Anthropological Niche

Through Digg, I found a link to a map showing real time clothing purchases from Zappos.  It might serve as a quick behavioral observation excercise!

A leading blog/news site (Huffington Post) is going to feature a new section titled "Technology is Anthropology".  As per the article:

HuffPostTech will cover how technology in general -- and the Internet in particular -- is changing the way we live our lives, from politics, education to entertainment....Facebook is no mere social networking site; with more than 250 million users, it's a democracy of its own, with a population that rivals some of the world's biggest countries. Indeed, the new section's overlaying concern -- what will connect all the blogs and aggregated news stories in it -- is the thinking that technology is anthropology.

Anonymity of informants can be important when protecting participants from harm (e.g., employer retribution).  Just how much demographic data can be collected before the informant can be identified?  In a blog article at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it is surprisingly how little information is needed to find an informant's identity.  As per the article:

Gender, ZIP code, and birth date feel anonymous, but Prof. Sweeney was able to identify Governor Weld through them for two reasons. First, each of these facts about an individual (or other kinds of facts we might not usually think of as identifying) independently narrows down the population, so much so that the combination of (gender, ZIP code, birthdate) was unique for about 87% of the U.S. population. If you live in the United States, there's an 87% chance that you don't share all three of these attributes with any other U.S. resident. Second, there may be particular data sources available (Sweeney used a Massachusetts voter registration database) that let people do searches to bootstrap what they know about someone in order to learn more -- including traditional identifiers like name and address. In a very concrete sense, "anonymized" or "merely demographic" information about people may be neither.

For a further exploration about the survey and ethics fail previously posted here, see yet another post on Neuroanthropology.  As per the article:

In my brief and incomplete survey of the discussions of this research, it became obvious that slash fans were particularly irritated, not just by the initial bad research design, but also by the seeming inability to apologize, learn from criticism or even simply back off on the part of the researchers.

This tenaciousness is interesting in a number of ways, not just that it layers on PR FAIL on top of initial Research Design FAIL. I serve on a Human Ethics Research Review board and have for a number of years, and it’s intriguing to see which researchers simply don’t get it, and then which ones also CAN’T get it when it’s pointed out to them. That is, even when their proposals get rejected or held up (which is surprisingly rarely), some researchers simply cannot think flexibly enough to come up with a new method for getting at something like the data that they initially expected. Moreover, the truly obdurate researchers often cannot see glaring ethical issues, even when they are pointed out and explained to them.

I often wonder if the ethics application process itself could be a sort of psychometric for testing what sort of ethnographic researcher a person might be (although I realize that these particular researchers were not ethnographers and never submitted a proposal to the ethics review panel or Institutional Review Board, IRB, at the university that they were ostensibly connected to, which I will not name as it does not deserve the guilt by implication). If a researcher can’t think of several ways to set up a survey or interview question to get at a particular bit of information, he or she should simply not be devising interviews.

This short article in the Daily Cardinal summarizes the finding by genetic biologists that race is not based in biology, but culture, as anthropogists have been repeatably asserting for over 100 years. As per the article:

Biology began speaking otherwise in the fall of 1998, when American Anthropologist published a seminal paper by Alan R. Templeton, a biology professor at Washington University.

The paper showed that, contrary to popular belief, the concept of race has no biological basis.

“Race is a real cultural, political and economic concept in society, but it is not a biological concept, and that, unfortunately, is what many people wrongfully consider to be the essence of race in humans—genetic differences,” Templeton said.

Templeton’s group analyzed DNA from global human populations and showed that, while plenty of genetic variations exist in humans, most of these are individual and not “between-population.”

So, though the DNA of different populations does vary, it is either not enough or not the right type of difference to define a particular sublineage of humanity from another.

Templeton found that as much as 85 percent of genetic variation was individual variation. The remaining 15 percent that could be traced to “racial” differences is very minor and below the threshold used to recognize race evolutionarily.