“A Feel for Technology: Technocapitalism and the Symbiotic Ethic in Japan” has been published as part of a special issue on Asian Technocapitalisms in Science, Technology, and Human…
Masaharu Kawano at Tokyo Metropolitan University has translated and published my posts on formulating research questions and the literature review into Japanese. You can find links to these…
It’s important to show occasional signs of life on a personal blog. It’s been nearly two years since my last post, and a lot has happened since then,…
To start, let me pour one out for Anthrodendum, the anthropology blog that may not have started it all, but which was for many the one pre-social media…
Inspired by things linked in these recent posts, I wrote something for McSweeney’s.
Xu Mason at McSweeney’s: As the costs of maintaining a cave meant to trap you in your ignorance increases year after year, we want you to know, from…
David Schurman Wallace at the Paris Review: Despite all the hand-wringing about distraction, it’s asked less often what it is that we want to attend to in the…
If you have any links that can be added, please email me. News Stories “University redundancies undermine Government’s own science strategy – academic” (RNZ, June 14) …
This is a follow-up to my earlier post “How to approach a research proposal: Writing Questions.” In that entry, I laid out a dynamic hierarchy of questions—conceptual questions,…
No matter where I have taught, one job that often challenges graduate students is the writing of a research proposal. When first encountered, it is a peculiar piece…
My programme is hiring two lecturers in cultural anthropology. These are junior level academic positions, equivalent to an assistant professor in the US. However, these jobs are permanent…
(This is an explanation of Labour-Based Grading that I provided to a first-year anthropology class I taught in 2020.) Labour-based grading is not what you are used to,…
Recent events have raised perennial questions about academic authority and institutional power in anthropology. There are persuasive allegations about more than one famous anthropologist—most recentl…
At Anne-Wil Harzing’s Publish or Perish: When comparing Google Scholar and ISI citation scores, the Business academic has six times as many citations in Google Scholar than in…
Caroline Wazer at Lapham’s Quarterly (via this on Metafilter), a discussion of three reviews of games in the Assassin’s Creed series in the American Historical Review, and video…
From Spacewhy on Medium: Most of the content generated is bad, like a repetitive HAL 9000 in its death agony—the program is in beta—but every once and a…
A short post on a book by Tom DeMarco: Only when we are 0 percent busy can we step back and look at the bigger picture of what…
This is the personal homepage of Grant Jun Otsuki. I’m a Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Recent Publications:In Anthropology Now: “…
All respect to the Public Knowledge Project and Open Journal Systems. The ecosystem they’ve built over years is tremendous and respectable. For good reasons, “open access journal” h…
Ted Chiang is a science fiction author who wrote the story that became Arrival (via Metafilter). Recently in The New Yorker: How much can you optimize for generality?…
Access to GPT-3 remains limited, but “EleutherAI,” a “grassroots collective of researchers working to open source AI research,” has released GPT-Neo: GPT-Neo is the code …
Umberto Eco, in How to Write a Thesis (from this excerpt): The language of the thesis is a metalanguage, that is, a language that speaks of other languages. A…
One of the pleasures of doing archival work is of discovering something about the people you are studying that gives insights into who they were as people, that…
A post by Eduref, a company that deals in information about postsecondary education, has gotten some attention for doing a Turing Test for course papers produced by the…