Posted 29 May 2013 / 1
WNYC Micropolis “Hasidic Supermarkets and the Virtues of Insularity” Although I think that this is an interesting little feature, it mistakenly attributes the benefits of this trust to a lack of diversity. What allows this trust is a relatively small, highly-integrated society. If the larger city lacks anything, it is the level of social integration Read More
A Minor Post, Cooperation, Cultural Anthropology, Economics, Ethics, Radio & Podcasts, Reputation, Social Networks, Sociology
Posted 10 Apr 2013 / 0
NPR All Things Considered “Cities Turn Sewage Into ‘Black Gold’ For Local Farms” This is a really interesting piece because it suggests that the costs associated with properly disposing of human waste are beginning to incentivize municipalities to repurpose this waste as fertilizer. As this feature indicates, landfilling and (even worse) incineration have been in Read More
A Minor Post, Closed Loop Systems, Economic sustainability, Pollution, Radio & Podcasts, Sustainability, Sustainable Agriculture
Posted 15 Feb 2013 / 0
Do everyday people have any sense of their place in the world? Human beings live in incredibly complex societies undergirded by convoluted economies and overwhelmingly diverse cultures. Do we have a sense of how these societies came to be, or how they function and persist? For evolutionists, these are pretty vexing scientific questions: most researchers Read More
A Major Post, Behavior, Cooperation, Economic sustainability, Ethics, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Group Selection, Human Evolution, Political Science, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, Social Diversity
Posted 10 Feb 2013 / 0
WNYC The Leonard Lopate Show “ Please Explain: Hearing and Sound” Interesting that Horowitz discusses the same rationale for why the cell phone conversations of others are so much more annoying than other conversations, a topic I have discussed here.
A Minor Post, Music, Radio & Podcasts, Sound Perception
Posted 26 Jan 2013 / 0
WNYC “NYC’s Top Dogs: Mapping Names & Breeds in the City” WNYC “Dogs of NYC” Data sets like these, even flawed by their incompleteness (only 20% of dogs in New York City are registered) are fascinating. The human relationship with dogs has changed radically as we have urbanized as a species: I would suggest that the dominance Read More
A Minor Post, Canids, Coevolution, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Geography, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, Mutualism, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, Web
Posted 18 Dec 2012 / 0
NPR All Things Considered “One Airport’s Trash Is 2 Million Worms’ Treasure“
A Minor Post, Closed Loop Systems, Composting, Decomposition, Radio & Podcasts, Resource Consumption, Sustainability
Posted 07 Dec 2012 / 0
All Things Considered “Positive Fracking Study Was Funded By Gas Company” 1.5 million dollars is a lot to receive from a corporation with interest in your research! Scientists can be bought, and transparency is the only thing that prevents profit-driven scientific fraud.
A Minor Post, Anthropogenic Change, Ethics, Pollution, Radio & Podcasts, Resource Consumption, Scientific Fraud, Sustainable Energy, Water Supply
Posted 26 Nov 2012 / 0
National Public Radio Shots “Give And Take: How The Rule Of Reciprocation Binds Us” I appreciate the far-ranging nature of this piece, and how it applies a basic understanding of reciprocity to larger social phenomena. There is not much here about how genetic and environmental factors modify how reciprocal people choose to behave; while there Read More
A Minor Post, Behavior, Cooperation, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Evolution, Emotion, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Human Evolution, Political Science, Psychology, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, Reciprocity, Reputation, Social Norms, Sociology
Posted 25 Nov 2012 / 0
Freakonomics Radio “You Eat What You Are” This piece delivers a much needed kick in the self-righteous pants to the locavore movement. It systematically disassembles the assumptions of the local food movement, ending by discussing the minimal quantitative ecological benefits of using the “I only eat local” rule. It pulls apart belief from reality, and Read More
A Minor Post, Anthropogenic Change, Belief, Carrying Capacity, Climate Change, Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Evolution, Ecological Footprinting, Economics, Ethics, Food, Greenwashing, Hunger, Hypothesis Testing, Life Cycle Analysis, Philosophy, Population Growth, Public Policy, Quantitative Analysis, Radio & Podcasts, Resource Consumption, Subsistence, Sustainability, Sustainable Agriculture, Vegetarianism
Posted 12 Nov 2012 / 0
National Public Radio Shots “Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning” This piece went in a direction that I just did not expect. There is so much focus on the role of rote learning versus problem solving in comparing “Eastern and Western” approaches to education, but I have never heard a clear Read More
A Minor Post, Belief, Cultural Evolution, Development, Fluidity of Knowledge, Gene by Environment Interactions, Genetics, Human Nature, Memetic Fitness, Philosophy, Public Policy, Radio & Podcasts, Teaching
