john hawks weblog

An article on the way MOOCs are (or may be) changing university priorities: "What MOOCs Will, Won’t, and Might Do".

He says many faculty members have been more focused on research instead of teaching in the past. Open education classes are changing that. Because of MOOCs and Princeton’s upcoming participation in Coursera, “The conversations about teaching (at Princeton) have gone from 0 to 60 on our campus,” he says. Princeton faculty who used to brush off discussions geared toward improving their teaching are now eager to have such discussions, he says.

Much discussion of this concept around right now. I think that there is great potential here, to redirect resources to allow each faculty member to teach the material in which she or he is most expert, and to enable students to learn introductory material from the best teachers. But that would really take a shift away from the idea that you need a single faculty member in the classroom 3 hours a week for a whole semester.

Every museum that does early hominins has to find a way to present the Laetoli footprints, and I've seen some very imaginative ones. The new exhibition at the Vienna Natural History Museum has one of the longest trackway casts I've seen:

Ann Gibbons covers a session at the meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, titled, "The Scars of Human Evolution" ("Human Evolution: Gain Came With Pain"). The session was organized by Rachel Caspari and Karen Rosenberg, and included some great talks. For example, Bruce Latimer, who is always excellent in describing the trade-offs of bipedalism for long-term skeletal health:

Turning up the pain threshold a notch, anatomist and paleoanthropologist Bruce Latimer of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland limped to the podium, dangling a twisted human backbone as evidence of real pain. “If you want one place cobbled together with duct tape and paper clips it’s the back,” said Latimer, a survivor of back surgery.

...

In the United States alone, 700,000 people suffer vertebral fractures per year and back problems are the sixth leading human malady in the world. “If you take care of it, your spine will get you through to about 40 or 50,” says Latimer. “After that, you’re on your own.”

The session was based on the 1951 article by Wilton Krogman, likewise titled, "The Scars of Human Evolution". In honor of the session, Scientific American has made the article available for download for a short time. In some ways, this article was the impetus for what we now call "evolutionary medicine".

Here's a closeup of the reconstruction of Homo erectus by Elisabeth Daynès, again at the new exhibition of the Natural History Museum, Vienna:

A new paper describes a case of a monkey mother having her birth assisted by another monkey -- in other words, a monkey midwife [1]. Kambiz Kamrani describes the paper well:

The head, once fully exposed, was grabbed by the midwife, who pulled the baby out with both hands. She progressed to rip open the birth membranes. The new mother reclaimed the infant within a minute, and severed the umbilical cord. She ate the placenta as the midwife descended.

Black snub-nosed monkeys are Old World monkeys (cercopithecoid primates) native to China. I think this is cool not because it shows that monkeys need midwives (they don't) but because it shows that the behavioral flexibility that may have enabled midwifery in early humans is very extensive among primates. A delicious placental incentive may seem inventive, but humans are mystifyingly strange in being among the few mammals who don't regularly consume the placenta after birth.

Primate births are still rarely enough observed that the comparative dataset is quite small. As field studies extend this area of observation more broadly, we may yet discover more behavioral flexibility in different primates.

References

A recent article in Scientific American by Robert Martone explains some recent research on how fetal cells become integrated into mothers' brains for the long term: "Scientists Discover Children’s Cells Living in Mothers’ Brains"

In this new study, scientists observed that microchimeric cells are not only found circulating in the blood, they are also embedded in the brain. They examined the brains of deceased women for the presence of cells containing the male “Y” chromosome. They found such cells in more than 60 percent of the brains and in multiple brain regions. Since Alzheimer’s disease is more common in women who have had multiple pregnancies, they suspected that the number of fetal cells would be greater in women with AD compared to those who had no evidence for neurological disease. The results were precisely the opposite: there were fewer fetal-derived cells in women with Alzheimer’s. The reasons are unclear.

Sometimes people wonder what HLA is really for. Once in a while, having someone else's cells inside you isn't quite as harmless as the case discussed here. Being able to recognize your own cells may be your only means of defense.

The kind of microchimerism described here lasts throughout a woman's postreproductive lifespan. The strength of selection varies across this timeframe. It was logical to hypothesize that the cells might have negative side effects on fitness, such as Alzheimer's risk, that manifest late in life. Mothers must suppress their immune responses to some extent during pregnancy, to avoid health risks to the developing embryo and fetus. That suppression cannot be cost-free; if it were, we would expect everybody to tolerate human foreign bodies as well as expectant mothers. Having roaming stem cells integrate themselves into neural tissue must not be good on average; if it were, we would have cells crawling their way into our brains all the time.

I bet those cells worm their way into the brain so that your mother will love you better. The only thing wrong with that hypothesis is that it can't explain grandmas.

The Wall Street Journal has an inspiring story of a hairdresser who turned her curiosity about Roman hairstyles into novel scholarship: "On Pins and Needles: Stylist Turns Ancient Hairdo Debate on Its Head".

In 2007, she sent her findings to the Journal of Roman Archaeology. "It's amazing how much chutzpah you have when you have no idea what you're doing," she says. "I don't write scholarly material. I'm a hairdresser."

John Humphrey, the journal's editor, was intrigued. "I could tell even from the first version that it was a very serious piece of experimental archaeology which no scholar who was not a hairdresser—in other words, no scholar—would have been able to write," he says.

Ms. Stephens' article was edited and published in 2008, under the headline "Ancient Roman Hairdressing: On (Hair)Pins and Needles." The only other article by a nonarchaeologist that Mr. Humphrey can recall publishing in the journal's 25-year history was written by a soldier who had discovered an unknown Roman fort in Iraq.

There is so much room in archaeology for people with deep subject knowledge, but not necessarily archaeological training, to make original contributions. Last night's NOVA episode, with a group of people trying to reconstruct Egyptian chariots, is another case where an ancient tradition can only be examined by those with insights about the subject beyond the historical and archaeological record -- in this instance, how to get a team of horses to work together using bridles, bits and yokes that no one had seen used in more than 2000 years.

One of the great potential strengths of online media and open access is to enable this kind of participation by non-academicians. I'm hoping to capture some of that enthusiasm and knowledge in an upcoming project.

(via Charles Mann)

Courtesy of a Twitter exchange, I was reading Stanley R. Barrett, who in the introduction to his 1984 book, The Rebirth of Anthropological Theory, considers an essential problem: As of 1984, anthropological theory seemingly hadn't gotten any better at explaining social phenomena, despite more than a century of trying.

Just as sociologists take refuge behind methodology in order to avoid dilemmas in their discipline, anthropologists slip off to the field, the enormous challenge of which soon drives away all other problems.

I didn't escape quickly enough, and the deeper I delved into the history of anthropological theory, the more inconsistencies I discovered. Scientific knowledge supposedly is cumulative, yet our theoretical orientations have oscillated between polar positions, advancing, repeating, and retracting, but rarely achieving progress. Our methodology rests on the assumption of an orderly universe; yet social life is essentially contradictory, although disguised by numerous mechanisms. A great deal of anthropological analysis has mistaken these mechanisms for underlying reality, which means that the discipline has itself contributed to a distorted view of behaviour. Since its beginnings, anthropology has expressed a dream, a hope for a universe without hate, rancour, or racism, in which the peoples of the world would live together in harmony. Yet it also has aspired toward science, even at the expense of the dream, and the result has sometimes been a discipline that has lost the capacity for moral judgment.

I don't usually editorialize in my "quotes" posts, but every time I read through this quote, the last two sentences irritate me. The reference to racism and colonialism is transparent, but even so I object. "Aspiring toward science" did not cause anthropologists to "lose the capacity for moral judgment".

The movie Django Unchained includes a scene in which the antagonist (a rich, white, plantation owner) expounds on phrenology as a justification of slavery. James Poskett in The Guardian gives the historical context behind racist phrenology. The interesting part is the existence of anti-racist phrenology:

[I]t wasn't just the slavers. My research revealed that some of the most vocal anti-slavery campaigners of the 19th century were also advocates of phrenology, and used it to justify their stance.

Lucretia Mott, a particularly uncompromising American abolitionist, sent her children to phrenological lectures and spoke of the "truth of phrenology" in letters to friends. When she visited Britain she stayed with the renowned Scottish phrenologist George Combe, himself an anti-slavery campaigner. Horace Mann, another major figure in abolitionist politics, was so keen on phrenology that he subscribed to the official journal. After becoming president of Antioch College in Ohio, he even boasted in the same sentence that the professors he employed were both "anti-slavery men" and "avowed phrenologists".

The relation between science, pseudoscience, and highbrow morality in the nineteenth century was counterintuitive. Phrenologists were steampunk witchdoctors.

My University of Wisconsin colleague Kris Olds has been writing about the international dimensions of massively open online courses (MOOCs). A recent entry ("Memo to Trustees re: Thomas Friedman’s ‘Revolution Hits the Universities’") reflects on an op-ed by the NY Times columnist. Olds discusses the hope behind MOOCs that they will bring education to the world, including massive numbers who cannot afford traditional college education, and puts this claim into the current economic context:

We are now in a new (normalized) normal, at least in the US, where austerity is accepted and indeed viewed positively for it can be perceived as a mechanism to restructure higher education systems and institutions. In short, we are arguably (as noted by Dean Martin McQuillan in an article in Times Higher Education magazine) not in a state of ‘crisis’ as ‘crisis’ infers a cyclical dimension to the challenges facing the financing of higher ed. Austerity (the strategic and systematic reduction of state-financing levels), in combination with the contradictory/ironic desire to ramp up state governance power (including about online education and associated credentialing), is the new normal and this is what Friedman, amidst all his hype about MOOCs and online education, utterly fails to flag.

His earlier entries on localization of MOOCs in a global context are well worth reading, including an entry on the new effort by the UK's Open University ("Are MOOCs becoming mechanisms for international competition in global higher ed?"), in which Olds lists the U.S.-heavy list of universities that have thus far entered the MOOC arena.