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ASU student Lisa Gallagher in our lab I am posting this from the ASU lab at Teotihuacan in Mexico. I will be attending a conference on Teo sponsored by UNAM and Penn State over the next few days. On the trip down I read one of the worst articles I've read in a long time. I was surprised that the paper was accepted by a journal. It was published in a new journal, Economic Anthropology , whose standards have perhaps not risen to a level the editors would like. Did anyone review this paper? This bad article got me thinking about the ratio between the scope or breadth of the claims made in a study, and the amount of data used. Works with a low ratio are often called "descriptive" studies. Works with a high ratio, on the other hand, contain little data, but make sweeping claims that go far beyond the data at hand. These are speculative studies, work that is poorly grounded. The paper I just read had a very high ratio, which is why I disliked it so much. Satisfying research in ...

Academia.edu has been getting a lot of negative press in the scholarly community. I see some of this on Twitter, and I've been sent some articles and links. I just read Sarah Bond's article in Forbes, " Dear Scholars, Delete your Account at Academia.edu .:" She has three objections to Academia. I don't find any of them compelling, although one of them is troubling. First, "It is not a 'real' .edu" The domain is an old one and a commercial operation seems to be disguising itself as an educational institution. Wow, I was really fooled by that. Stupid and unsophisticated users might get confused. Give me a break, this is trivial. Second, Academia is trying to get money for enhanced features. I guess I'm not sure how that is a bad thing. Perhaps if the basic fact that they are commercializing scholarship (my point 3) is abhorrent to you, then the enhanced features might be especially abhorrent. Again, this seems trivial to me. Third, Academia is ...

I have always been a big fan of book reviews. When I get a new journal, I may scan the article titles first, but I almost always read the book reviews before the articles. Book reviews are an important part of quality control in scholarly disciplines where books are prominent (as in archaeology). In the past I have blogged about the book review crisis in Latin American archaeology: See my posts in: 2008 ,   2009 ,   2011 For a decade, very few books were being reviewed in the main journal, Latin American Antiquity. The major Mesoamerican journal, Ancient Mesoamerica, doesn't published book reviews at all! But now, book reviews are trending up in quantity. I thought there were more reviews in LAA over the past year, so I counted them up. Here are the data, starting in 1997. These figures paint a bleak picture of the decline of quality control in Latin American archaeology starting around 2004. But after six years of almost no reviews (average of one--count, 'em--1 per issue!), ...

I just read a nice blog post by A.P. Van Arsdale, "Size, Science, and Scientific Truth  on bias in scientific thinking. I differ from Van Arsdale somewhat in my view that science is not about "Truth," but about reducing error. As Professor Indiana Jones once said,   " Archeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, Dr. Tyree's Philosophy class is right down the hall.'     Archaeology, like all science, is about facts and patterns and explanations, not about truth. But I do understand that many people use the word "truth" informally to refer to facts, patterns, and explanations. In his post Van Arsdale lists nine principles from Carl Sagan that comprise a "Toolkit for sceptical thinking." These are from Sagan's book, " The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark ." These are great precepts, and they neatly describe my own epistemology. Wherever possible there must be  ind...