Today I was speaking with my graduate students on the basic format of a peer-reviewed paper, and how following that format will help with the inevitable criticisms that come from peer review. I immediately recalled a very funny animation of how grad students, post-docs, and assistant professors react to negative reviews that I saw awhile back.
Thanks to Matt Craddock, I was able to track it down for my students – and now for you! It’s over on the great Research in Progress Tumblr. This particular post is called We regret to inform you that your paper has not been accepted.
And, yes, that’s the grad student reaction in my opening image. Go over to “we regret to inform you” for all three animated reactions. Really priceless.
But, wait, there are more!
Elizabeth Quinn highlighted a very amusing depiction of the different types of peer reviewers using a Team Fortress 2 video game theme. As someone who has played this game, I immediately liked it. Here’s just one image with the accompanying quote from Peer Fortress: The Scientific Battlefield.
THE PYRO
Reviews from Pyros need to be held in oven mitts.
Your topic is out of scope.
Your writing is terrible.
Your problem is not worth solving.
Your idea sucks.
Your solution doesn’t work.
Your theory is broken.
Your experiments are hopelessly flawed.
Plus, you’re duplicating the classic result from [Smith and Jones, 1955].
In searching some on my own for the handling of peer review, I came across one that uses the internet meme of Downfall – Hitler Reacts. The way the meme works is to take a climatic scene from the film Der Untergang on Hitler’s final days and use the sub-titles to create the parody.
So here’s Scientific Peer Review, ca. 1945:
As if that isn’t enough, there is actually one journal out there brave enough to publish annual highlights of the funny, absurd, and over-the-top things that reviewers actually say in their comments.
Environmental Microbiology features an annual Referees’ Quotes (sadly, I couldn’t find one for 2012!). So here’s Referees’ Quotes – 2011. And some choice quotes:
Our referees, the Editorial Board Members and ad hoc reviewers, are busy, serious individuals who give selflessly of their precious time to improve manuscripts submitted to Environmental Microbiology. But, once in a while, their humour (or admiration) gets the better of them. Here are some quotes from reviews made over the past year, just in time for the Season of Goodwill and Merriment.
• I do not understand why the co-authors of this manuscript have allowed their names to be in the author list.
• It is rare when a reviewer receives a genuinely flawless manuscript to review on an interesting new topic, but the ms by X clearly fits the bill.
• As in many other examples, producing a big dataset of pyrosequencing data does not make a good story. Sometimes I wonder if the ‘wonderful’ old times of serious analysis of 16S rDNA data are over. I am afraid that I am starting to show worrying signs of ageing . . .
• The authors have taken on board my comments from the previous submission of this study. I can only imagine that the previous submission was a pre-submission draft that was accidentally submitted. Or I might just be being nice for once.
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Neuroanthropology: Funny Depictions of Reactions to Peer Review
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Erkan in the Army now...: Some Istanbulites did not like PSY’s Istanbul photo… Istanbul news roundup…
PSY shared the photo above while he was in Istanbul. Some did not like this “ugly” photo that represents Istanbul. Well but isn’t it one of the ways to represent Istanbul?
Gangnam Style craze takes over Istanbul as PSY conquers a frenzied crowd
from Hurriyet Daily News
The South Korean YouTube sensation PSY gave a much-anticipated concert in Istanbul.
1920 | Smirnoff Found a Second Life in Istanbul
from Mavi Boncuk by M.A.M
Mavi Boncuk | Pyotr Smirnov founded his vodka distillery in Moscow in the 1860s under the trading name of PA Smirnoff, pioneering charcoal filtration in the 1870s, and becoming the first to utilize newspaper ads along with charitable contributions to the clergy to stifle anti-vodka sermons, capturing two-thirds of the Moscow market by 1886. His brand was reportedly the tsar’s favorite. When Pyotr died, he was succeeded by his third son Vladimir Smirnov (? – 1939). The company flourished and produced more than 4 million cases of vodka per year.
!f Istanbul continues to inspire with !f Events
by Turkish Digest
!f Istanbul continues to inspire with !f Events
Emrah Güler ANKARA – Hürriyet Daily News
This year’s !f Events include a workshop for blossoming online activists, a gathering with the featured families of LGBT people of the documentary ‘Benim Çocuğum’ and !f²: Istanbul Live, the simultaneous screening of five festival films in 31 cities in Turkey and its neighbors
Istanbul’s Burger Battle Goes International | Culinary Backstreets
by Turkish Digest
Istanbul’s Burger Battle Goes International
February 18, 2013, by Istanbul Eats
As chronicled by Istanbul Eats, the Tünel end of Istanbul’s famed İstiklal boulevard was some two years ago the site of a heated burger war. It all started when a former Turkish basketball-player-turned-restaurateur who had spent time studying in California opened up Mano Burger, a mostly successful recreation of the kind of burger joints the owner frequented in the United States.
Sarai Sierra Update: Istanbul police release surveillance photos of slain …
CBS News
A surveillance image of Sarai Sierra in Istanbul, shortly after she was murdered. / CBS New York. (CBS/WCBS) NEW YORK – Police in Istanbul have released photos of slain Staten Island woman Sarai Sierra from the day of her disappearance in Turkey.
The House Hotel Nisantasi, Istanbul: review
Telegraph.co.uk
On the European side of the city, Nisantasi is Istanbul’s Knightsbridge, so this is an address that impresses locals and returning visitors. For first-time tourists, however, its designer store-laden streets lack the colour and character of downtown
Istanbul Municipality Forces Neighborhood To Make Way For Planned …
Green Prophet
Until a recent urban renewal project that forced most residents out, the neighborhood of Tarlabaşı was home to a diverse array of Istanbul’s minority populations. In the early 20th century, Tarlabaşı’s winding streets and colorful buildings were home
Holocaust commemorated in Istanbul
Ynetnews
VIDEO – Guests of the Ortaköy Etz Ahayim Synagogue in Istanbul – a holy place that has witnessed countless weddings, ceremonies, bar mitzvahs and hopeful prayers throughout decades and generations – commemorated the International Holocaust
Istanbul is done, invest in developing cities: Minister
Hurriyet Daily News
His second proposal was to turn toward Bursa, since the city will coalesce withIstanbul as the gulf passage project that will bypass the İzmit gulf with a bridge to directly connect Istanbul to Bursa and İzmir is put into effect. The minister also
People to eat Istanbul bread for higher price
Hurriyet Daily News
The reason for the hike is the increasing cost of flour, yeast, fuel and natural gas, according to the Istanbul Chamber of Bakers, which said that flour and yeast prices had soared by 25 percent in the last year, making the hike unavoidable. Effective
Istanbul public transport? – Yahoo! Answers
Hi all, I’m going to Istanbul at the end of the month and want to get to my hotel from the airport by metro and tram. I know I need to change at Zeytinburnu to get
Istanbul and its old world charm
The Hindu
I am standing in the heart of Istanbul, a magical city that’s been the cradle of many civilisations. My senses are teased from all directions. The sound of the evening call comes to my ears from the Suleyman mosque, competing with vendors’ cries and
Istanbul paints itself as a hub for modern art
AFP
Turkey is a country famed for its rich, artistic heritage and now, the country is also proving itself to be a platform for the contemporary art market as well. Galleries are springing up throughout the capital attracting the artworld’s elite, hungry
Related posts:
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Happy news for Istanbulites. Red Hot Chili Peppers will be in town on Sept 8. An Istanbul news roundup
an Instagram photo gallery of Istanbul and news roundup…
Terrible traffic in Istanbul, Pamuk’s museum, 3rd Istanbul airport… Istanbul news roundup…
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CultureBy - Grant McCracken: The Sweetness trend
Recently I was thinking on the possibility of a new trend.
And I wrote it up here.
Have a look.
You will see that I rush the conclusion. These are early days and at the moment we have little more than a suggestive trace of the new trend. Still, early notice has to start somewhere, as it were.
Here's a paragraph.
Why sweetness? Well, we are coming out of an era of some darkness. We seemed almost to celebrate skepticism and snark. We dwelt upon the grimmest aspects of the human experience. TV and movie making were increasingly ghoulish, with new standards of viscera and depravity. Shows like CSI and NCIS dwell lovingly on the crime victim. Bright lights and strategically placed towels protect our sexual sensitivities, but everything else on the autopsy table is enthusiastically examined. Once the standard bearer of heartlessness, The Silence of the Lambs (1991) now looks a little quaint. Since its release, we have seen a succession of werewolves, vampires, serial killers, and human monsters of every kind. If you are 40 or under, you've grown up on a steady diet of heartlessness.
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hawgblawg: drone life: swarms of insect sized MAVs by 2030
Please read Charlie Booker writing in The Guardian on February 24 on the US Air Force plans to develop bird- and insect-sized micro-drones with flapping wings, known as micro air vehicle or MAV. They can operate in swarms and their purpose is, among other things, to kill. The bird MAVs are planned to go operational in 2015, the insect MAVs by 2030. Be sure to read and then watch the chilling video, from 2009. Our tax dollars at work.
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FoodAnthropology: Fish and Ships: Exploring Seascapes and Engagements in Seafood Politics; a AAA 2013 panel!
Organizers: Shingo Hamada (Indiana University) and Lillian Brown (Indiana University) This session explores the interplay of humans and the sea through seafood production, circulation, and consumption. Anthropologists have studied economic systems since the birth of the discipline, and introductory courses … Continue reading →
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Shenzhen Noted: shenzhen good samaritan law passed
Inquiring minds want to know: what is Shenzhen’s Samaritan Law? Well, it’s actually its being referred to as “the good person law (好人法)” and ims to protect good Samaritans from being sued by… Read More →
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C L O S E R: Muslims in Alsace – A ‘French’ Model?
Closer Blog: The French region of Alsace-Moselle, near the German border, has its own specific legislation concerning religions. For historical reasons, local authorities are allowed to finance religious groups, unlike in the rest of the country.Read more: Muslims in Alsace – A ‘French’ Model?
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tabsir.net: The high social price of humanitarian dissimulation
By Estella Carpi
A few months ago, while conducting my PhD fieldwork in North Lebanon, I shared my ideas on the current humanitarian assistance to Syrian refugees with a journalist working in Lebanon. I reported that I was told by some Lebanese from Halba that their neighbors threw stones at humanitarian workers during the food kits’ distribution for Syrian refugees in a little town in ‘Akkar (North Lebanon). Apparently it was just an outburst of tension because of the sudden massive presence of humanitarian organizations in loco. In the past they have always neglected this area in Lebanon due to lack of political interests, since the Israeli occupation and the consequent local impoverishment were primarily vexing the south of the country (1978-2000).
The humanitarian agency that the journalist was working for at that time first decided to omit such information before publishing the article. After that, in order not to be accused of censorship, with a cringe-worthy diplomatic move, they published it by elegantly modifying the content of the stones episode, and contending that local people in North Lebanon would definitely warm up if aid were provided to them too. This is a human dynamic that, unfortunately, I had never got the insight of in the field. The humanitarian agency at issue declared that this “information amendment” was carried out in a bid not to generate further frictions between the Lebanese and the Syrian communities. My “Wikileaks philosophy” pushes me instead to broach out the subject overtly and try to analyze it. (more…)
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PopAnth - Hot Buttered Humanity: Sex changes and changing rooms
Changing attitudes or just a practical measure? Unisex toilets are becoming more common in many countries
A few months ago, I was about to walk into the women’s changing rooms at the local swimming pool with my young son when a new notice caught my eye. Translated from the Portuguese original, the text read as follows: “Children who need help to get dressed may only be accompanied by one person. Children who are over eight years old must go to the changing room that corresponds to their gender.” I stood in the doorway and chuckled to myself, “Surely,” I thought “it should read sex” and then hurried my son inside – he was already late for class and still only eight years old.
A few weeks later, I was having breakfast listening to the news on a nationwide radio and my ears popped up (or at least they would have, if I were a rabbit) when I heard a journalist introduce a piece on “gender changes.” A doctor was interviewed who stated that it was not possible to change minds but it was possible to change bodies. “Surely,” I thought aloud once more, “the journalist should have said sex changes.” Only a few days ago I also heard another reporter on the national radio refer to same-sex marriage as marriage between people of the same gender.
Gender has, in my opinion, become such a mainstream word that in some contexts, at least here in Portugal, it has become a misplaced substitute for sex. It as if people feel that it is no longer safe or politically correct to say the word sex unless they are referring to the sexual act, which isn’t usually spoken much about in public anyway.
So what is the difference between sex and gender? We could say that sex refers to the biological body and that gender refers to cultural interpretations of biological differences which produce differentiated social roles and attributes for the sexes.
Sounds easy enough, or does it? Consider the following example from my experience in Cape Verde with students who were affiliated to a research centre on gender and family. We were a small group of about ten people sitting around a table and I wanted the group to split into two, to discuss the difference between sex and gender. The group was comprised of around eight women and two men who happened to be sitting together. So the issue was raised by one of the female students: do we separate the men in order to have a more balanced distribution of… (I think both the words sex and gender were cautiously avoided) or is it alright for both of them to be in the same group? We came to a group decision that it was okay for the men to stay together. What do you think?
[Read the rest of the article]: Sex changes and changing roomsAuthor informationElizabeth ChallinorResearcher, Centre for Research in Social Anthropology (CRIA/UM), PortugalAn aspiring screenwriter who became an anthropologist so he could one day turn his ethnographies into a Latin American version of 'The Wire'. He is currently working on an ehtnography of social class in Bogotá, Colombia, entitled 'The Law of the Most Alive'.Original article: Sex changes and changing rooms©2013 PopAnth - Hot Buttered Humanity. All Rights Reserved.
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trinketization: The Communist Horizon: Talk by author Jodi Dean 7pm 19.3.2013
A book talk by Jodi Dean, author. The Communist Horizon charts the re-emergence of communism as a magnet for political energy following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the stalling of the Occupy movement. Jodi Dean will introduce the book – 45 minutes approx – then answer questions from the audience, followed by wine [...]
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Language Log: Universal alphabet
Not that I think this is any sort of panacea, but our good friends at BBC have seen fit to ask: "Could a new phonetic alphabet promote world peace?"
Although backers of this supposed universal alphabet claim that "it will make pronunciation easy and foster international understanding", I have doubts that SaypU (Spell As You Pronounce Universal project) constitutes a viable route to world peace.
It is curious that SaypU, which uses 24 letters, dispenses with precisely those three letters that give persons who are unfamiliar with Pinyin (official PRC Romanization for Mandarin) the most trouble: "c", "q", and "x". It also adds a reverse "e" for schwa, but, since standard keyboards do not have this symbol, the asterisk (*) may be used to represent it.
The home page of the SaypU project has a conversion tool that you can use to render various traditional spellings into SaypU. For example, if you enter
English "Let's meet at Leicester Square", the result in SaypU is "Let's miit at Lestɘr skwer."
Turkish "Ben İstanbul'da yaşıyorum" ("I live in Istanbul") gives "Ben İstanbul ' da yashɘyorum."
Vietnamese "Tôi ăn một bát phở, được không?" (lit., "I'll eat a bowl of phở, okay?", i.e., "May I have a bowl of pho?") yields "Toy an mot baat fɘɘ, dɘɘk khong?"
Hindi मेरा नाम बहादुर है ("My name is Bahadur") gives "Mɘeerɘaa nɘaam bɘhɘaadɘur hay."
Japanese ここに 語句 もしくは 文章 を 入力 して 下さい ("Please enter a text") results in "Kokoni go ku moshikuwa bunshoo wo nyuuryoku shite kudasai."
Georgian იოსებ სტალინი იყო საქართველოდან ("Joseph Stalin was from Georgia") yields "ioseb stalini iko sakartvelodan."
After you do the conversion to SaypU, you can push a "play" button and the pronunciations will be read out — quite accurately, it seems.
When I showed this BBC article to my colleagues at Language Log headquarters, the only responses I received are these two:
"The Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
–Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
"Il est faux de prétendre que les peuples et les personnes humaines se foutent sur la gueule parce qu'ils ne se comprennent pas. Ils se foutent sur la gueule parce qu'ils se comprennent."
– Romain Gary, Pseudo
[Thanks to Mark Liberman, Paul Kay, Deven Patel, Philip Lutgendorf, Katherine Wang, Erika Gilson, Eric Henry, Peter Golden, John Colarusso, and Bill Hannas]
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Shenzhen Noted: this day in history…
The Shenzhen Archive Information Web (深圳档案信息网) has been uploading monthly records of important Shenzhen matters (深圳大事记). Years 2002 through 2009 have been uploaded and it is possible to learn that ten years ago, on… Read More →
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Language Log: Unknown Language #7
The attached materials came to me from the UN refugee office in Damak city, Jhapa district, in the far southeast of Nepal. There is a sound recording of a female refugee and a sample of her writing in which she employs at least two different scripts, Roman letters and another that looks like some syllabaries of South China I've seen.
I suspect that she might be from northern Myanmar (esp. Kachin state), from which a flood of refugees is now pouring due to the unrest there. In her written sample, she seems to mention Ang Sui Ki and other names and words that are more or less recognizable.
As with the post cards in unknown languages that we've posted on LL to good effect, perhaps we can invite the collective readership of LL to help us solve this one too.
The recording:
The writing sample:
[Hat tip to Mark Hansell]
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Somatosphere: Web Roundup: Reading Literature as Medical Anthropologists by Cassandra Hartblay
This month’s Web Round-up gathers reviews of recent works of fiction that engage medical anthropological themes. You’ll also find some links to writings about anthropology and fiction from around the blogosphere. This slant toward literary subject matter is inspired by the recent addition of the Top of the Heap column to the Somatosphere family.
Fiction (or memoir) is often the place where we as writers and readers get to work through ideas and “what-ifs” in ways that journalism and ethnography don’t allow. Science fiction (also called speculative fiction, or SF) offers a particular affinity with ethnographic thought, as an exercise in imagining other possible worlds. SF author Ursula K. LeGuin’s anthropological roots especially underline this point (see here and here). And for many of us, while working in the field or writing ethnography, reading literature provides an important coda – a space to think outside of the immediate circumstance, to dwell in intuition and lyricism.
Fiction and/as Neuroanthropology
A coming book from the author of Cloud Atlas is an English-language translation of a personal memoir by a Japanese teenager with Autism. The Reason I Jump brings issues of neurodiversity and assisted communication out of the realm of behavioral science, and into personal prose. Along with Mark Haddon’s fictional novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, the volume promises to add to a genre of Autism Spectrum writing, or, with of first person writing from authors with diagnosed cognitive differences. This not only offers an in-roads for scholars and students to approach an insider’s perspective on neurodiversity, but opens the possibility for memoir or autoethnography of cognitive difference that, as G. Thomas Couser, Michael Angrosino, and Sanjay Gupta have all argued, can help to decolonize disability.
Cognitive difference as literary subject matter is not new. From Dostoevsky’s protagonists in Crime and Punishment and Diary of a Madman to Jonathan Franzen’s thematic focus on pharmaceutical use in contemporary American life in The Corrections, writers use the novel as a place to work out what kinds of thought drive human behavior. A recently released novel titled Umbrella, by Will Self, dwells in the world of British twentieth century psychiatry from post-WWI to early 2000s. Umbrella extrapolates on Oliver Sack’s “Awakenings” story about the life course of people living with encephalitis lethargica (popularized in the film starring Robin Williams). Some reviews praise the formal disorder of the novel as an expression of the content – the disorder of the mind and so the disorder of the text. Others (e.g. on NPR) warn that the work, with its sprawling, modernist literary style, choppy narration, and refusal of chapters or other narrative breaks, can be intimidating to the reader. The New Republic suggests a middle ground, calling the novel’s prose inaccessible at first, but ultimately catching and plot-bearing.
In the New York Times Book Review, Judith Shulevitz highlights the way that Umbrella scrapes away at the medical roots of psychiatric diagnosis, hinting instead at social causation:
Looking back on his life, Busner [the protagonist], who never did stop believing that “mental illnesses were creations quite as much as inflictions,” concludes that the post-encephalitic condition is indeed an existential phenomenology, that its symptoms express the pathologies of a disturbed world.
This suggestion, that socio-political structure is equally a root of mental illness as are neurological factors, is well-covered territory in anthropology and critical theory, from Anti-Oedipus to much of the contemporary ethnography reviewed on this blog. As R.D. Laing writes, “We can see other people’s behavior, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person’s experience, but only with his behavior.” According to the reviews around the web, Umbrella seems to offer an attempt to record inter-experience.
Finally, a recent book by Joshua Cohen, Four New Messages, takes on the challenge of sketching human meaning-making in the digital age. The book is reviewed in the New York Times, discussed on the blog at Harper’s, and Cohen is interviewed on the KCRW radio program Bookworm. Four New Messages asserts that human brains “on the internet” are a subject for fiction as well as for scientific investigation.
Further Reading:
For reading ideas at the anthropology/SF (Sci-Fi or Speculative Fiction) cusp, see the open course page put together by Erica James and Stephen Helmreich at MIT. They include both a statement on their philosophy of this intersection, and the syllabus, with both novels and accompanying academic readings.
Acclaimed British SF writer Gwyneth Jones has a collected volume of short stories, The Universe of Things, as well as a book of collected critical essays on the genre, and her book, Life, belongs squarely in the realm of feminist science & technology studies.
Ryan at Savage Minds has a nice post from this past summer reflecting reading SF as a young person. He credits SF author Ray Bradbury as the person who “first sparked my interest in what we broadly call ‘the human condition.’”
A curated collection at the website of the Journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology offers a thoughtful essay by Shannon Dugan Iverson and Darren Byler about the points of convergence and divergence between literary and ethnographic genres – as traditionally distinguished by a concept of “truth” – over the course of the twentieth century. They also offer numerous reading suggestions, including fictional short stories, novels, ethnographic monographs, and critical articles.
On her fieldwork blog, cultural anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid observes that “no one does anthropology as well as novelists do.” For ethnographic fiction, she suggests: “The White Tiger on today’s booming India by Aravind Adiga, What is the What, the life history of the Sudanese refugee, Deng, by Dave Eggers, or The curious incident of the dog in the night which shows, from the native’s point of view, so to speak, the life of a young boy with Asperger’s Syndrome, by Mark Haddon.”
There is an engrossing conversation about the intersection of anthropology and fiction with author Laura Resau on anthropology-influenced young adult fiction blog Charlotte’s Library (maintained by Rhode Island archaeologist Charlotte Taylor). The thoughtful exchange addresses everything from the lack of lyricism in contemporary academic writing to the ethical problems of representing the other that ethnographers sometimes engage more directly than novelists. Resau herself describes her trajectory simply: “After I got my Masters, I decided that instead of continuing with my PhD, I wanted to dedicate myself to creative writing… with an anthropological twist.”
The August 2012 edition of Cultural Anthropology included an interview with Amitav Ghosh (by Damien Stankiewicz) on Anthropology and Fiction. Ghosh holds a PhD in social anthropology from Oxford, and his historical fiction and journalistic writing is widely published and has received numerous laudations. The journal has published several such fiction/ethnography articles over the years, and the links are collected here.
Lisa Wynn has a slightly older post on Ethnographic Fiction at Culture Matters.
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Academic Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 2009. Anti-Oedipus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Penguin.
Angrosino, Michael V. 1994. “On The Bus With Vonnie Lee.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 23 (1) (April 1): 14 -28.
Couser, G. Thomas. 2005. “Disability and (Auto)Ethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 34 (2) (April 1): 121 -142.
Gupta, Sanjay. 2007. Behind the veil of autism. Paging Dr. Gupta Blog. February 20. [www.cnn.com]
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hawgblawg: Maurice El Medioni channel
The Jewish-Algerian pianist from Oran, Maurice El Medioni, has a Youtube channel that I just discovered. There are many gems here: Maurice in concert, Maurice backing Lili Boniche, Blond-Blond, Line Monty, and Reinette L'Oranaise, live footage of Sami El Maghrabi, TV footage of Salim Halali. More to come, no doubt.Medioni survived a recent stroke. A friend met him and sent me a photo of Maurice a couple days ago, and he looks good. Hopefully he will get back on tour, inshallah with El Gusto.
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tabsir.net: 7000 Manuscripts in Zabid
Zabid mosque interior; Photograph by Eric Lafforgue
مدير مرگز المخطوطات في زبيلـ
هناك سبعة آلاف مخطوطة في زبيد!
الجمعة 25 يناير-كانون الثاني 2013 الساعة 01 صباحاً / الجمهورية نت - توفيق حسن أغا
لم يتبق لمدينة زبيد التاريخية إلا أربعة أشهر من المهلة التي منحت لها من قبل لجنة التراث العالمي التابعة لمنظمة الثقافة والعلوم (اليونسكو) إما أن تطمس أو تكون في قائمة التراث العالمي؛ ومنذ عام 2007 وزبيد بين مد وجزر وكلما تنفست الصعداء وجدت أحدا ينغصها ويباعدها عن بلوغ بوابة التراث العالمي، كلما اقتربت من البقاء في هذه القائمة التي كتبت فيها زبيد عبارة دون بقاء منذ عام 1993م ، ومن هذا التنفس وجدت هذه المدينة عام 2007 من مبنى دار الضيافة رفاً وجدته حينها هو المكان المناسب لحفظ ما تمتلكه من مخطوطات، ولكن عندما وجدت ضالتها في هذا المكان وجدت من يطمع بأخذ هذه الدار من يدها ليهدم ما بنته “ زبيد” في ساعة زمن
الجمهورية كانت في اليومين الماضيين في أروقة دار الضيافة سابقا ومركز المخطوطات حالياً، وبعد أن رأت العجب العجاب حول ما يدور حول هذا المبنى والذي إذا قدر الله وتحول إلى مكتب أوسكن أو لمصلحة أخرى عما هو عليه كمركز مخطوطات ستكون واقعة أخرى لن تتحملها مدينة زبيد التاريخية، ولمزيد من التفاصيل التقت (الجمهورية) الأستاذ عرفات الحضرمي ـ مدير مركز المخطوطات في مديرية زبيد وأجرت مع الحوار التالي..
من يكسب..؟!
بداية كيف تحدثنا عن هذه الخلفية التي تم فيها التزامن في اختيار دار الضيافة وتحويله كمركز للمخطوطات؟
(more…)
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Discard Studies: Three calls for papers about the indeterminacy of waste and pollution 3/1/13
Two calls for papers and one workshop are all due March 1, and they all have something in common: the indeterminacy of waste and pollution, and the struggle to make the effects determinant. The CFP for the Canadian Association of Geographers states: “It seems impossible to definitively ascertain, calculate, or identify waste once and for all or always and everywhere.” The … Continue reading »
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Erkan in the Army now...: Eurosphere roundup: Italy election results, still on the agenda…
Frattini: A Bersani-Berlusconi coalition can give Italy stability (Interview)
from EurActiv.com
Italian elections: And now for the warnings from around Europe – stay the course, or else…
by Open Europe blog team
Responses to the extraordinary results of the Italian elections have started to come in from around the rest of Europe, the most interesting of which we include below. Predictably, an instant raft of warnings has come out from Northern Europe and Brussels.
“Where Now For Italy?” by Paolo Borioni
from Social Europe Journal by Paolo Borioni
MAIN FOCUS: Europe fears Italian paralysis | 27/02/2013
from euro|topics
The political stalemate after the election in Italy caused turmoil on the markets on Tuesday. The yields on Italian government bonds rose while share prices fell in several countries and the euro also dropped significantly in value. Some commentators warn that the EU is now paying the price of its austerity policy and that the euro crisis will worsen once again. Others believe that the Eurozone is now in a position to survive Italy’s political paralysis.
Media regulation in the UK – a response to David Elstein
from open Democracy News Analysis – by Nigel Warner
Media is evolving and converging. Regulation should be simple, cohesive, and it must protect the rich diversity of voices and mediums currently enjoyed. It is economic rather than regulatory dangers that pose the greatest threats to media survival.
Freedom of Information in England – to expand or retract?
from open Democracy News Analysis – by Ben Worthy
With increased use of outsourcing, particularly in the NHS, campaigners want to bring private contractors under FoI legislation. At the same time the government is considering restricting access to information due to alleged abuse. Which direction should FoI be travelling?
Berlusconi’s Surge Shows Why Europe Needs a Deeper Union
by EU-Digest
The return of Silvio Berlusconi to the Italian political stage sends an unmistakable message to Europe’s leaders: They will have to be a lot more ambitious if they want to hold their currency union together.
Italy’s stunned centre-left reaches out
from FT.com – World, Europe
Bersani lays claim to ‘responsibility’ of trying to form government and offering opponents in next parliament bare bones of programme
Italy After the Vote: What Now?
from A Fistful Of Euros » A Fistful Of Euros by Brent Whelan
The Italian voters have spoken—but what on earth did they say?
Two clear winners were anointed yesterday. First, Beppe Grillo, whose M5S placed first at 25% with the slogan “send them home,” retire all the old guard politicians and replace them with citizen-legislators. And second, Silvio Berlusconi, the oldest of the old guard, the embodiment of everything Grillo and his followers railed against. So having yoked together this improbable pair, can the Italian voters honestly expect the state to move forward in any direction whatsoever?
Italy election: Did a Bersani-Grillo alliance just become a real possibility?
from Open Europe blog by Open Europe blog team
Sowing the seeds of an Italian spring
from open Democracy News Analysis – by Francesca E.S. Montemaggi
The Italian election resulted in a deadlock with no clear winner. But while Italy is stuck between politics as usual and a sterile protest vote, the seeds of a ‘liberal revolution’ have discretely been sown. Could this mark the beginning of an Italian spring?
Italy parties seek way out of election stalemate
by EU-Digest
The results, notably by the dramatic surge of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement of comic Beppe Grillo, left the center-left bloc with a majority in the lower house but without the numbers to control the powerful upper chamber, the Senate.
Italy is in need of political reform
The country’s economic problems can be addressed only by changing the mechanism that selects the ruling class, say Tito Boeri and Luigi Guiso
Weary of Austerity, Portugal Sings a Song of Revolution
from Global Voices Online by Janet Gunter
This post is part of our Europe in Crisis special coverage.
Thousands of Portuguese people, unhappy with the austerity measures imposed by the government, have promised to again fill the streets of the country on March 2, 2013.
French economy more worrying than Greece, says German economist
from Hurriyet Daily News
Germany is more concerned about the situation of the French economy than Greece.
The inbuilt political stand-off in the ECB’s bond-buying programme
from Open Europe blog
“Liberal, Jewish, Sexy”: Keeping Tabs on Hungarian Students
from Global Voices Online by Atlatszo.hu
Last week, Hungarian TV channel Atv reported [hu] that they had obtained a list created by the official student union at one of Hungary’s most renowned universities. Allegedly, the student union members at ELTE University‘s Faculty of Humanities (BTK) added offensive comments to a list of applicants to the university’s freshmen camping trip, using personal information available on once the largest Hungarian social network iWiW. The leaked [hu] list was created in 2009.
Related posts:
Eurosphere roundup: Post-election stalemate in Italy, Cyprus votes for austerity…
Eurosphere roundup: EU Google Probe, Italy Elections…
Eurosphere roundup: Berlusconi gone [for the moment...], Eurocrats appointed in Greece, Italy?
Eurosphere roundup: Italian elections… EU pressure on Google privacy rules… Horsemeat scandal…
Eurosphere roundup: Financial markets now trust Italy and Spain; Euro fiscal pact; Danish Presidency news…
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ICCI Home: International Society for Philosophy, History and Soicial Sciences of Biology
The International Society for Philosophy, History and Soicial Sciences of Biology holds its 2013 conference in Montpellier, July 7-12. Proposals for sessions and contributions from biologists, ecologists, philoosphers and historians of biology are welcomeuntil Feb. 28, as well as interdisciplinary sessions. Website: www.ishpssb2013.org
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The Subversive Archaeologist: A Very Remote Period and A Gigantic Fail: Riel-Salvatore and Gravel-Miguel on Upper Palaeolithic Burial Variability
I've been watching the media coverage of a paper by Julien Riel-Salvatore and Claudine Gravel-Miguel, which is to appear in the soon-to-be-published Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial. In it the authors make much of the variability of Upper Palaeolithic (UP) burials in Eurasia since the first modern humans began colonizing at give-or-take 40 Ka. I first heard of their work through the February 23 Past Horizons archaeology web log, which is featured in the blogroll on SA. That blog reported on the article, and included quotes from Julien himself. This morning I noticed that Julien had put up a long post on his own web log, A Very Remote Period Indeed. The authors, through J. R.-S., thought it best to put the article in context, because they feared the media were running with a slant that didn't do their work justice. In J. R.-S.'s blog was a link to a galley proof of their contribution. It is to that original paper that my remarks are aimed, and not any of the spin---whether that of the media or the authors. The lion's share of their 44-page-long contribution comprises 19 pages of tabulated observations, 9 pages of references, 1 1/2 pages of pie charts, one page of histograms and the 1/2-page map reproduced below. [Yawn] The remaining 11 pages of introduction and analysis remind me that, where burial is concerned, I might be tilting at windmills. But if I'm tilting at windmills, these authors are fencing with straw men. According to the authors, it's necessary to investigate the variability in Upper Palaeolithic burials because the conventional wisdom states that burials from this time are rich in grave goods and stand in contrast to what came before (i.e. Middle Palaeolithic burials). I'll leave it to you to decide how big a straw man this is. Suffice it to say it was big enough in the authors' minds to warrant this research.To achieve their goal of assessing Upper Palaeolithic burial variability the authors set their temporal limits at 45 Ka and 10 Ka. They seek to capture any data from the presumed earliest incursion of modern humans until approximately the end of the Upper Palaeolithic [and prior to the transitional Mesolithic]. The authors are keen to use what might be termed a 'clean' dataset. So, they exclude burials from their chosen period in southwest and southeast Asia. Bang, out goes the Natufian, particularly rich in burials, but which might be tainted by agriculture and therefore not useful for comparison with the rank and file Upper Palaeolithic of the rest of Eurasia. Be that as it may. They get to draw the lines any way they please. It's what they do within those lines that matters most.My big beef about this paper stems from what appears to be a whopping great authorial blind spot where the Late Pleistocene climate of Europe and North Asia are concerned. Indeed, the authors make much of what they perceive as the qualitative differences between what went on in two arbitrary temporal subsets---one between 31,250 and 28,750 cal. bp; a second between 13,750 and 11,250 cal. bp. In their wordsthe number of interments show two peaks, the main one during the 31,250–28,750 cal. bp interval, and a slightly more modest one between 13,750– 11,250 cal. bp. They are separated by over 15,000 calendar years which suggests the pattern is not simply an artefact of time-vectored differential preservation where we would expect to see a continuous increase in the frequency of burials as we move towards the present ... . While the absence of corroborating palaeontological and geological data prevents us from ascertaining this ... , some very unusual preservation biases would have had to be at play to exclude human intentionality as the driving factor.No need whatsoever to ascribe differential preservation to any graves that may have existed in the period and the region about which the authors are speaking. There wan't anyone there to bury! I hate to be the one to point this out to the authors [the Hell I do!], however the time between about 26,000 and about 14,000 years BP circumscribed the Last Glacial Maximum. As you can see from the graphic below, the ice sheet during this period engulfed most of the British Isles, all of Scandinavia and a great east--west swathe of northern Europe. Most of the unglaciated land to the south across northern Europe [the area with few burials during that time] was periglacial. Nothing but permafrost and tundra vegetation. There's no mystery that the UP people weren't there at that time, even when they had been in the early part of the UP. It was too friggin' cold!The quote following the map below pretty much says it all.From Riel-Salvatore and Gravel-Miguel 2013.Straight from the horse's mouth:[... the map above] also highlights that only southwest France and the Italian regions of Liguria and Puglia have yielded burials attributed to the two periods. Since most of Italy has yielded Late but not Early burials, this pattern is unlikely simply to be an artefact of regional research histories, a point reinforced by the fact that countries with rich histories of research (e.g. Spain) have yielded no UP burials despite having a rich Mesolithic burial record ... . [...The figure] therefore suggests that there was a dramatic contraction of the area in which burial was practised after the end of the Gravettian [i.e. during the LGM]. The Late sample also becomes considerably denser over the more limited area over which it is distributed, with areas of Western Europe devoid of Early burials looking as though they were somehow ‘backfilled’ by burial- practising populations (e.g. central and northwestern Italy, parts of Germany). They're saying that they're bemused at the absence of burial in the more northerly reaches during the middle of their temporal range. Doh! That these authors would even consider research intensity and forget all about the effect of the climatic conditions during the middle of their temporal range amazes me. How about you?SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.
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