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This is an excerpt from an email sent to SAA members by President Fred Limp: "Late last week the SAA Board was informed that there are two TV series planned that promote and glorify the looting and destruction of archaeological sites. They are American Diggers and Diggers . The first is scheduled for Spike TV and the other for National Geographic TV. As past SAA President Bob Kelly wrote in a recent e-mail in response to American Diggers, "This shameless and shameful program will glorify and promote the mindless destruction of archaeological sites in the U.S."  SAA and other groups, such as SHA, have already prepared and sent strong letters condemning both of these programs to the production companies, networks, and others. Copies of the SAA letters can be found on the SAA website ( http://bit.ly/w2MHJM , and http://bit.ly/wzT7IA ). The letters provide details on why we are so concerned. Up to this point Spike TV has not responded to the public outcry. Leadership of ...

Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks writes some of the more insightful and entertaining works in anthropology today. Check out his website for his publications. (By the way, are YOUR publications posted online???).  I particularly like his book reviews; they are concise and pithy, often containing some real zingers that put people and ideas in their place. I just read his outstanding book review essay on seven books on cultural evolution by evolutionary psychologists and others: Marks, Jonathan     2012    Recent Advances in Culturomics. Evolutionary Anthropology 21:38-42. If you have read some of these works applying biological models to cultural evolution, you will recognize the aptness of Marks' comments (such as the fact that decades ago anthropology solved many of the supposed problems they bring up). Anyway, to the remarks on archaeologists and beers. Marks ends his essay arguing for the importance of distinguishing good science from bad sc...

Suppose you had submitted a paper to a journal ("Journal-X") and you got this message from the editor: "You only cite Journal-X once. Consequently, we kindly ask you to add references of articles published in Journal-X to your present article." Would you comply? This is known as "coercive citation," something I had never heard of until I read the latest issue of Science: Wilhite, Allen W. and Eric A. Fong  (2012)  Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing. Science 335:542-543 . It seems that this practice is rampant in the fields of business research. These authors did a thorough study with lots of interviews with authors and studies of journals in several fields. At least some authors in every field considered (social sciences and business) reported attempts a coercive citation, but there was considerable variation. They took economics journals as the standard for regression analysis, and found that contributors to journals in marketing, management, finan...

Check out the nice piece in The Guardian today, "The parable of the farmers and the teleporting duplicator" by Mike Taylor in The Guardian, Feb 10, 2012.