Author Archive for homer

A Conversation with Eduardo Porter

Published on February 2, 2011 in News. 1 Comment

From David Leonhardt in the New York Times blog “Economix”:

Eduardo Porter and I were colleagues on the economics beat at The New York Times several years ago, and he is now a member of the editorial board. He’s also the author of the recent book “The Price of Everything.” Our conversation, the latest installment of this blog’s Book Chat series, follows:

Q. Let’s start with an unusual topic for a book on prices: religion. You suggest an economic framework for thinking about religion. The costs of religion are time (in church, praying and the like) and behavior restrictions (against what you can eat, whom you can marry and the like). The benefit — or at least one benefit — is the fact that religious people report being happier on average than nonreligious.

It’s a big gap, as you write. The average happiness gap between someone who goes to church weekly and someone who never goes to church is as large as the average happiness gap between the richest 20 percent of Americans and the poorest 20 percent.

Does this mean that nonreligious people and marginally religious people should, for the sheer sake of earthly satisfaction, consider becoming more religious?

Mr. Porter: No.

Religious belief contributes to happiness and well-being by providing social glue to bond groups together. The investments required to participate — from dietary restrictions to, in some societies, mutilation — wall religious groups off from the rest of society, protecting their investment from uncommitted free riders. The rules might contribute to happiness as they lead believers to drop unhealthy behaviors, like alcohol abuse. More importantly, the walls foster trust and solidarity, which allow mutual support networks to emerge. And the enclosed nature of the system reinforces collective belief sets –satisfying believers’ need to belong.

What If They Gave a Science War and Only One Side Came? Ask the American Anthropological Association

Published on January 11, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Hugh Gusterson in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In November the executive board of the American Anthropological Association, of which I am a member, met for one and a half days. In preparation for the meeting, we were expected to read a 250-page briefing book. About three pages of that 250-page book were taken up by what the meeting will now be remembered for: a revision of the association’s statement on its long-range planning. We did not know it, but those three pages were to set off a short “science war” within anthropology. Now that tempers have died down, we can ask what the controversy shows about the force of the word “science” and about anthropology, a discipline that has always stood at the crossroads of science and the humanities.

Most of the 250 pages, and most of our time in the executive-board meeting, was given over to issues that many of us saw as more urgent than the long-range-planning statement: a detailed review of the association’s budget in a time of national recession; a discussion of our publishing model in a context in which most of the association’s journals operate at a loss and their content is increasingly available free via the Web; an analysis of our publishing partnership with Wiley-Blackwell; a briefing on the introduction of a multimillion-dollar computer program to facilitate the association’s business; a conversation about recurrent issues in organizing the annual meeting and issues that had already arisen with regard to next year’s meeting, in Montreal; a discussion of the search for a new editor of our flagship journal, American Anthropologist; a performance evaluation of the association’s executive director and the staff he oversees; and a tricky discussion about whether, or how, to make available as an archival document a 10-year-old official report of the association’s that had since been repudiated by the membership through a ballot.

At the end of the 12-hour meeting, in what seemed like routine business, we briefly discussed and approved two documents that had been revised by subcommittees of the executive board. (For the record, I was on neither one.) One was a statement called “What Is Anthropology?” It was intended to give an overview of our discipline to interested outsiders. The other was the AAA’s statement on its long-range planning.

You Might Already Know This …

Published on January 10, 2011 in News. 1 Comment

Daryl J. Bem

From Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

They should have seen it coming.

In recent weeks, editors at a respected psychology journal have been taking heat from fellow scientists for deciding to accept a research report that claims to show the existence of extrasensory perception.

The report, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is not likely to change many minds. And the scientific critiques of the research methods and data analysis of its author, Daryl J. Bem (and the peer reviewers who urged that his paper be accepted), are not winning over many hearts.

Yet the episode has inflamed one of the longest-running debates in science. For decades, some statisticians have argued that the standard technique used to analyze data in much of social science and medicine overstates many study findings — often by a lot. As a result, these experts say, the literature is littered with positive findings that do not pan out: “effective” therapies that are no better than a placebo; slight biases that do not affect behavior; brain-imaging correlations that are meaningless.

C-Span Puts Full Archives on the Web

Published on March 16, 2010 in News and Uncategorized. 0 Comments

16cspan_ca0-articleinline From Brian Stelter in the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Researchers, political satirists and partisan mudslingers, take note: C-Span has uploaded virtually every minute of its video archives to the Internet.

The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library on Wednesday.

Having free online access to the more than 160,000 hours of C-Span footage is “like being able to Google political history using the ‘I Feel Lucky’ button every time,” said Rachel Maddow, the liberal MSNBC host.

Ed Morrissey, a senior correspondent for the conservative blog Hot Air (hotair.com), said, “The geek in me wants to find an excuse to start digging.”

For the article…

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

Published on February 26, 2010 in News and Uncategorized. 0 Comments

jobless-america-future-200 From Don Peck in The Atlantic

HOW SHOULD WE characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn’t be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.

The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.

All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis. The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year.

For the full article…

Editorial: Nietzsche and European Posthumanisms

Published on January 18, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

From Russell Blackford, Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Evolution and Technology:

In issue 20(1) of The Journal of Evolution and Technology, we published “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism” by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner (March 2009). In this intriguing article, Sorgner argues that there aresignificant similarities between the concept of the posthuman (as typically deployed in transhumanist thought) and Nietzsche’s celebrated notion of the overhuman (often referred to, perhaps misleadingly, as “the Superman”). Sorgner does not claim that late twentieth-century and contemporary transhumanist thinkers were knowingly influenced by Nietzsche: this is a question that he explicitly leaves open. Nor does he depict transhumanism as monolithic, or the concept of the posthuman as unambiguous. For all that, he suggests that the similarity between the two concepts – overhuman and posthuman – is not merely superficial: it lies at a fundamental level.

Sorgner compares the posthuman and overhuman concepts in a way that is calculated to bring out a deep similarity. He discusses, for example, how the relevant systems of thought are alike in viewing humanity as merely a work in progress, with only limited potential in the absence of a radical transformation. Humanity is, in other words, not an evolutionary culmination but something that cries out for improvement. Sorgner adds, however, that the idea of the overhuman provides Nietzsche with a grounding for values that appears to be missing in transhumanist thought.

Performance and Connection in Electronic Social Networks

Published on March 8, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Erika Pearson has an article, All the World Wide Web’s a stage: The performance of identity in online social networks, in the latest issue of the journal First Monday. This is the abstract:

This paper discusses how ideas of performance can be used to conceptualize the play of identity formation on social networking sites (SNS). Linking Goffman’s theories of social performance with Granovetter’s notion of the social tie, this paper will argue that identities on SNS are deliberately constructed performances that straddle the frontstage and the backstage, the public and the private, and in doing so both support and rely upon webs of social connections which engage with fluid or playful identity constructions.