Diaspora

Maintain control of your web info. Communicate directly, not through a corporate server like Facebook where your data security is vulnerable, but instead, use encrypted messages. Pledge to support Diaspora; I did.  You can get a cool shirt . . .

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr#

or

http://www.joindiaspora.com

and, check out MetaFilter.  I just discovered it and plan to join.

Financial crisis: Where's our Greek riot?

Financial crisis: Where's our Greek riot?

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Eco-sustainability

Straw Bale Houses Built in England Withstand Hurricanes
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/straw-house-built.php

Urban Farms Take to the Roofs
http://www.salon.com/food/feature/2010/05/17/community_gardens_slide_show  (requires subscription possibly)

Vertical Farms in Cities
http://www.verticalfarm.com/

In the last class discussion we had Wednesday, over an article entitled: "Medical Anthropology:  Malnutrition in Malawi" a student seriously proposed that food aid should not be provided to poor people in 3rd world countries because A.  their population would grow because the children wouldn't die, and B.  the country wouldn't be able to continue feeding a growing population.

I can understand but not agree with the perspective.  It's a perspective born out of privilege, relative wealth, and inexperience.  While she didn't seem like a rich student, she had clothes and looked clean and well fed.  Her family life may be horrible, but I doubt if she's watched while her siblings starved to death at home.

I wish I knew how to break through.  I'll look for more ideas.  We couldn't watch "Healers of Ghana" this semester because I was sick and cancelled that class, but most students like it for the perspective it provides.

When?

http://todayspictures.slate.com/20100512/   Photo #15

We kill young men, don't we?

The following is taken from a longer piece on NPR's Homepage.  The link is at the end of the excerpt.

'The Truth About Homicide'

Now a senior reporter at the L.A. Times, Jill Leovy started The Homicide Report in 2007 after noticing the huge disparity in the way murders were covered by the news media. The sensational stories, mostly the outliers and anomalies, got the most attention. But the majority of homicides were largely ignored.

"The first year I was in the Watts homicide unit, that unit had 60 murders that year," she tells NPR's Guy Raz. "I was shadowing the detectives, and we were running on murders every other day. Every morning they had CNN on, or something on, and it would have the latest installment of the Laci Peterson murder." The sensational case of a pregnant wife murdered by her husband enthralled the nation for months.

"The detectives in that unit were fascinated with it. Every day, we would have a moment of discussing the newest development in that case, and then they'd go on to do the 60 other murders that year — and that is homicide in America.

"The truth about homicide," she says, "is that it is black men in their 20s, in their 30s, in their 40s. The way we guide money and policy in this country, we do not care about those people. It's not described as what's central to our homicide problem, and I wanted people to see that. I wanted people to see those lives and to see that that's our real homicide problem in America.

"The money needs to go to black male argument violence," she continues. "Anything else … you're dealing with the margins of the problem, statistically, and it's not right."

Nobody Deserves To Be Murdered

Leovy wants to give a name, an identity and a story to every person who was murdered in L.A. County. She wants society to get away from "medieval notions" of deserving or not deserving to be killed.

"I don't care if they're the worst thug in the world," she says, adding, "some of these guys are really, really deeply, criminally involved characters. Many of them have killed people."

"You don't have it coming in a gang shooting," she says, "you need to be arrested and prosecuted.

"A lot of the money we spend is based on the presumption that the victims are guilty in some ways," Leovy explains. She hears all the time how terrible it is that young men are killing each other, how they need to shape up. She argues the discussion needs to be reframed.

"When we talked about domestic violence, we never talked about how these women were so delinquent and terrible and they needed to get their heads together and be taught right. We talked about protecting them from people who are trying to hurt them. We don't talk about men that way."

I've thought about this problem frequently.  People love the sensational, the cultural violations - young pretty pregnant women, the Madonna and child figure - are not the sacrifice and when they are, the sacrifice is horrific.  Young men of color are the cannon fodder of our society.

from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126853039

A Teacher's Nightmare

SO: the other night I had the weirdest dream. Yes, boring, but still, it reflects the situations teachers encounter and the often humorous situations that result.

At any rate, I dreamed that my class in Physical Anthro was supposed to learn about population genetics. In the dream, I turned the page in the book, even though I don't lecture from the book, and saw that the topic was population genetics. I said 'just a minute' and began scanning the section. I became engrossed (entranced!) by Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and as I was looking through the material, I realized that the class had gone eerily silent. I looked up to find that the classroom was empty! During my reading, the students had quietly packed up their things and left. I looked at the clock, and realized I had spent 15-20 minutes standing at the front of the room, thinking and reading about Hardy-Weinberg.

The fact that this nearly happened to me in lab (minus the students exiting the classroom) is the probable impetus for the dream, but it also speaks to the larger issues I think about: the complexity of material covered in two or three paragraphs of an introductory textbook; the need for students to understand basic mathematic and statistical principles in order to understand a complex world; and, how teachers can most effectively present material that is complex and mathematically based. I'm still working on the last one.

I intend to dramatically revamp the physical course, giving much more weight to homework assignments, making the tests easier, and perhaps developing small, problem-based group exercises for each unit. I tried the last, a bit, when I assigned articles to discuss in that class, but I found that too many students were unprepared to understand half of the articles.

Two related articles that illustrate my point:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627603.600-neanderthals-not-the-only-apes-humans-bred-with.html

and

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/13/seth-roberts-on-orwe.html

NYU Students Raise More than $100,000 to Build Facebook Alternative

NYU Students Raise More than $100,000 to Build Facebook Alternative

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Baby names of 1990

1 Michael 462,180 2.2505 Jessica 302,994 1.5434
2 Christopher 360,115 1.7535 Ashley 301,741 1.5370
3 Matthew 351,530 1.7117 Emily 237,173 1.2081
4 Joshua 329,012 1.6021 Sarah 224,063 1.1413
5 Jacob 298,098 1.4515 Samantha 223,948 1.1407
6 Nicholas 275,245 1.3403 Amanda 190,942 0.9726
7 Andrew 272,671 1.3277 Brittany 190,798 0.9719
8 Daniel 271,885 1.3239 Elizabeth 172,460 0.8785
9 Tyler 262,240 1.2769 Taylor 168,995 0.8608
10 Joseph 260,444 1.2682 Megan 160,330 0.8167
11 Brandon 259,340 1.2628 Hannah 158,690 0.8083
12 David 253,303 1.2334 Kayla 155,856 0.7939
13 James 244,818 1.1921 Lauren 153,547 0.7821
14 Ryan 241,139 1.1742 Stephanie 149,753 0.7628
15 John 239,809 1.1677 Rachel 148,958 0.7588
16 Zachary 225,214 1.0966 Jennifer 147,972 0.7537
17 Justin 220,040 1.0714 Nicole 136,051 0.6930
18 William 217,648 1.0598 Alexis 131,143 0.6680
19 Anthony 216,131 1.0524 Victoria 117,415 0.5981
20 Robert 205,339 0.9999 Amber 115,574 0.5887

from: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/decades/names1990s.html

Mothering

Read this:

http://www.slate.com/id/2253115/

20 years from now

This from Salon:
http://www.salon.com/life/parenting/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2010/05/07/us_baby_names

Isabella and Jacob are the top names this year. That would mean that 20 years from now they would be in my class but I will be long gone by then.

I should be able to figure out the top names 20 years ago: Dylan? Dakota? Erick (Eric?) Heather (fading, but still popular)? Amanda? Kate (also fading)?

Overheard in SF / Osteological changes to my mental perceptions

Public Eavesdropping "You shouldn't be allowed to play the ukulele if you don't speak Hawaiian." Street person to uke strummer, overheard in Precita Park by Robert Weiner

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/06/DDMG1D8NIO.DTL#ixzz0nBjw3qd7

my sentiments exactly  . . . though the Samoans, Filipinos and Chamorros also do a good job!
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Driving home today, my first thought, as a Lexus SUV passed me, was "Nuchal torus!  wow, the back of that SUV looks like a H. erectus skull." That's what teaching a phys. anth lab course does to a person.  Three weeks ago I thought my dish scrubber looked like a clavicle.  I'm teaching the class next fall - hard to say what subconscious comparisons come up.

Veil as Choice, pt. 2

The previous post was an excerpt from a longer article about a Pakistani immigrant and her daughter's response to Islam and the veil in the U.S.  In the longer article, the daughter wrote:

When my mother turned 12, she started wearing a burqa in her hometown of Multan, Pakistan. More than a decade later, she got married and moved to Karachi, then a thriving capital of modernity, where few women wore hijabs, let alone all-encompassing veils.

Growing up in Central Valley, Calif., I had no qualms about showing off my legs in shorts and skirts, and I was shocked to learn my mother had covered every inch of her body. Even more unbelievable to me, though, was that my mother felt pressured when she moved to Karachi to suddenly give up the burqa, a blanket of fabric that had at that point been part of her identity for more than half her life. It provided her with a sense of comfort, it helped define her identity as a Muslim and a woman, and it was gone virtually overnight.

It angered me that she hadn’t protested. What had she wanted to do, I asked her. “It doesn’t matter,” she told me. “We must do what we can to fit in our community.”

She continues:

That is the crux of the problem I see today in Europe’s current battle over the veil: Communities defining how women should cover up or what they should take off.  

In a larger sense, all communities define how individuals, both male and female, should act, because communities set norms of behavior.  An Iranian male once told me that he didn't understand why Americans became upset over stoning for adultery since it was applied to both males and females (though I think he might have been blind to the frequency with which the punishment was not applied to males).  For him, this norm of behavior was coherent and equitable.  Many ethnographies deal with the relative freedom and norms of behavior granted to males and females within a community.  For one such ethnography, I could recommend:  Swartz, Marc J. 1991. The Way the World Is: Cultural Processes and Social Relations Among the Mombasa Swahili. Berkeley: University of California Press. (see:  http://www.anthro.ucsd.edu/Faculty_Profiles/swartz.html)

What is interesting to me in the quotes I've provided are two things:  1.  how the West defines female freedom as the freedom to remove clothing; and, 2.  how the daughter adopted the Western perspective of individual choice, including the choice of defying community norms, while the mother enacted her individual choice privately, allowing her 'outside' to conform, but retaining her belief in her inside.

My American students would claim that this is hypocrisy:  that having a belief includes the freedom to express this belief, and that being veiled prevents free thought or opinion, as if the outside dictates the inside.

I've taught in my class (kudos to Dr. Martin Ottenheimer for this formulation) that Americans have internalized the 'peach pit' schema of personality and personhood, while the East, broadly speaking, has internalized the 'onion' schema.  Prof. Ottenheimer did not use the term 'schema' but it fits, I think.

In the 'peach pit' schema, the notion of an unalterable core or inner self is proposed, and charges of hypocrisy can come from either: 1.  behavior that deviates from professed beliefs or values or, 2.  behavior that changes from context to context, so that the outside fails to conform to the inside.  The 'onion' schema is an idea of personality wherein each layer is present and conforms to the external condition, and as layers are peeled away, eventually the person comes to  . . . nothing.  The person is the set of layers, according to this idea.  The other idea claims that the 'real' person is inside and once social convention is stripped away, that inner, true self can be revealed.

Therefore, I think we can see how the separate schemas:  individual choice, outside conformity versus internal integrity, and the schema of the 'onion' versus the 'peach pit' are at work here.  The American daughter has confronted her own assumption that female freedom equates to baring the body, due to her exposure to alternate behaviors and community norms, but still clings to the notion that choice is internal and individual and that internal choice must match (or be expressed) on the outside of the body in order to conform to cultural schemas of person and integrity.

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A follow up post on Iranian and Shiite hypocrisy should come at some time, though I have not experienced this directly in my field work.  Also, I could work this idea into my examination (long delayed!!) of Xander within the Buffyverse (the Whedonverse, more correctly).