Around the Web Digest: Week of March 22

This week I’m trying to spread the love to some blogs I haven’t featured in the past. Please, if you know of any good blogs, particularly physical/biological anthropology blogs, send them my way at rebecca.nelson.jacobs@gmail.com.

If you haven’t done the Savage Minds Reader Survey yet, don’t fret! There’s still time to get in the running for the Awesome Stuff giveaway.

DigVentures describes a genetic mapping study that found a shocking lack of Viking DNA in the UK:  Not So Vicious Invaders? What Genetic Mapping Tells Us About Our Past 

Similarly, this post on The Conversation discusses recent evidence from genome sequencing that adds a new wave of steppe pastoralists to the history of European settlement:  European Invasion: DNA Reveals the Origins of Modern Europeans 

This post from Paperless Archaeology is a bit older but I’m still trying to get a handle on the archaeoblogosphere, and this series of presentations on digital archaeology is something we don’t see every day: Mobilizing the Past Workshop Videos 

This post on Discard Studies examines the use of data to track how disasters unfold in ways that would otherwise be hidden: Visually Representing Slow Disasters

Food Anthropology features this interview with Susan Rodgers on her strategies for engaging students: Raising the Bar for Introductory Classes: Susan Rodgers on Challenging and Changing Students through “Food, Body, Power”

In this interview on Somatosphere, neuroanthropologist Andreas Roepstorff reflects on his own interdisciplinary career and the challenge of collaboration in anthropology:  Experimental Anthropology in the Making: A Conversation with Andreas Roepstorff

Aidnography posted this critique of the political economy of international development volunteering or “voluntourism,” arguing that it is contributing to the trend of demanding more career preparation from young people without connecting them with well-paying jobs: The Professionalization of Development Volunteering – Towards a New Global Precariat?

This post on Imaginative Ethnography, Public Health, Private Profits: Lessons from the Ebola Crisis for a Global Response, problematizes the differential valuation of human life and privileging of technological medicine that contributed to the Ebola crisis in western Africa.

Ever since its grand debut on CSI:NY (Season 4, Episode 5: “Down the Rabbit Hole”), Second Life has been the quinessential site for digital ethnography. This GOOD post suggests that it’s become a haven for subcultural activity: Second Life is Staying Alive

CASTAC takes on the final line in The Imitation Game: ““[Turing’s] machine was never perfected, though it generated a whole field of research into what became nicknamed “Turing Machines.” Today, we call them “computers.””: How Influential was Alan Turing? The Tangled Invention of Computing (and Its Historiography)

Till next week, dear readers…

Rebecca Nelson

Rebecca Nelson is the executive director of América Solidaria U.S. She recently graduated with a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on volunteer tourism in Guatemala and how it is opening up new avenues for tourists and hosts to develop more cosmopolitan understandings of the world (as well as opening up new forms of friction over the circulation of knowledge).