Tumgik
phlmatt · 9 years
Link
Gabriella Coleman's work is available to legally download for free. She's a big open source/creative commons supporter. You can find most of her writing on her website (including Coding Freedom) but not HHWS. A quick google search will find it for you though. Happy reading ya'll!
Dear Anthropology and Sociology students:
I am putting together a list of ethnographic books that can be taught (in their entirety) to undergraduate students. These should be well-written books that don’t intentionally obscure their theoretical insights with lots of...
81 notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Photo
Tumblr media
shut uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup
26K notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Breaking The Male Code: After Steubenville, A Call To Action
Sports Editor at The Nation, Dave Zirin
135K notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Link
As we write this piece, we have to turn our phones on silent to drown out the frenzied buzzing of our inboxes and texts. We’ve gone on strike. It’s not the kind of strike you are used to, like an MTA shutdown or a crowd outside of Walmart with picket signs. We are Black Women, AfroIndigenous and...
980 notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Laverne Cox weighs in on Ferguson on The View
204K notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Photo
Tumblr media
Hey y’all! I’m Tina, a recent graduate in Biological Anthropology form the University of Cambridge. My research focuses on the evolution of human hair diversity - something which is severely under-researched, despite the fact that its one of the most visibly varying traits we humans have! 
I was offered a place to do my PhD at Cambridge, but alas, funding did not come through. I will reapply Cambridge, but I’ve also spoken to some really amazing Professors at Penn State and Harvard University who’ve encouraged me to apply to their graduate programs and work with them on this project, but I simply cannot afford the cost of applications before the deadlines , so I am crowdfunding over the next 10 days (check it out). 
My bachelor’s thesis was entitled Human Hair Diversity: Quantitative variation of hair fibre shape and pigmentation. The department liked it and awarded it a Starred First (82) and my supervisor and I are working on a publication for a peer-reviewed journal based on this research right now. I ended up finding a lot of interesting things that I’m dying to share with you all! (And hopefully I will be able to share that publication with you all in a few months)
To keep it brief, I’m interested in answering questions such as:
Why did humans evolve such a wide range of hair textures and colours?
Do certain textures/colours provide an evolutionary advantage?
Why did humans lose all their body hair but keep their scalp hair?
My BA thesis is a step in the right direction, but having the opportunity to dedicate an entire PhD to this would bring this field out of the dark ages. And I do not exaggerate when I say that, a lot of studies published in scientific journals will describe hair in categories such as “wavy”, “woolly”, “blond” “red” despite the fact that we have the methods to describe the detailed morphology and chemically structure of hair - and using these methods would be a much more objective approach to studying it!
But unfortunately, a lot of researchers use categories like the ones described above, or even worse they will divide hair into: “African”, “Asian” and “European” hair, completely ignoring anyone who does not fall into those categories and completely homogenizing the massive numbers of populations which fall within these vast geographic regions.
Answering questions about human hair diversity is part of understanding human phenotypic variation - essentially, it’s part of understanding why we look different. I plan to make sure the public can access and understand all of the work that I do + any relevant information on the evolution of human (hair) diversity through my website.
If any of this sounds interesting to you, there’s even more info on the website humanhairdiversity.com and I will be using the hashtag #HairEvolutionPhD across platforms, follow me on Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to hear more about it. And I would really appreciate it if you can support the campaign in any way you can, since I need to reach a minimum of £430 by the end (or I receive nothing), I can assure you that every little bit helps immensely! So, here is the crowdfunding page again.
Thanks for reading!
32K notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Note
Oh wait, you mean that dude that did that incredible thing that people should focus on by asking him questions so they can become informed and then post/distribute/broadcast videos/pictures with answers to such questions and said dude so that people can recognize the brilliance behind such incredible thing? So all of that attention on the dude that did brilliant thing can represent science and the achievement of sciency things to a broader public? You see no problem with the dude that currently represents science to the whole world wearing a shirt that objectifies women as sexual objects? Like that wouldn't reaffirm for women/non-men in STEM + young women/non-men interested in STEM that they will continue to be met with a hostile work environment where everything from euphemistic "jokes" to the clothing colleagues wear reminds them that they are always being reduced to a collection of sexual organs for the pleasure men? nbd you say? But a female friend of his gave him the shirt!! Oh because one women represents the thoughts and feelings of half the world's population? Cool story, bro.
And yeah, you're right, the WHOLE world ignored that he help land Philae, a robotic probe, on a comet 500 million kilometers from earth. Because, news.
Who is Matt Taylor? What was the most important day of his life? What shirt is everyone talking about? I'm so confused
NASA landed some kind of equipment onto a comet (you can read about it here).  It’s basically an incredible, unprecedented achievement and Matt Taylor helped do it.  He was being interviewed on it and this was what he was wearing:
Tumblr media
If you can see the problem, which I admit took me a while to see, his shirt has some scantly clad women on it (something made and given to him by a female friend of his).  So everyone threw a hissy fit over it, ignoring a) one of the greatest achievements we’ve had, up there with Curiosity on Mars, and b) all the freaking women scientists that helped the mission too.  Instead, we all get to listen people pitch a fit over a shaped piece of cloth.  Mr Taylor has since issued a tearful apology
So far as I’m concerned the focus should have been on his achievement, not his choice of clothing.  If this were a woman, there would be outcry, but because it’s a man, we can just ignore any achievement he’s made for the sake of “political correctness”.
30 notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Photo
...So you can imagine an entire post-apocalyptic alternative timeline, but can't imagine how said ALTERNATIVE timeline could not include contemporary, western, race/gender/able-bodied discrimination...? Because drastically changing literally the entire structure for material production in a POST-APOCALYPTIC timeline can't challenge ANY systems of oppression that you've grown up reaping the benefits from. Like, bro, do you even fantasize?
Tumblr media Tumblr media
via Saladin Ahmed
26K notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Quote
This book gives me more information about penguins than I care to have.
In 1944 a children’s book club sent a volume about penguins to a 10-year-old girl, enclosing a card seeking her opinion.
She wrote, “This book gives me more information about penguins than I care to have.”
American diplomat Hugh Gibson called it the finest piece of literary criticism he had ever read.
(via excitementanddisbelief)
135K notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Photo
Tumblr media
242K notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Source: twitter.com/imransiddiquee
Wish I would’ve gotten to this sooner since it’s late to be posting, but I really love this particular message and the discussion around “being a man” and how it relates to the treatment of women as well as gay men (or anyone else perceived as “less” / equivocated with being undesirably weak)
46K notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Photo
If that isn't the most bad-ass bourgeois bikes ever...
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
VRZ 2  is a track bike frame with 3d printed titan lugs glued together with carbon fiber tubes. This method allows to build custom frames in a short period of time. You could change the geometry to what ever fits you best, then the lugs gets generated by a software. The generated 3D files are produced with laser-cuseing process. Afterwards the printed parts need to be finished and bonded to the tubes.
VRZ 2 BELT  Frame: VRZ 2 Tubematerial: carbon Lugmaterial: titanium (laser-cusing) Lugcoating: TIN, CRN, or TiCN+C Handlebar: Deda Pista Saddle: AX Lightness Seatpost: Vorwaertz TI+C 1 Steam: Vorwaertz Top 2 Crankset:THM CLAVICULA (GATES carbon belt) BB: BB86 THM Wheels: Lightweight RUNDKURS Tires: Conti 4000s Total weight: 4,9kg
http://cargocollective.com/vorwaertz
2K notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Text
Why do we need feminism?  Because a woman made a video about inequality, misogyny, and stereotypes in video/computer games, even though women make up 48% of all gaming communities, and has been threatened with violence, rape, and terrorist action since. 
If equality has already been achieved, the threat of a woman exposing the inequality wouldn’t be met with terrorism. 
3K notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Quote
I think there’s a huge fear of good writing in anthropology—the assumption being that good writing has a tendency to be precious, to be too full of itself, to be self-indulgent (always a no-no in our discipline), to be a distraction from the pressing reality at hand that needs to be analyzed rigorously. A stringent work ethic got established in anthropology from its earliest days, disdaining the idea that ethnography as a literary form could be a source of pleasure. Good writing in our discipline is associated with frilliness, with caviar and champagne. The mission of ethnography required that we sacrifice such privileges. A certain moral righteousness ordained that we not spotlight the ethnographer carrying out the work, but rather those heroic people at the margins of capitalist development who could be assisted in their quest for cultural survival through our attention, activism, and publications. Ethnographic writing had to be as pure, unadorned, and unscented as Ivory soap, and go in and get the job done. -Ruth Behar
Fucking this! Every single day it seems. Visual work is ever guilty of this as well. 
29 notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Note
The "debate" over the appearance and ethnicity of Cleopatra is one of the most futile and inane non-issues ever to worm its way into academic consciousness. There never was a "controversy" before hack afrocentrist pseudo-scholars got it into their heads that there exists a grand conspiracy to deny the influence and importance of black people throughout history. Quoting Plutarch or Shakespeare (sorry, not a valid source) isn't going to prove anything. Cleopatra was Greek, born of dynastic incest.
As I told you already six months ago, go back to your classes if you’re not interested in challenging the ways we teach whiteness-as-default in academia. Stop trying to make your satisfaction with the institutionalized racism in our education MY problem. As if throwing around terms like “hack afrocentrist pseudo-scholars” isn’t biased as hell, and as if everything you have ever had to say isn’t in defense of the idea that everything in the Ancient/Classical world was the product of whiteness. I already know what you learned in your classrooms, and I don’t care.
The documented fact that racial claims for Ancient/Classical cultural achievements have been wrangled about for quite literally centuries doesn’t prove anything about them, but it says a great deal about us. We exist in the context of visible and documented stripping of cultural achievements from Black peoples and cultures. In the words of Immanuel Kant:
The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. [David] Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man.
That ^^ is WHY THIS CONVERSATION IS HAPPENING. Not because “people just want to know”. It’s because this entire supposed “debate” is product of scientific racism from the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe.
^^^That is what you’re defending.
The bottom line is that how WE would categorize Ancient Egyptians today is relevant only to sociocultural conversations; in the words of S.O.Y. Keita:
There is no scientific reason to believe that the primary ancestors of the Egyptian population emerged and evolved outside of northeast Africa.[…]The body proportions of ancient Egyptians generally are similar to those of tropical (more southern) Africans.
The funny thing is? I’m not the one making any racial claims for Cleopatra. What DID I do?
I posted a QUOTE from a book, saying that we don’t KNOW what skin color she had:
Tumblr media
But all that matters to people invested in the whiteness of the past, is that there can be no ambiguity, nothing but easy answers that support centuries of racist thought and influence on every facet of Western academia.
If it isn’t obvious by now, this answer isn’t for eruditefag, who at this point is probably blockworthy. This is for people who want to know how we got to this point, and why people are still arguing about this. Lastly, if it’s such a “non-issue”, I wonder why eruditefag feels the need to make sure everyone knows just how set in stone Cleopatra’s “Greekness” was, and how this is conflated with whiteness in regard to this discussion.
1K notes · View notes
phlmatt · 9 years
Text
Monday Roundup
So I'm looking at a new format for sharing some of the things that I don't get around to discussing in detail. It also allows me to rid myself of some of the anxiety I get over agonizing over what things deserve an in depth response and how best to frame it, which leads to most of them never being finished. So here's a Monday Roundup of the tabs that I've kept open all week and why they're worth a read.
[Video] Can We Auto-Correct Humanity? - Ugh internet fatalism? Still? Yeah it's still a thing and this video really hits all the tropes. Why do I include this? It's a teaser, it WILL be getting a long response soon. It also set's a nice stage for a few other articles to respond to.
[Article] Teens Are Waging a Privacy War on the Internet — Why Marketers Should Listen - It's really impossible to talk about internet fatalism without mentioning danah boyd. She's done incredible ethnographic work (that any anthropologist would be massively proud to call their own), working with teens to understand nuanced uses of technology. Nuance and technology you say? Yes, it is a thing and she does it with style and ease, steeze if you will. The title, like any good title, is pretty explanatory as to what you'll get on the inside. A must read, even if you've read her book.
[Article] Why Kids Sext - A The Atlantic article, so take it with a grain of salt, but pretty good none-the-less. It does a fair job of presenting sexting as a part of youth dating that is/is becoming normalized. It's well sourced, covering the full gambit of supportive and critical research that has been done, including danah boyd (I told you she had to be mentioned), and does a nice job of presenting why sexting and child pornography laws need to be reexamined. She adds an appeal that "perhaps the best hope is that one day, in the distant future, a naked picture of a girl might simply lose its power to humiliate." I hope that future isn't so distant.
[Article] To Siri, With Love - This article made the rounds so I'll be surprised if you haven't seen it, but it's so important when having discussions about internet fatalism. It reveals that argument as inherently ableist. You'll see a post on this soon also. Another good person to check out in that vein would be Faye Ginsburg (which you can find here and here, both linked from her own page). I'll confess I haven't read either of those articles but I am familiar enough with her work that I'll still recommend them.
[Article] Read what happens when a bunch of over-30s find out how Millennials handle their money - Eh, just a curious kind of read. 
Obvious theme is obvious. It was a tech kind of week. ;) Look for an article about why I don't like Jon Stewart *GASP* to drop midweek.
1 note · View note
phlmatt · 9 years
Link
Ya'll should probs read this, because, well, ya know, it's important!
I’m glad you’re here. I hope you’ll listen to what I have to say because it’s not going to be easy. After all, isn’t that why you became a feminist? To listen to what women have to say and help undo the oppression that men have put into the world? As questions like “where is the space for men in…
40 notes · View notes