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Napoleon Chagnon is all over the Internet these days. His memoir, Noble Savages, was recently published, along with a variety of articles and posts about the Darkness-in-El-Dorado affair (in which Chagnon was attacked by journalist Patrick Tierney with outrageous stories of ineptitude and malfeasance in the Amazon). Chagnon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences last year, and last week Marshal Sahlins resigned from that organization, citing two reasons: (1) Chagnon's election; and (2) the involvement of NAS in military research. I don't want to rehash these things here. For Sahlins' resignation, see Serena Golden's post in Inside Higher Education . For information and lots of anthropological opinions about all this, see recent posts in Savage Minds by Alex Golub and a tweet from David Graeber , each with a bunch of comments. And for a hard-hitting account of the Chagnon-Tierney affair and the role of the American Anthropological Association, see the scholarly...

I received an e-mail from the White House yesterday. No, it wasn't Michelle Obama chatting about Pac-12 Men's Basketball (her brother coaches the Oregon State team). It was from John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. I had signed a "We the People" petition advocating: "Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research." The petition and Holdren's reply are posted here . Holdren has posted a memorandum requiring federal agencies that fund research (e.g., NSF, NEH, NIH) to come up with policies and procedures to make the results of that research publicly available without charge. The memorandum deals with access to journal articles as well as data archiving and the availability of basic data from federally-funded research. This is a big step forward for open access, and I am encouraged at the twin f...

Dale Askey, a librarian at McMaster University, is being sued for libel by Edwin Mellen Press for posting negative comments about the press's books in a blog post. As a university librarian, his job is to evaluate books and publishers and advise his university. This is scary stuff: a commercial publisher is trying to shut down academic freedom. Perhaps scarier still is the fact that Askey's university has yet to come to his defense. If suing bloggers for negative remarks were to become common, many of us would be in big trouble. You can read about this case in Sam Trosow's blog , which has links to the lawsuit (that document includes the blog post in question), and a piece by Colleen Flaherty in Inside Higher Education . You can sign a petition in support of Dale Askey at Change.org . I've signed. Mellen does publish a few archaeology books, titles that I had not heard of. My bibliography database includes some of their books in the field of urban history. I've look...

Minard's map of Napoleon's Moscow campaign I attended a day-long workshop today run by Edward Tufte. If you aren't familiar with his books and ideas, you should be. Tufte is a statistician/political scientist retired from Yale University who has published four books on how to present information--particularly quantitative data--in graphical format. He frequently refers to the figured map produced by Charles Joseph Minard in 1869 showing the fate of Napoleon's Moscow campaign of 1812 (see above). To Tufte, this is the finest informational graphic ever published. It presents reliable data in an easily comprehensible, but rigorous format. Napoleon's army left the Polish-Russian border (left on the diagram) with 422,000 soldiers. By the time they got to Moscow (right side), following the tan shaped route, the army was much reduced through attrition due to freezing and starvation. Their retreat is shown in black; when they got back to the border the army was down to 10,0...