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Adam Bohannon

THE END(S) OF ETHNOGRAPHY: Social/Cultural Anthropology's Signature Form of Producing K... - 0 views

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    Today's investment in and calls for public anthropology are one symptom of the profound rupture and reorganization of the research agendas of social/cultural anthropology as it moved away from the four-field organization of anthropology into an alignment with certain humanities-driven, energetically interdisciplinary appropriations of the concerns of the social sciences in the name of "theory." In anthropology, this story can most cogently be told by focusing on what happened to its central professional culture of method: what ethnography looks like today and the conditions of research, encompassing fieldwork, that produce it. This article is an examination of this reorganization of social/cultural anthropology, which has left the center of the discipline intellectually weak relative to the vitality of its diverse interdisciplinary and even nonacademic engagements. It asks whether this post-1980s reorganized social/cultural anthropology might rediscover and reunite with some of its historic core associations (four-field as well as topical) in the new terrains of research and partnerships on the peripheries of its old disciplinary center.
scross

Second Life affair ends in divorce - CNN.com - 0 views

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    A British couple who married in a lavish Second Life wedding ceremony are to divorce after one of them had an alleged "affair" in the online world."> text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Adam Bohannon

Collective Action in Action: Prosocial Behavior in and out of the Laboratory - 0 views

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    Experiments have become a popular method to study altruism and cooperation in laboratory and, more recently, in field settings. However, few studies have examined whether behavior in experiments tells us anything about behavior in the "real world." To investigate the external validity of several common experimental economics games, we compare game behavior with prosocial behavior among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of lowland Bolivia. We find that food-sharing patterns, social visitation, beer production and consumption, labor participation, and contributions to a feast are not robustly correlated with levels of giving in the economics games. Payoff structure and socioecological context may be more important in predicting prosocial behavior in a wide variety of domains than stable personality traits. We argue that future experimental methods should be tailored to specific research questions, show reduced anonymity, and incorporate repeat measures under a variety of conditions to inform and redirect ethnographic study and build scientific theory.
Matthew Schuler

Americans giving up friends, sex for Web life - Online World - MSNBC.com - 0 views

  • Surfing the net has become an obsession for many Americans with the majority of U.S. adults feeling they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the Web.
  • 48 percent of respondents agreeing they felt something important was missing without Internet access.
  • "People told us how anxious, isolated and bored they felt when they are forced off line," said Ann Mack, director of trend spotting at JWT, which conducted the survey to see how technology was changing people's behavior. "They felt disconnected from the world, from their friends and family," she told Reuters.
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  • More than a quarter of respondents — or 28 percent — admitted spending less time socializing face-to-face with peers because of the amount of time they spend online. It also found that 20 percent said they spend less time having sex because they are online.
Mike Wesch

The Law of Accelerating Returns - 0 views

  • Can the pace of technological progress continue to speed up indefinitely? Is there not a point where humans are unable to think fast enough to keep up with it? With regard to unenhanced humans, clearly so. But what would a thousand scientists, each a thousand times more intelligent than human scientists today, and each operating a thousand times faster than contemporary humans (because the information processing in their primarily nonbiological brains is faster) accomplish? One year would be like a millennium. What would they come up with?
  • Downloading the Human Brain
  • This, then, is the Singularity. The Singularity is technological change so rapid and so profound that it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.
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  • Needless to say, the Singularity will transform all aspects of our lives, social, sexual, and economic,
  • Some prominent dates from this analysis include the following: We achieve one Human Brain capability (2 * 10^16 cps) for $1,000 around the year 2023. We achieve one Human Brain capability (2 * 10^16 cps) for one cent around the year 2037. We achieve one Human Race capability (2 * 10^26 cps) for $1,000 around the year 2049. We achieve one Human Race capability (2 * 10^26 cps) for one cent around the year 2059.
  • Well, for one thing, they would come up with technology to become even more intelligent (because their intelligence is no longer of fixed capacity).
  • A Thought Experiment
  • By 2030, going to a web site will mean entering a full immersion virtual reality environment.
  • Brain implants based on massively distributed intelligent nanobots will ultimately expand our memories a trillion fold, and otherwise vastly improve all of our sensory, pattern recognition, and cognitive abilities.
  • And in the same way that biological self-replication gone awry (i.e., cancer) results in biological destruction, a defect in the mechanism curtailing nanobot self-replication would endanger all physical entities, biological or otherwise.
  • A related question is "is death desirable?"
  • Plan to Stick Around
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