MT
• American Behavioral Scientist Special Issue on the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. /RM
• Interview with anthropologist Catherine Lutz on the costs of war. /KF
• Does the AAA Support or Oppose the Res Works Act? /KF
• New Pew research: “Mormons in America”. //MT
• On Mitt Romney’s Mexican heritage: one Chicano author wrestles with definitions of identity. //MT
• The long, slow sexual revolution (part 1)— in which @GregDowney1 takes on Evolutionary Psych /KF
• MotherJones: Roundup of our favorite “Shit [insert race, gender, sexual orientation] Say” videos /KF
• Johannes Fabian—Cultural Anthropology and the Question of Knowledge, 2011 Huxley Memorial Lecture (audio) /KF
• Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” removed from classrooms under AZ ethnic-studies ban. /KF
• Academic publishers have become the enemies of science /KF
• Specimens from Darwin’s voyage on the HMS Beagle rediscovered. //MT
• Sydel Silverman and Her Quest to Preserve Anthropological Records – The Atlantic /KF
• Susan Blum on China’s (postponed) plans to educate Tibetans in Mandarin instead of Tibetan /KF
• Harry Walker on anarchist anthropology in the latest Anthropology Of This Century is worth a read. /RM
• All statistical biases are pretty much irrelevant. They are all dwarfed by publication bias. /KF
• Massive student loan debt is like taxing people for not living up to their potential. //MT
• New UC tuition idea: 5% tax on your income for 20 years. //MT
• The Australian, non-suck solution to student loan debt /RM
• Society for Cultural Anthropology officially opposes the Research Works Act! Huzzah! /RM
• Ancient Popcorn Found—Made 2,000 Years Earlier Than Thought in Peru /KF
• No, @cshirky, @zephoria is not the first ‘native anthropologist’. Otherwise a nice enough @nytimes piece. /KF
• The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers /KF
• OUP treats authors as “work for hire” whereby copyright is theirs from the start!? /KF
• In the context of SOPA/ PIPA: it almost came to be that taping TV with a VCR was copyright infringement. //MT
• Language Log tackles the venerable history of “just sayin”. //MT
• On the high fertility of Republican Presidential candidates. //MT
• Anthroworks likes to read dissertation abstracts. Here’s 40 that caught their eye in 2011. //MT
• On the popularity of American Indian stereotypes and playing Indian in South Korea. //MT
• “I have tried to mix and match ethnic and cultural traits in creating my imaginary fantasy peoples”—George RR Martin /KF
• On seeing a book on your dissertation topic . . . by someone else. /KF
• The Exploiting Africa Academy Award nominations /KF
• Sacheen Littlefeather representing Marlon Brando when he won (and rejected) the Oscar for The Godfather /KF
• Citizen philosophers: a 2008 law mandates philosophy courses for high school students. //MT
• Let’s make teaching skeletal anatomy to elementary schoolers fun! //MT
• Gillian Tett “Anthropology is like salt with food… it is a powerful dynamic to bring to the table.” /KF
• Zotero 3.0 is here! Now runs outside of Firefox and integrates with Chrome and Safari. /KF
• Say hello to ZotPad, the first iPad client for Zotero. /KF
• Time to dust off the #aaafail hashtag: @AmericanAnthro opposes federal open access in public comment to White House /RA
• Superman’s underwear advertized as cure for impotence, STD’s in Malaysia. //MT
• American Anthropological Association Takes Public Stand against Open Access #aaafail /KF
• The Digital Return: Digital Repatriation & Indigenous Knowledge /KF

Matt Thompson is adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Old Dominion University. He was once cast as a soldier in Andrew Jackson's army in a theatrical production on an Indian reservation.