I’m a professor. I have a lot of books. After testing several bibliography apps I chose BookCrawler to catalog my home library (mostly so I could alphabetize it) with my iPod touch. The program is great — using Pic2Shop as a barcode scanner it easily sucked down info about my books. In one case when [...]
My latest column at Inside Higher Ed is up — “The iPad for Academics“. My review of the iPad was not unabashedly positive — I think it makes a great PDF reader, but that it hardly eclipses the laptop for most of the jobs that academics do. That said, I wanted to make a few [...]
In my quest for additional optimization I recently downloaded and tried the mac app Launchbar. In general I do not believe in loading down your computer with tons of software in an attempt to convince yourself that you are a ‘power user’ but I am going to make an exception for Launchbar. This thing rocks [...]
Oh yes, I am tweeting. Come find me at http://twitter.com/r3x0r
I think the the thing that we’ve all figured out by now is that in virtual worlds people who do not share the same physical space get to interact with one another synchronously. This is true of phones as well. And videoconferencing. They are, in Schutz’s terminology, contemporaries but not consociates — they share the [...]
I bought a kindle. I dropped US$400 on a device to let me read books when I already own a tremendous amount of books that I will never get to. Why? And, is kindle any good for professors like me? I bought a kindle because I live in Honolulu and I go to the mainland [...]
Here’s one from ASAO: a nice list of “digitized Pacific resources”:http://www.nla.gov.au/oz/digitised-pacific-resources.html including our own “UH Manoa materials”:http://library.manoa.hawaii.edu/research/digicoll.html. Go librarians go!
“Digg is restructuring”:http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2008/01/24/digg-demonstrates-failure-open-collaborative-networks — part of the general Web 3.0 trend to create not just collaborative networks, but collaborative networks that help us flourish, which, it turns out, means structures that are regulated rather than ruthlessly games. I see this as similar somehow to the difference between early MMOGs, where inflation and gaming the system [...]
Damn, any feminization of the new mac laptop in “this review”:http://gizmodo.com/348361/our-macbook-air-review-matrix? Must write longer blog entry comparing this to seminal article “When computers were women”.
“Alice Marwick”:http://www.tiara.org/blog/?page_id=299 studies identity online. “Passively Multiplayer”:http://passivelymultiplayer.com/ — the PMOG blog.
IHE has a short piece today on “Middlebury’s banning students from using Wikipedia”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/26/wiki. The article is interesting, but what is especially valuable to me (and the paper on Wikipedia that I wrote) are the comments it generated, which provide a nice slice of quotable academic opinions about Wikipedia. As someone who has contributed a lot [...]
I often use Dawkin’s outrage with religion as an example to my anthro students that science, too, is a culture. Rather than use interviews with him now, there’s a “whole new book”:http://www.amazon.com/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0618680004/sr=8-1/qid=1162357679/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books that I will have to look over in my Copious Free Time.
Ever since I have been hired as a professor I have been more and more concerned about what people find out about me when they search for me on the web. Or maybe I should say: ever since I was hired as a professor and then went and wrote a blog entry about laxatives. At [...]
By Internet standards I have been around for quite a while, and while not a dinosaur on the scale of, you know, _David Weinberger_ or something ( :) )I’ve witnessed the rise and fall of a good many trends in the blogosphere and elsewhere. So while I don’t have a second brain located in my [...]
If you were a sociologist interested in the recent heavies in theory and wanted a quick crib sheet, you might look “here”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/sore/53/s1. Honestly the most interesting thing about this issue (after the article on DMS) is _who_ they choose to write about. Spivak has those kinda legs in sociology? Who knew. UPDATE: Sorry, the full [...]
The Wikipedia entry on “incipit”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incipit is a scrumptiously brief comparative piece. I particularly like the final point about computer files.
Some quick links for people trying to turn Google Earth’s pictures of PNG into intelligible maps: “Ethnologue maps”:http://www.ethnologue.com/show_map.asp?name=PG — Ethnologue has made PNG language maps available for free consultation on the web. Vaguely remember Hogbin’s _The Leader and the Led_ and want to find Wogeo? Look no further. The comfortingly bounded, internally discrete, color-coded language [...]
Why? Because the Encyclopedia Brittanica has never even _heard_ of “Spam musubi”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_musubi.
“Kerim”:http://keywords.oxus.net/archives/2005/05/13/david-graeber/ and “Biella ‘m4dd0g’ Coleman”:http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/archives/000744.html#000744 have already publicized “what Yale is doing to David Graeber”:http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=7834 so I won’t repeat it here. I haven’t read “his book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312240457/qid=1116118035/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/102-6229466-0987309 but I have met David and remember him as funny, articulate, and approachable. What is more, he is also amazingly erudite — an example of the sort of deeply-learned [...]
I am going through the final, painful thicket of ideas that is the ‘theoretical’ section of my dissertation. “This is what my brain feels like”:http://www.geocities.com/heartland/ranch/1201/oandkrh400.html?200528. These two paragraphs just took me literally an hour to write/revise: “But mining, like cannibalism, “is always symbolic, even when it is ‘real’†(Sahlins 1983:). It is important to realize [...]
On 4 April I posted Tommy’s very smart and funny “Major Anglophone Anthropology Departments as Fashion Brands”:http://alex.golub.name/log/?p=381 table on my website, where it was received with thunderous silence — at least in the comments (I can’t be bothered to check my server logs to see who is reading the blog these days, since this takes [...]
I’m just at the very edge of the F/OSS world, and so I’ve always enjoyed the uber-idea aggregators at O’Reilly. Tim’s stuff in particular has always been super resonant and mind-expanding for me. Their ability to intuit and articulate future trends is useful, at least to someone like me. Now there’s the “O’Reilly Radar Blog”:http://radar.oreilly.com/. [...]
That’s what I want. Exactly like Bloglines (not citeulike or delicious, where you find articles and tage them), but with academic journals instead of blogs. I’d have different folders for different things I’m interested in, and every month or quarter or year or whatever I’d get the title and abstract of each article on the [...]
The Chapter is finished. Too tired to blog. More links instead. Excellent, Smithers!! Ron May’s new volume of essays on PNG’s political history, “State and Society in Papua New Guinea: The First Twenty-Five Years”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/sspng_citation.htm is available on line as part of the ANU’s noble and far-seeing “e-press print on demand”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/titles.htm program. And you know what’s [...]
This week marks the start of the “Book of Leviticus”:http://www.hareidi.org/bible/Leviticus1.htm#1 for all of who follow the Laws of the God of Jacob. Leviticus is one of my favorite books of the bible because of all the rich ethnography. I mean: it’s sacrificetastic! When I finished reading this week’s portion I gave a sort of self-satisfied [...]
Since “Kerim’s touched on the subject”:http://keywords.oxus.net/archives/2005/03/16/race/ I’ll mention a few more things. First, “Troy Duster”:http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/people/duster (“CV”:http://sociology.fas.nyu.edu/attach/938) has a “nice, brief piece”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/03/17/ED263680.DTL on pharmacogenetics that is worth checking out. Of course, those of you who are more old-school may prefer “Buffon’s Of the varieties of the human species“:http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Chateau/6110/buffon/1varieties.htm. Of course there is indeed such a thing [...]
My class just finished our section on _What Does It Mean to be 98% Chimpanzee_ today. I admit there are some reasons not to like this book, but overall I find it timely (rather than cobbled together out of a bunch of articles), wide-ranging (rather than unfocused), trenchant (rather than ‘trollish’) and ‘important’ (i.e. I [...]
I so do _not_ want to turn this blog into a forum on race and genetics. It’s so tiring. Nonetheless I thought I’d do a round up on some links and reccomendations I’ve gotten from readers in response to my previous post. First, “Kerim”:http://keywords.oxus.net/ points to Loic Wacquaint’s essay “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration”:http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24703.shtml at [...]
“This guy”:http://www.streightsite.blogspot.com/ is writing “a book about blogs”:http://www.blogpros.blogspot.com/ and asked me to contribute. Frankly the website looks like the Yes Men doing a parody of a late-nineties Fast Company type consulting firm. But the letter he sent me was only slightly formletter-ish and he even sent me a ‘reminder’ that I hadn’t replied to him, [...]
This week my intro anthro class is studying race. Explaining why ‘race’ and folk heredity are bad science but omnipresent cultural constructs is something that every anthropology professor has to do over and over and over again. I sometimes find the anthropological knee-jerk against race unsatisfying because it often takes the form of a a [...]