Computing past
The Guardian has an interview with George Dyson about his new book, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. The book reviews the early history of computing, focusing on John von...
View ArticleBrittannia rules the waves
Ars Technica has an engrossing article by James Grimmelmann about the rise and fall of HavenCo. The firm promised data security and anonymity based on the idea that it was located on the independent...
View ArticleOnline education and Silicon Valley
The Wall Street Journalprofiles computer scientist and AI researcher Sebastian Thrun. The interview discusses his online education startup, Udacity:In the midst of this, there was a slight hitch, Mr....
View ArticleCeramics in the Epigravettian of Croatia
I've had a paper on my desktop for more than a week expecting to write a comment on it, and now happily I discover that the first author, Becky Farbstein, has described the work in a blog post: "First...
View ArticleStudents and technology in the classroom
Another school year is about to start for those of us who teach college courses. More and more, students are coming to classrooms and actively using technology -- laptops, smartphones, tablets -- for...
View ArticleEnmeshed in technology
Anthropology and technology combine in a Sarah Bakewell piece about the most recent Channel swimmer, Karen Throsby: "Man is a work in progress, constantly adding technology". Purists pooh-pooh anyone...
View ArticleWho did what to whom
A confluence of stories, one from the New York Times fashion section, by Henry Alford: "A Web of Answers and Questions", about Googling people you meet...“Obviously, one is always going to have to be...
View ArticleEarly Stone Age hafted spear points from South Africa
This week in Science, Jayne Wilkins and colleagues report on part of the lithic assemblage from Kathu Pan, South Africa, which includes 210 points [1]. The paper reports that these are the earliest...
View ArticleFinding sequencing methods in the library
Jay Shendure and Erez Lieberman Aiden have a recent review in Nature Biotechnology that provides some recent data on the falling cost and increased use of genome sequencing [1]. They accentuate the...
View ArticleSocial media, social dynamics, and the Dunbar number
Drake Bennett in Businessweek takes on evolutionary anthropology this week in a profile of Robin Dunbar ("The Dunbar Number, From the Guru of Social Networks"). If you don't know why Businessweek would...
View ArticleQuote: Craig Stanford on gorilla habitat threats
Primatologist Craig Stanford was interviewed about habitat threats to gorilla populations by a public radio station: "The Human Threat to Great Apes":Cell phones, like many other electronic devices,...
View ArticleTransport distance in MSA Botswana
Two years ago, I wrote about the archaeological assemblages and evidence of symbolic behavior at Rhino Cave, Botswana ("Views from Rhino Cave, Tsodilo Hills, Botswana". Another site in the same region...
View ArticleBehavior of the first North African humans
Mohamed Sahnouni and colleagues describe the archaeology of El-Kherba, Algeria. [1]. This locality is a paleontological exposure associated with the nearby Ain Hanech site, and Sahnouni and colleagues...
View ArticleFishing for white elephants
Barbara King notes the recent characterization of fish cooking residues on early Japanese pottery: "What 15,000 Years Of Cooking Fish Tells Us About Humanity". She focuses on the relationship between...
View ArticleBaiting ancient DNA with RNA
A new paper by Meredith Carpenter and colleagues describes a novel method that can greatly enrich the yield of DNA from ancient samples: Most ancient specimens contain very low levels of endogenous...
View Article