After tightening its citizenship laws in the mid-1980s, Bhutan conducted a special census in the south and then proceeded to cast out nearly 100,000 people — about one-sixth of its population, nearly all of them of Nepalese origin, including my family. It declared us illegal immigrants, even though many of us went back several generations in Bhutan. It hasn’t let any of us move back.
The enormity of this exodus, one of the world’s largest by proportion, given the country’s small population, has been overlooked by an international community that is either indifferent or beguiled by the government-sponsored images of Bhutan as a serene Buddhist Shangri-La, an image advanced by the policy of “gross national happiness,” coined by King Jigme Singye Wangchuck in the 1970s.
David Samson, the Port Authority chairman, said the plan would position the terminal — which with 225,000 travelers a day, is the world’s busiest bus hub, according to the authority — as a “world-class facility.”
But there are two basic reasons why science cannot replace metaphysics. The first is that science itself is based on a metaphysics whose truth is by no means evident. In focusing on the forces and elements of nature, science tacitly assumes that these are more real than artificial compound things such as languages, societies, armies, class struggles, bridges, and rail networks. There is an unspoken reductionism at work here, as if the smallest constituents of the world possessed a reality that was withheld from the macro-sized entities that they compose.
Original article:Although it may seem difficult for adults to understand what an infant is feeling, a new study from Brigham Young University finds that it's so easy a baby could do it.Psychology professor Ross Flom's study, published in the academic journal Infancy, shows that infants can recognize each other's emotions by five months of age. This study comes on the heels of other significant research by Flom on infants' ability to understand the moods of dogs, monkeys and classical music."Newborns can't verbalize to their mom or dad that they are hungry or tired, so the first way they communicate is through affect or emotion," says Flom. "Thus it is not surprising that in early development, infants learn to discriminate changes in affect."Infants can match emotion in adults at seven months and familiar adults at six months. In order to test infant's perception of their peer's emotions, Flom and his team of researchers tested a baby's ability to match emotional infant vocalizations with a paired infant facial expression.
Mariana Vaillant-Molina1, Lorraine E. Bahrick1, Ross Flom. Young Infants Match Facial and Vocal Emotional Expressions of Other Infants. Infancy.
Article first published online: 25 MAR 2013, DOI: 10.1111/infa.12017Abstract: Research has demonstrated that infants recognize emotional expressions of adults in the first half year of life. We extended this research to a new domain, infant perception of the expressions of other infants. In an intermodal matching procedure, 3.5- and 5-month-old infants heard a series of infant vocal expressions (positive and negative affect) along with side-by-side dynamic videos in which one infant conveyed positive facial affect and another infant conveyed negative facial affect. Results demonstrated that 5-month-olds matched the vocal expressions with the affectively congruent facial expressions, whereas 3.5-month-olds showed no evidence of matching. These findings indicate that by 5 months of age, infants detect, discriminate, and match the facial and vocal affective displays of other infants. Further, because the facial and vocal expressions were portrayed by different infants and shared no face–voice synchrony, temporal, or intensity patterning, matching was likely based on detection of a more general affective valence common to the face and voice.
“You’re storing energy in your shoulder,” Dr. Roach said, speaking from Africa, where he was heading to Lake Turkana to look at fossil footprints of human ancestors about a million and a half years old. The storage occurs in the cocking motion, when a thrower brings hand and ball back, preparing to throw. “It works just like a slingshot would. You’re actually stretching the ligaments.”Several developments in anatomy allowed humans to throw this way, he said, including a waist that allows twisting and a relatively open shoulder, compared with those of other primates like chimpanzees.Looking at the fossil record, Dr. Roach and colleagues put the moment at which these changes came together in one body at about 1.8 million years ago, when Homo erectus first appeared. “It’s possible that Homo erectus could throw as fast as we do,” Dr. Roach said.
Because Doctor Who has been a cultural touchstone in Britain for half a century, so the logic goes, we cannot have it fronted by a black man or a woman. It just wouldn’t feel right. Right now, arguing about who the next Doctor should be feels more real than arguing about parliamentary politics, because there’s at least the slim chance that what we think might influence the outcome.
What does it mean that our society places such a premium on fantasy and imagination? “No culture,” observes the child psychologist Suzanne Gaskins, “comes close to the level of resources for play provided by middle-class Euro-American parents.” In many traditional societies, children play by imitating adults. They pretend to cook, marry, plant, fish, hunt.“Inventive pretend,” in which children pretend the fantastic or impossible (enchanted princesses, dragon hunters) “is rarely — if ever — observed in non-industrialized or traditional cultures,” Gaskins says. That may be because inventive play often requires adult involvement. Observing the lack of fantasy play among the Manus children in New Guinea, Margaret Mead noted that “the great majority of children will not even imagine bears under the bed unless the adult provides the bear.”Westerners, by contrast, not only tolerate fantasy play but actively encourage it, for adults as well as for children. We are novel readers, movie watchers and game players.
When the scientists at the park realized Pansy’s death was imminent, they turned on video cameras, capturing intimate moments during her last hours as Blossom [a close friend], Rosie [oldest daughter] and Blossom’s son, Chippy, groomed her and comforted her as she got weaker. After she passed, the chimps examined the body, inspecting Pansy’s mouth, pulling her arm and leaning their faces close to hers. Blossom sat by Pansy’s body through the night. And when she finally moved away to sleep in a different part of the enclosure, she did so fitfully, waking and repositioning herself dozens more times than was normal. For five days after Pansy’s death, none of the other chimps would sleep on the platform where she died.
[Brian Hare] was at a bonobo orphanage in the Democratic Republic of Congo when Lipopo, a newcomer to the orphanage, died unexpectedly from pneumonia. Although the other bonobos could have moved away from his body and traveled anywhere in their very large, heavily forested enclosure, they chose to stay and groom Lipopo’s corpse. When their caretakers arrived to remove the body, the vigil morphed into a tense standoff.
In the video Hare took, Mimi, the group’s alpha female, stands guard over Lipopo’s body. When the caretakers try to push the corpse out of the enclosure with long poles, Mimi fights them, viciously. She grabs the poles with both hands, wrenching them away from Lipopo. She calls to other bonobos, who help her fend off the humans from two sides. Even when the vet arrives with a tranquilizer gun, Mimi stands her ground, her mouth open wide in a scream that’s inaudible in the silent film. Mimi wasn’t related to Lipopo. In fact, she barely knew him, Hare told me.
Consider how cooking evolves: It starts in the home and then eventually spreads to restaurants and on to cookbooks, along the way transforming a recipe from oral tradition to commercialized product. In the home, recipes are often transmitted from grandmother to mother, or from father to son, or simply by watching and participating. I've seen this in rural Mexico, for instance, when an older daughter teaches her younger sister how to pat tortillas the right way. When societies get richer, you start to see restaurants, a form of specialization like auto mechanics or tailors (see: Adam Smith on the division of labor). Restaurants require that strangers -- other cooks -- be taught the process. That means simplifying or standardizing ingredients so they're easier to work with and, in many cases, available year-round. This, of course, means writing down the recipe. Once a dish reaches these commercial milestones, cookbooks will follow.
I recall a trip a few years ago to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where I was surprised to find that virtually all restaurants were Chinese or Indian. They were excellent, but still I wanted some local food. In a fit of desperation, I paid the maid to make me a Tanzanian dish in the hotel kitchen, a kind of improvised room service, with a large tip attached. I ended up with a sort of porridge that looked quite simple but tasted delicious. As I was enjoying the meal, it occurred to me that writing down the recipe wouldn't do much good, as I wouldn't be able to reproduce it at home. The grain -- perhaps a maize flour or millet -- was unfamiliar, and the rest of the local ingredients were fresher and more delicious than anything I could easily get my hands on at home in Fairfax, Virginia. A recipe like "cook grain; add water and salt" wouldn't get me far, not even with Whole Foods at my disposal.
And so:And of course the book might be easily criticized, since it does not rest on a strong argumentative structure, but rather is an attempt to draw together insights from such widely divergent thinkers as the physicist-turned-psychologist Fechner (1801-1887) and the vitalist philosopher Bergson (1859-1941), in support of what is only the outline of a new ontology. An ontology which aims to surpass the boundaries of objectivism: expecting the Cartesian idea that a self-supporting thinking ego might describe the world as it is (as its object) to be false. One should acknowledge that ‘the Philosopher himself [is] taken up into the universe which he is accounting for.’ This makes any ontology provisional, makes us having to accept pluralism (giving up the effort to surmount conflicting ontologies into a definitive one), and potentially leads to a conception of consciousness as potentially continuous with a wider consciousness. Wider than the individual, or than reason, or than humanity.
The consequence of all this is captured in one of those apt expressions the artist with words added to philosophical language: that the ‘universe’ (which presents itself as a ‘multiverse’) might not consist of entities springing all from a single source, but that its consistency might be described aptly enough as ‘strung along’.Such is the abundant unfolding of the world.
Disney is very protective of their intellectual property. Did you ever hear from them after you screened the film?
MG: No… There was some talk about Disney suing us, but I think the consequence of that — everybody realized — would have been negative for Disney and would have no benefit. And obviously no profit was made out of the utilization of the character or the film, so nothing ever happened.
On Thursday in San Francisco, Michael Hausfeld, a plaintiff’s attorney from Washington, D.C., stood before a federal judge and argued that the N.C.A.A. violates the nation’s antitrust laws. Hausfeld is the lawyer who has brought the O’Bannon case, so named for the lead plaintiff, Ed O’Bannon, a former U.C.L.A. basketball star who sued the N.C.A.A. for licensing his likeness to the video game maker EA Sports without compensating him. Dozens of other former college athletes have since joined the suit.If they get certified as a class — and that is what Thursday’s arguments were about — there would be potentially tens of thousands of plaintiffs.
In the next month, the judge will make a decision about whether the lawsuit should go forward. There are no guarantees, of course, but if O’Bannon wins, and players have to be compensated for use of their likeness, it will be the first small step toward giving the players a share, at long last, of the riches their work produces.It won’t, however, be the last such step. Whether through O’Bannon or some other means, the day is coming when the players will be paid. The only question is when.
Originally published in The Valve in April 2008.
Remember, under the common law, mens rea, criminal intent, was a standard requirement for criminal prosecution but today that is typically no longer the case especially under federal criminal law .
Faced with the evidence of an non-intentional crime, most prosecutors, of course, would use their discretion and not threaten imprisonment. Evidence and discretion, however, are precisely the point. Today, no one is innocent and thus our freedom is maintained only by the high cost of evidence and the prosecutor’s discretion.
One of the responses to the revelations about the mass spying on Americans by the NSA and other agencies is “I have nothing to hide. What me worry?” I tweeted in response “If you have nothing to hide, you live a boring life.” More fundamentally, the NSA spying machine has reduced the cost of evidence so that today our freedom–or our independence–is to a large extent at the discretion of those in control of the panopticon.
A major challenge, of course, is figure out how to make sense of connectivity data once it's been harvested. Here's a relationship viewer and here's a bunch of images.Navigate the brain in a way that was never before possible; fly through major brain pathways, compare essential circuits, zoom into a region to explore the cells that comprise it, and the functions that depend on it.The Human Connectome Project aims to provide an unparalleled compilation of neural data, an interface to graphically navigate this data and the opportunity to achieve never before realized conclusions about the living human brain.
As the ur-postmodernist, Warhol’s entire artistic practice and persona stood, quite intentionally, in opposition to modernist ideas. He was the very antithesis of a Van Gogh, a Picasso, a Pollock. Where they (it was held) re-made the world visually and emotionally in the smithies of their tortured souls (to paraphrase James Joyce), Warhol blithely swiped subject matter from mass media. He presented himself as a kind of empty mirror for the images that were already all around us in advertising or entertainment or packaging. And his persona was famously cool and withdrawn, or even blank: just the opposite of the outsized, impassioned personalities of Picasso or Pollock.
Yet remarkably, the entire discourse and institutional context which was developed in relation to Manet, Kandinsky or de Kooning, and explicitly attacked by Warhol and the postmodernists, is simply reproduced by the foundation, the board, and indeed by virtually all institutions that deal with postmodern art. It’s roughly analogous to scientists trying to account for the latest results in physics using the intellectual equipment of medieval theology.
Thalia Wheatley, Olivia Kang, Carolyn Parkinson, and Christine E. Looser. From Mind Perception to Mental Connection: Synchrony as a Mechanism for Social Understanding. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6/8 (2012): 589–606, 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2012.00450.xConnecting deeply with another mind is as enigmatic as it is fulfilling. Why people ‘‘click’’ with some people but not others is one of the great unsolved mysteries of science. However, research- ers from psychology and neuroscience are converging on a likely physiological basis for connec- tion – neural synchrony (entrainment). Here, we review research on the necessary precursors for interpersonal synchrony: the ability to detect a mind and resonate with its outputs. Further, We describe potential mechanisms for the development of synchrony between two minds. We then consider recent neuroimaging and behavioral evidence for the adaptive benefits of synchrony, including neural efficiency and the release of a reward signal that promotes future social interaction. In nature, neural synchrony yields behavioral synchrony. Humans use behavioral syn- chrony to promote neural synchrony, and thus, social bonding. This reverse-engineering of social connection is an important innovation likely underlying this distinctively human capacity to create large-scale social coordination and cohesion.
Reposted from a year and a half ago. Miyazaki is always worth thinking about.We know, of course, that cartoons aren’t just for kids, right? Many exist in what I’ve come to call “universal kid space”; they’re fully accessible to children, yet are compelling to adults on their own terms, and not just vicariously through children. In thinking about Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo I’ve been thinking about the adult aspect of the film. What’s here for adults?
Miyazaki's subject here is love, though not romantic love and certainly not sexual love. What the characters in this film are missing is devotional love. Just about every character in this film has been abandoned in one way or another.
The nursing home that Sosuke's mother Lisa works at is next door to a school (or is it a pre-school?). In each case, the old and the young have been isolated from the world of adults. The old women in the home are, I presume, widows, and their children are not taking care of them. The children in school are not being looked after by their parents....
Both Sosuke and Ponyo have two parents, but those parents are not together. Sosuke's father is captain of a ship and over the course of the entire film, he never gets off it. . . . Ponyo's mother is a goddess who is not present in Ponyo's home and who only interacts with Ponyo once during the entire film.
Letters of Our Days
A, E, I, O, U:
These were all the five
So select letters in being
Standby for someday,
The imagined who at noon can see
Indifferently the hollow of
Moonlight and sometimes “Y” . . .
The sun in the only
One center of the galaxy
Once upon a time:
Remember?
Dear Papa,
How are you? I am fine. Having a wonderful time.
Wish you were here.
Love,Sally
It is difficult to say much more about the piece without descending into gibberish. This is one of the first things you notice when you spend time around Turrell. Though he is uncommonly eloquent on a host of subjects, from Riemannian geometry to vortex dynamics, he has developed a dense and impenetrable vocabulary to describe his work. Nearly everyone who speaks and writes about Turrell uses the same infernal jargon. It can be grating to endure a cocktail party filled with people talking about the “thingness of light” and the “alpha state” of mind — at least until you’ve seen enough Turrell to realize that, without those terms, it would be nearly impossible to discuss his work. It is simply too far removed from the language of reality, or for that matter, from reality itself.
This is a curated collection of blog posts and op ed pieces on "The History and Future of Higher Education," a project initiated by the HASTAC alliance which is coordinating the teaching of a number of diverse courses, workshops, and reading groups, in different locations and online, on the future of higher education in the Spring/Winter term of 2014. Anyone is invited to offer a course or informal learning program on this topic and include it as part of this project.
Below this introduction, you will find a collection (reposted from hastac.org and other online publications) of posts, resources, forums, syllabi, sample assignments, tools, and other resources and information updates about this co-located, freeflowing, and loosely connected array of courses--many of which will have public, online, open components. We are hoping for as much public engagement as possible. We see this as bringing together mounting energies advocating on behalf of reinvigorated funding and new investment in education--with a particular emphasis on the importance of critical thinking, humanities content, peer-contribution, and 21st century literacies. We are seeking the best new ideas for improving, informing, and reforming education as it exists today.
Right now (June 2013), we have confirmed co-located teaching of courses on some general or specific aspect of the history and/or future of higher education by:
- Cathy Davidson, Interdisciplinary Studies and English, Duke University, "The History and Future of Higher Education" (draft course description)
- Katie King, Women's Studies and American Studies, University of Maryland
- David Palumbo-Liu, Comparative Literature, Stanford, "Histories and Futures of Humanistic Education: Culture and Crisis, Books and MOOCs" (draft syllabus)
- Howard Rheingold, independent scholar, author of Net Smart, UC Berkeley
- Sean Michael Smith, Hybrid Pedagogy
- Jesse Stommel, Marylhurst and Hybrid Pedagogy
Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter. I address this problem in my 1992 book, Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges. These two domains will never be brought together in any kind of the sense usually implied by the term "reductionism." You can speak of galaxies and particles of dust in the same terms, because they both have mass and charge and length and width. You can't do that with information and matter. Information doesn't have mass or charge or length in millimeters. Likewise, matter doesn't have bytes. You can't measure so much gold in so many bytes. It doesn't have redundancy, or fidelity, or any of the other descriptors we apply to information. This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own terms.The gene is a package of information, not an object. The pattern of base pairs in a DNA molecule specifies the gene. But the DNA molecule is the medium, it's not the message. Maintaining this distinction between the medium and the message is absolutely indispensable to clarity of thought about evolution.Just the fact that fifteen years ago I started using a computer may have had something to do with my ideas here. The constant process of transferring information from one physical medium to another and then being able to recover that same information in the original medium brings home the separability of information and matter. In biology, when you're talking about things like genes and genotypes and gene pools, you're talking about information, not physical objective reality. They're patterns.I was also influenced by Dawkins' "meme" concept, which refers to cultural information that influences people's behavior. Memes, unlike genes, don't have a single, archival kind of medium. Consider the book Don Quixote: a stack of paper with ink marks on the pages, but you could put it on a CD or a tape and turn it into sound waves for blind people. No matter what medium it's in, it's always the same book, the same information. This is true of everything else in the cultural realm. It can be recorded in many different media, but it's the same meme no matter what medium it's recorded in.
There is considerable debate among memeticists about whether memes should be defined as brain-structures, or as behaviors, or some other presumably well-anchored concreta, but I think the case is still overwhelming for defining memes abstractly, in terms of information worth copying (however embodied) since it is the information that determines how much design work or R and D doesn’t have to be re-done. That is why a wagon with spoked wheels carries the idea of a wagon with spoked wheels as well as any mind or brain could carry it.
The discovery of any genetic mutation that coincided with the “human revolution” (6) must take care to distinguish cause from effect. Supposedly momentous changes in our genome may sometimes be a consequence of cultural innovation. They may be products of culture-driven gene evolution (7)
There are some useful remarks in the discussion.But the old and impeccable pedigree of this classical account of gene-culture co-evolution, in the origins of language and elsewhere, has not prevented the spread of "gene for X" bizarreness, or other forms of anti-evolutionary mysticism. So it's nice to see a couple of eminent scientists expressing these ideas, clearly and forcefully, in the pages of a widely-read journal.
Infants as young as ten months old express sympathy for others in distress in non-verbal ways, according to research published June 12 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Yasuhiro Kanakogi and colleagues from Kyoto University and Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan.Infants at this age are known to assign goals and intentions to geometric figures; hence the researchers used a series of animated sequences to test infants' responses to aggression. In their experiments, researchers showed infants an aggressive 'social interaction' between a blue ball that attacked and violently crushed a yellow cube and found that the babies preferentially reached for the victim rather than the aggressor. Infants' behavior remained consistent when the roles of the shapes were reversed and when a neutral, non-aggressive shape was introduced in the video, suggesting that their preference for the victim was not out of fear of the aggressive shape.Based on these observations, the authors conclude, "Ten-month olds not only evaluate the roles of victims and aggressors in interactions but also show rudimentary sympathy toward others in distress based on that evaluation. This simple preference may function as a foundation for full-fledged sympathetic behavior later on."
Smile and the world smiles with you—but new research suggests that not all smiles are created equal. The research shows that people actually anticipate smiles that are genuine but not smiles that are merely polite. The differing responses may reflect the unique social value of genuine smiles."These findings give us the first clear suggestion that the basic processes that guide responses to reward also play a role in guiding social behavior on a moment-to-moment basis during interactions," explains psychological scientist and lead researcher Erin Heerey of Bangor University (UK).
Inspired by a harrowing episode when Mr. Frankel could not communicate the symptoms of a virulent stomach bug to a pharmacist in Beijing, the service takes just 15 seconds to put mobile users in touch with a human translator fluent in both English and any of 11 other languages. In other words, it combines the speed of Google Translate with the precision of a traditional translation service — at least that was the pitch Mr. Frankel and Mr. Sarda made to the sharks.Within 72 hours of the segment being shown, 20,000 new customers had downloaded the VerbalizeIt app, according to Mr. Frankel. Daily revenue, he said, more than tripled. The company charges about $1.50 a minute from individual consumers and as much as 27 cents a word from businesses that use the same network of 10,100 freelance translators to translate documents and videos.
At the moment, MOOCs are still in the early part of the hype cycle and discourse is dominated by Manichaean fears of robots replacing professors or venture capitalists taking over higher education. (Although the discourse is not without thoughtful pieces about the pedagogy of MOOCs or forecasts that attempt to see beyond the hyperbole). When it comes to speaking about the nuances, the many shades of meaning between the extreme positions, and especially about the role of liberal arts at a time when digital media and learning offer such great promises – and to some, great threats – I knew where to turn. Bryan Alexander, who I previously interviewed about emerging learning technologies for this blog, is the senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. The ensuing video conversation is longer than usual – around 24 minutes – but if you want to get past the more superficial debates about MOOCs and take a more finely-tuned glimpse at possible futures, you will find it worth your time. This interview will be followed in my next blog post by a conversation with a passionate (and in online learning circles, legendary) practitioner who is bringing the ideas Alexander is laying out for us to life in a residential college and, simultaneously, a global online learning community.
When I first began studying anthropology it was de rigueur to have an opinion about Napoleon Chagnon and his work on the Yanomamo. We couldn’t just read Yanomamo: The Fierce People and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of his theory and approach. We couldn’t just debate the ethnography for what it was or was not. Instead, we were invited to stake out a position that mirrored the tendentious and political debates that swirled around Chagnon. It was, on the whole, a shameful affair that discredited most who were involved. Incredibly, Chagnon still rouses ideological passions among (mostly older) anthropologists.In the long meantime, those of us who don’t buy into the false dichotomies of cultural-biological, nature-nurture, and science-humanities have assimilated Chagnon’s work and moved far beyond those unproductive debates.
... now that you've got me thinking about it, I think there's a general correlation between native peoples in the Amazon, or in South America in general, and the sophistication of their numbering system. And the degree to which they intellectualize and have concepts of, say, the stars in the sky, and they have constellations, or the complexity of their baskets. And I think numbering systems tend to be correlated with complex basketry and complex cosmology. Now, I don't know a good example from my work among the Yanomamö that illustrates that, but …
In the past fifteen years or so, Andreessen explained, Silicon Valley’s hands-off attitude has changed, as the industry has grown larger and its activities keep colliding with regulations. Technology leaders began to realize that Washington could sometimes be useful to them. “A small number of very high-end Valley people have got involved in politics, but in a way that a lot of us think is relentlessly self-interested,” Andreessen said. The issues that first animated these technology executives were stock options, subsidies, and tax breaks. “They started giving the Valley a bad name in Washington—that the Valley was just another special-interest group.”In early 2011, Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and other Silicon Valley moguls attended a dinner with President Obama in Wood-side, at the home of John Doerr, a venture capitalist with ties to the Democratic Party. Instead of having a wide-ranging discussion, the tech leaders focussed narrowly on pet issues. John Chambers, of Cisco, kept pushing for a tax holiday on overseas profits that are reinvested in the United States. According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, while Chambers was lobbying Obama, over cod and lentil salad, Zuckerberg turned to Valerie Jarrett, the President’s adviser, and whispered, “We should be talking about what’s important to the country. Why is he just talking about what’s good for him?” When it was Jobs’s turn, he asked for more H-1B visas for foreign students who earn engineering degrees in the U.S.—a longtime Silicon Valley desire. Obama told him that the issue could be addressed only in the context of broader immigration reforms, such as allowing children who had arrived here illegally with their parents to gain legal status.Zuckerberg came away from the gathering impressed with Obama but sorely disappointed in his own industry. The most dynamic sector of the American economy had no larger agenda.
In the (bleary) eye of the tiger: An anthropological journey into jungle backyards
David Jaclin
Université de Montréal and Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, ParisDavid Jaclin, Department of Communication, University of Montreal, CP 6128, succursale Centre-ville, Montreal, QC H3C 3J7, Canada. Email: davidjaclin@gmail.com
Abstract: North America shelters a growing population of so-called ‘exotic animals’. If the phenomenon is not recent, it now fuels a considerable black market. Jungle backyards compose a non-negligible (yet often neglected) part of some modern ecological landscapes. This article explores problematical situations emerging from these shared humanimal lives. It presents the first results of a multi-species ethnography and examines the prevalence of what I call beastness – an antique commerce amid humans and animals that reveals not only utilitarian purposes, but also relational entanglements. Such a commerce feeds a sizeable economy and exerts major selective pressures (both biological and cultural) on organisms and their environment. For instance, there are more captive tigers living in the state of Texas alone than wild specimens running free anywhere else on the planet. From a strictly statistical point of view, the average tiger is no longer the tiger we imagine. Not wild anymore but neither quite domesticated, some animals – pioneers, in a sense – shuffle traditional taxonomical and ontological conceptions. Through biographical material, I reflect on adaptive responses as well as on zoological potentialities developed by this always-evolving bestiary. Providing serious case studies to further debates dealing with bio–eco–conservation, I discuss the influence of informational and communicational processes crystallized by some of our contemporary crossed becomings.
June 3, 2013 — While psychologists have long debated the core personality dimensions that define humanity, primate researchers have been working to uncover the defining personality traits for humankind's closest living relative, the chimpanzee. New research, published in the June 3 issue of American Journal of Primatology provides strong support for the universal existence of five personality dimensions in chimpanzees: reactivity/undependability, dominance, openness, extraversion and agreeableness with a possible sixth factor, methodical, needing further investigation.
