Reminder - The Battle of Newtown

Just a quick reminder - the Battle of Newtown reenactment will take place August 27 and 28.  My family went two years ago and had a great time.  Even if the sound of cannon and musket fire is not your bag, there is Sutler Row with a wide variety of merchants and craftspeople (my then nine-month old son was fascinated with the blacksmith). 

Online degrees (and the perils thereof)

One of the reasons I have been horribly slacking on the blog is that I'm currently constructing a number of online courses for future semesters.  I've taught them for two semesters, and found them rather enjoyable for myself and my students.  So when I'm confronted with stories of the how bad these courses can be, particularly as taught by for-profit colleges, I feel an instinctive need to reexamine my own course construction to make sure everything is up to the rigor of my institution.  For the record, I teach out of an established, public university, and rather resent the perceived monopoly that for-profit "colleges" have on the medium.  For some quick background, here is an amusing yet informative bit from Cracked Magazine (I've always thought of them as a sad MAD Magazine wannabe, but funny is funny).  I came across the bit via Amy Hale, who relates some of her experiences teaching for a for-profit institution (hint: not pretty).

All this came back into my mind lately when I chanced across a story from the Albany Times Union, in which a police recruit was fired a day after he was hired due to questions about his online degree in criminal justice.  Apparently, the degree was from Ashwood University, a rather obvious diploma mill that awards degrees based on "life experience."  I suppose I could take the easy and obvious route, wag my finger at the phony degree holder and intone Caveat emptor, but I have to wonder just how informed high school guidance councilors are about online colleges.  Did anyone warn the student about these scams when he was a junior in high school?  Or has the proliferation of for-profit institutions become so widespread that quality control only goes into effect after the checks have been cashed and a hapless graduate finds himself the subject of media ridicule due to his useless degree?

And yes, I have heard rumors of online, for-profit institutions that don't offer shoddy courses ending in useless degrees.  By all means, show them to me.  I'm always up for new experiences.

Surnames and Vikings

Just finished reading Leif the Lucky to my 2 year old, who sat with very un-bedtime like, rapt attention through the whole thing.  This reminded me of a recent article in Molecular Biology and Evolution regarding the covariance of Scandinavian-derived surnames and Y-chromosomal signatures in northwestern England.  Lest I begin to sound like a broken record, here we have yet another example of how classic marker studies are being validated by modern molecular methods.


Bowden, G et al., 2010, Excavating Past Population Structures by Surname-Based Sampling: The Genetic Legacy of the Vikings in Northwest England.  Molecular Biology and Evolution 25 (2): pp. 301-309.

New blog bundle on Google Reader

I was recently made aware via Neuroanthropology of a great new blog bundle on Google Reader.  The Bioanthropology bundle brings together posts from a number of prominent bioblogs for your easy perusal.  The result is impressive, although it did have the effect of depressing me by pointing out this story about the Miss America pageant.

Gould, Morton and Anthropology

This story has already been around the blogosphere (particularly the bioanthropology blogs) but it does bear some further comment.  In a nutshell, the late Stephen Jay Gould had frequently commented on the work of 19th century researcher Samuel Morton as an example of how personal bias can skew scientific data.  Morton was famous for measuring the skulls of individuals from various world populations ("races"), which Gould claimed was intended to justify a racial hierarchy based on skull size.  Gould claimed, via re-examination of Morton's data, that Morton had fudged the numbers in order to justify Caucasian superiority.  Gould made this claim both in a 1978 article in Science and in his famous 1981 work The Mismeasure of Man.  What is often lost in Gould's narrative is that his conclusions are based on Morton data tables, NOT any reexamination of the original skulls.  Now, a team of anthropologists led by Jason Lewis has reexamined the skulls using Samuel Morton's methods, and the results don't bode well for Gould's legacy on this point.  It appears that Morton accurately measured the skulls in his collection, while it was Gould who fudged the numbers in order to paint Morton as a biased researcher.

The importance of these results cannot be overemphasized, since Gould's conception of Morton's work as an example of racial bias have become part of the popular narrative of the impossibility of "value-free science," especially when it comes to anthropometric and craniometric analysis.  I remember, as a newly minted graduate student, being essentially handed The Mismeasure of Man as required reading when the topic of race came up.  Of course, there are some very legitimate criticisms to be made of Mortons work from the standpoint of population biology and life history.  For example, many of the African skulls apparently came from slave populations, which would have been subject to greater disease load and nutritional insults.  But this only underlines the fact that Gould's fudging of data was both unnecessary and damaging to the overall cause of combating academic and pseudo-scientific racism.  I still remember a talk by intelligence researcher James Flynn at Binghamton University, where he referred to Gould's "awful" book.  Flynn, of course, is the discoverer of the "Flynn Effect" (the overall continuous rise in IQ scores worldwide), and is one of the most trenchant critics of the idea of race-based heirarchies. 

Cyark

I was just made aware of this program through the Facebook page for the Community Archaeology Program.  CyArk is a program dedicated to digitally preserving cultural heritage sites using a battery of state of the art mapping and scanning techniques.  The methods described herein are becoming more and more essential to archaeology AND biological anthropology, and should likely be required training in many four-field programs. 

The Battle of Newtown - This Summer

A combination of bad internet connections, overwork, and old-fashioned hot weather laziness has stifled the blog a bit, but not for long.  One item that I'd been waiting for confirmation of was the reopening of the Newtown Battlefield this summer.  Unfortunately, the Memorial Day Civil War event did not take place this year, but the annual re-enactment of the Revolutionary War event will happen in August.  Although I have always been a bit ambivalent about "living history" events, they are one of the primary venues for the general public to engage with history and the social sciences.  The Battle of Newtown is of particular interest to me, as it was a seminal event in the population history of the Euroamerican settlement of Chemung County, NY.