Anne Rice: 'I Quit Being A Christian'

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: Anne Rice: 'I Quit Being A
Christian' via The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com by The Huffington
Post News Editors on 7/29/10

Anne Rice, the bestselling novelist most popularly known for "Interview
with the Vampire" and her other creepy vampire novels, announced on
Wednesday via Facebook that she has officially renounced Christianity.
It's a bold move for the author who has become well-known for her
vehement religiosity; the majority of her frequent tweets are related
to religion in some way. The author has also recently launched a new
series of novels about angels, which debuted in October 2009
with "Angel Time."

Rice declared on her Facebook account that she is "an outsider" in the
Christian community:
I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be
anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse
to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to
be anti-life.
Rice affirmed that though she has decided to leave the Christian
institution, she "remain[s] committed to Christ as always."






(via GalleyCat)




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Blender 2.53 Released

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: Blender 2.53 Released via
BlenderNation by Bart on 7/22/10
The Blender Foundation just released 2.53, the first ‘Beta’ of the
Blender 2.5 series. While the excellent 2.50 release log has been
updated with 2.53 features, there’s no ‘changelog’ since the previous
version available yet (this may follow later). What *is* clear is that
lots of bugs have been fixed, there’s a new ‘addons’ system [...]
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Is 'FlashForward' Heading to Starz?

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: Is 'FlashForward' Heading to
Starz? via TV Squad by Chris Harnick on 7/23/10

Filed under: TV News
'FlashForward' may have been discarded by ABC, but that hasn't stopped
fans from aggressively campaigning for another network to pick up the
series. It's worked before for other shows and according to TVOverMind,
Starz might be the savior fans are hoping for.

A fan posted on the Save FlashForward! Facebook fanpage that they were
told by a Starz's representative that the network is aggressively
looking into picking up the series.

To prove their dedication to the series, 'FlashForward' fans have
staged blackouts in front of ABC offices.

The series starred Joseph Fiennes (right) as an FBI agent looking into
the cause of a worldwide blackout that showed citizens a glimpse into
their future.


Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

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Samsung: Don’t Like Your iPhone 4? Here, Have a Free Galaxy S (UK)

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: Samsung: Don’t Like Your iPhone
4? Here, Have a Free Galaxy S (UK) via Android Phone Fans by Quentyn
Kennemer on 7/23/10



Samsung’s really flogging the living hell out of Apple’s misfortunes as
of late. Now, they’re extending a hand to all of those inside the
walled garden that aren’t satisfied with the fruits, vegetables, and
flora inside. After “antennagate”, Samsung’s firing back at all
coordinates and they won’t stop until the Apple flag has fallen. On
twitter, Samsung’s official account for their UK division responded to
several users who were just going on about their merry day tweeting
about their iPhone 4 woes. Their suggestion? “Switch to a Galaxy S,
we’ll even give it to you for free!”



Tiffany – the lady that Samsung graced with a brand new Galaxy S – told
Wired:

“My iPhone and I have been inseparable for almost a month now, tomorrow
being one month since the iPhone OS 4 launched. But the honeymoon
period ended this week as repeated dropped calls, and a sudden
unexplainable inability to make or receive calls or send texts left me
disgruntled.

“So I did what anyone else would do: I vented my frustration on
Twitter. Imagine my surprise, then, when this morning I am tweeted by
Samsung offering me a free Galaxy S, their latest phone. Too good to be
true? I decided to investigate.

“I called a friend at Samsung, and though she was initially sceptical
(sic), it has now been confirmed: the campaign is legit. Samsung is so
confident about the superiority of the Galaxy S that they’re sending
free ones to existing iPhone customers so they can decide for
themselves.”

That’s ridiculously generous. There are no immediate catches that can
be found (carrier contract deals?) and I’m sure Samsung won’t send a
free Galaxy S to anyone just claiming to have issues (let’s face it:
everyone’s going to want to try it after this), but it’s still pretty
awesome to see that they aren’t going to take Apple’s FUD-spreading
without a fight.

[Wired via Samsung Hub]

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WootTF?!: The End Of History

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: WootTF?!: The End Of History via
Woot! - One Day, One Deal on 7/22/10

You know, often when I'm drinking a beer while sitting on my couch and
staring off into space for hours in an attempt to make the darkness and
pain I've tried so long to keep bottled up in the depths of my heart
from bubbling up to the surface, I sometimes think to myself, "Man, if
only this beer was stronger and I were drinking it out of a stuffed
roadkill coozie. THEN maybe I could get my life back on track."

Finally, someone has heard my silent prayers.

The End Of History, the newest brew from Brew Dog, is a 55% ABV (yes,
55% ALCOHOL BY VOLUME) beer that not only seeks to "get you krunk"
faster than any other beer in history, but also comes in this fetching
dead rodent package! From the site:

"This blond Belgian ale is infused with nettles from the Scottish
Highlands and Fresh juniper berries. Only 12 bottles have been made and
each comes with its own certificate and is presented in a stuffed stoat
or grey squirrel. The striking packaging was created by a very talented
taxidermist and all the animals used were road kill.

The impact of The End of History is a perfect conceptual marriage
between art, taxidermy and craft brewing. The bottles are at once
beautiful and disturbing – they disrupt conventions and break taboos,
just like the beer they hold within them."

Sadly, it seems all eleven bottles of the limited run are sold out now,
even though they were going for over $750 a pop. Rats. I mean, "Tree
rats".

[via The Daily What]





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google

google

Lasers used in a light show have damaged a Canon EOS 5D Mark
II(
reviews ) CMOS
sensor and I sure didn’t know it was possible, but I thought I’d get a
warning out since it appears to have damaged this guy’s sensor. I would
suspect that all CMOS sensors are probably susceptible – including Nikon,
Sony, Panasonic etc., but maybe because we’re using larger lenses on the
HDSLR cameras would tend to focus more of the laser’s beam on the sensor
(I’m no scientist so I’m just guessing here, but it makes some sense). While
it appears to be mostly safe and not common to get damage (you’ll see in the
video that several lasers hit the camera but only one caused the damage), we
thought you should know.
------------------------------
[image: Redrock Micro]
------------------------------

Popout

How to break your 5D in a second from
Aguaon
Vimeo .

A laser light burnt my sensor. Shot at Madrid’d Gay Pride:
http://www.vimeo.com/13432785
------------------------------
[image: Follow planet5D on twitter]
------------------------------

We thought we’d check up on this a bit and found this page on the
International Display Laser Association’s
sitewhich says:

“Lasers emit concentrated beams of light, which can heat up sensitive
surfaces (like the eye’s retina) and cause damage. Camera sensors are
susceptible to damage, similar to the human eye.

For large scale shows, such as on a televised concert, laser show producers
work with clients to avoid TV camera locations and video projectors (ILDA
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be at a show.

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lens.”

So, there you go… you can read more on their site, but I think the idea is
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The Numbers No One Wants to Talk About in the Android vs. iPhone Sales Battle

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: The Numbers No One Wants to Talk
About in the Android vs. iPhone Sales Battle via Android Phone Fans by
Kevin Krause on 7/21/10





For all of those shocked and awed by the Apple’s announcement that as
of last Friday they had sold 3 million iPhone 4 handsets, I’d like to
take a moment to direct everyone’s attention over to John Battelle’s
Searchblog. In his post he takes a rather bold stance, one much of the
blogosphere hasn’t even entertained the idea of since Steve Jobs used
the smoke and mirrors sales figure to distract our tech reporting peers
from what has been dubbed “antennagate.” Kind of like shaking some
shiny keys in front of a bunch of spoiled babies or dangling a ball on
a string in front of a kitten. I can’t really put it any better than
Mr. Battelle did, so take a gander at this excerpt from the full post
that delves into a bit of simple arithmetic to show that the 3 million
figure might not be that impressive after all:

“3 million phones in 23 days – that’s a pretty strong clip, the fastest
sales of an Apple phone to date, Mashable reports. If I do the math,
that’s more than 130,000 phones a day.

But did anyone in the press notice Google’s little announcement, the
day before Apple launched its iPhone 4? This one? The one where Google
said, and I quote: ’Every day 160,000 Android-powered devices are
activated — that’s nearly two devices every second.’

Yep, that’d be 30K MORE phones a day than Apple. And my guess is that
Android’s pace is accelerating, while the iPhone 4 is probably sliding
downward, given how many folks bought it at launch (Mashable reports
that 1.7 million were sold in first three days, so 1.3 million the next
20 days). In fact, if you do THAT math, and divide 1.3 million by 20
days, you get 65,000 iPhone 4s sold each day, which is nearly 100,000
less, PER DAY, than Android phones.”

Granted, there is no denying that for a single handset a sales number
of 3 million is beyond astounding, but we’d also venture to say that if
iOS was dropping on the same number of smartphones as Android and at
the same frequency the figure would be spread out quite a bit more —
just as is the case with Google’s platform. If anyone should be scared
about the number of phones flying off the shelves it certainly
shouldn’t be Google in this case.

Will Android ever topple the iPhone? There will at least come a time
where the two are no longer separated by as wide a gap in market share.
A time when Google’s platform sits at the same level. Only true
innovation and the continued release of simply killer Android phones
will prove if Google has what it takes to become the top dog in the
handset world.

[thanks to Rob Isakson for sending this in!]

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Woz: The "Best 'compromise' solution" for the iPhone 4? A Pre Plus!

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: Woz: The "Best 'compromise'
solution" for the iPhone 4? A Pre Plus! via PreCentral.net by Jonathan
I Ezor on 7/16/10



Henk van Ess, who describes himself as a "a Dutch born investigative
journalist and accidental entrepreneur" who sells MiFi cellular WiFi
access points, recently took an order from Steve Wozniak (co-founder of
Apple) himself. After verifying that it was the real Woz, van Ess
started an e-mail conversation with Woz about the iPhone 4 and other
issues, and received permission to post the conversation on his site.

While Woz is always interesting, of particular importance to our
community was his suggestions for how iPhone 4 users can deal with the
unreliability of the AT&T data network:

If you can afford it, carry a second Verizon phone for backup. Another
option is to carry a Verizon mifi and rely on Skype on your iPhone. I
have used this mifi technique to rescue my own, and others', iPhones on
occasion. If you buy a Verizon Palm Pre, you get free mifi on it so
that is possible the best 'compromise' solution, to carry a Verizon
Palm Pre along with your AT&T iPhone 4.

Woz continues that he has a Pre (Plus) with Verizon, and notes
that "[a]t first [Verizon] charged but then they made free a built-in
mifi ability (Mobile Hotspot)."

It's great to know that Steve Wozniak is a member of our community, and
we encourage him to explore his Pre Plus; it has a lot more to offer
than just a free Wi-Fi connection!

Source: Mifieurope.com (via Mobilecrunch)


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5 Ways to Use Foursquare to Market Your Location-Based Business

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: 5 Ways to Use Foursquare to
Market Your Location-Based Business via StartupNation Blog by Wendy
Kenney on 7/18/10



I’ve been mulling this around since posting the last Foursquare article
and thought that there were more practical tips could be added.

Foursquare is a hugely untapped and powerful little tool for business
marketing, especially if you own a business that requires customers to
physically visit your location to make a purchase. Unfortunately most
businesses don’t understand just exactly how they can use Foursquare
and are missing out on a fantastic and inexpensive marketing
opportunity!!

So here are five very practical tips on how to use Foursquare to market
your location-based business.
1. Use Foursquare like a customer loyalty card
The cool thing about Foursquare is it shows the user how many times
they have been at each location, so you could offer customers a freebie
after so many check ins. Make sure you set clear rules about how to
redeem the offer including: check ins more than once per day do not
count towards redemption of the free offer; or free offer value at
$5.00, may not be accumulated or transferred, may not be redeemed for
cash, etc.

The women’s clothing store Ann Taylor recently launched a Foursquare
promotion like this in New York City giving shoppers 15% off at the
store after their 5th check in and giving the person with the most
check ins at one location (called the Mayor) 25% off their purchase at
that visit.

Another company, Tasti D-Lite, offers frequent shoppers a branded
Foursquare badge, as well as additional loyalty points on their
physical loyalty card, plus freebies and other perks.
2. Organize a real-time treasure hunt.
Now this could get really fun. Leave a clue of the day on the “Tips”
section of your Foursquare page with the answer to each clue being a
different special of the day. The customers who come in and guess the
special, get the special, plus they are eligible to win a bigger prize
at the end of the contest.

Another company, Jimmy Choo, a high-end designer footwear brand, runs
this contest by having a pair of Jimmy Choo sneakers check in at
various hot spots around town. The person who is able to guess the next
hot spot and arrive there before the Jimmy Choo shoes arrive will win a
pair of very expensive shoes.
3. Use Foursquare to entice new customers to come into your store by
offering a 1st Timers check in discount or freebie.
“Show us your check-in and your dessert is on us!” Again, make sure you
communicate clearly in your offer what the rules are; i.e., free
dessert is only for first check in, and must be redeemed with purchase
of a meal; etc.”
4. Leverage word of mouth marketing.
One of the benefits of Foursquare is that friends can “follow” each
other and thus can see each other’s check in’s on Foursquare. Note: The
check in’s are also posted on Twitter, Facebook and Yelp, if they’ve
enabled the function. This is huge for your business because every
check in at your location is a tacit recommendation from the person
checking in there. Leverage this exposure by inviting people to check
in via Foursquare. Providing special offers for those who check in via
Foursquare will invite people to check in more often.

Also, make sure you pay attention to what people are saying on
Foursquare about your business, because whether you use it or not,
people are using it, and chance are, they are talking about your
business. Personally reply back to people who leave tips or make
positive comments and thank them. Likewise, it’s just as important to
respond to negative comments as well and to remedy the issue as soon as
possible. Don’t be negative; just say something like, “I’m sorry that
you had a bad experience. Let’s get it touch and discuss how we can
make it up to you.”
5. Tie in text message marketing with Foursquare.
Invite people to take photos of them having fun or otherwise enjoying
your location and text the photos to a special text message phone
number. Once they do this they will have opted into your text message
marketing program and you will be able to send them additional specials
and discounts via text.

What other ways can you use Foursquare to market your high traffic
location based business? I would love to hear your comments. Next post,
how to market your non-location based business on Foursquare.

Wendy Kenney is a nationally known Buzz Building Expert and the Founder
and CEO of 23 Kazoos, a marketing firm specializing in inexpensive and
creative small business marketing strategies. She has honed her
marketing skills through over 26 years of entrepreneurship and business
management.

Wendy just released her new book called “How to Build Buzz for Your
Biz- Tap into the Power of Social Media, Publicity and Relationship
Marketing to Grow Your Business” based on her knowledge of what works
and what does not work in small business marketing. This book features
practical and low cost marketing strategies, such as “How to Grow Your
Business Using Social Media,” as well as valuable links, resources, and
tips and is available on Amazon.com.


Wendy frequently speaks to organizations about marketing for small
business. To get more information or to schedule Wendy to speak go to:
Business Marketing Speaker

Claim your free download (no email necessary) on Wendy’s website: 23
Kazoos

How to Build Buzz for your Biz: 23 Creative and Inexpensive Marketing
Strategies That Will Get You Noticed

ShareThis

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HP files for 'PALMPAD' Trademark

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: HP files for 'PALMPAD' Trademark
via PreCentral.net by Dieter Bohn on 7/19/10



Looks like we have a possible name for the upcoming webOS Slate
previously known as Hurricane: PALMPAD. This from a USPTO Trademark
application filed on July 9th by HP. The trademake is listed in a
fairly comprehensive list of possible categories:

Computers, computer hardware, computer software, computer peripherals,
portable computers, handheld and mobile computers, PDAs, electronic
notepads, mobile digital electronic devices

While that rumored Q3 launch window still feels a little early, we're
wondering if maybe, just maybe, we might see a 2010 launch.

What do you think of the name? It's definitely in the range of iPad,
but we're liking that 'Pad' can be a a way to clarify it's a tablet yet
not let it get confused with Slate or Tablet or any of the other names
that might get applied to a Windows 7-based slate device.

Source: USPTO; via myHPmini

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paris: the street is ours!

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: paris: the street is ours! via
Human Transit by Jarrett at HumanTransit.org on 7/13/10

Next time you're involved in a debate about whether we should consider
taking one lane of traffic on a busy street and setting it aside for
buses, show them some pictures of Paris in 2010. Almost any boulevard,
in fact. Here's Boulevard Raspail:




Lots of traffic in two lanes, and a lane reserved for buses and
two-wheels conveyances. Yes, the bus lane is empty at the moment, but
this demonstrates the great and damnable paradox of bus lanes: If buses
are moving well, and carrying more people than the car lanes, the bus
lane looks empty most of the time. Only a failing or obstructed bus
lane looks like it's full of buses. That's why bus lanes such a hard
sell in cities run by motorists who want to do the green thing but
still form their impressions from behind the wheel -- like Los Angeles,
for example.

But in the last two decades, while a few American cities have had long
arguments about converting single lanes to bus-only, Paris just did it.
Not here and there. All over the city. Name your favorite Paris
boulevard, and it probably has bus lanes now.



And they´re really nice buses, where you can board and alight at all
doors.

One key to the Paris project is that these are not just for buses. They
can also be used by taxis and all two-wheeled vehicles. This is a
manageable range of vehicles that all serve urban mobility more
efficiently than the private car, and that don't usually generate
enough congestion to plug the lane for any length of time. Now and
then, something else shows up in a bus lane, such as here on Blvd. de
Clichy in front of the Moulin Rouge.


But still, the buses get through.

What about smaller streets? Surely when you just have two lanes of
traffic, you'd never take one of them -- half of the entire capacity of
the street -- for a bus lane, would you? Of course you would. Have a
look at Rue du Faubourg St. Denis, climbing the gentle grade from Les
Halles to Gare du Nord.




Without that barrier in the middle, you could have striped this one-way
street as two traffic lanes plus a parking/delivery lane on each side;
in fact, if I probe my dim memories of living in Paris in 1986, I think
that's what it was. But they not only carved out a wide bus lane but
also a solid median curb to protect it. (These curbs are sensible
because motorists know not to drive over them but emergency vehicles
still can.) The resulting wide bus lane is important because it's
shared with two-wheeled vehicles -- bicycles and motorbikes and
scooters, and these need the ability to pass the bus without
interacting with parallel traffic.

Here's Rue du Faubourg St. Martin, the southbound partner of the
northbound Rue du Faubourg St. Denis above. Here, the bus lane is on
the left, and stops are in median islands. Looking north:


The magnificent edifice in the distance, by the way, is Gare de l'Est,
the railway station for the east. Looking south from the same spot:


Another view of a median bus stop:


Remarkably, even though cyclists are welcome in the bus lane, they also
have a cycle lane, carved out of the sidewalk/footpath and isolated by
landscaping:


Note that the direction of the bicycle path matches that of the street,
the norm in Paris. Car traffic still has one through lane and an
intermittent delivery/parking/turning lane.

[Update Note also that the bus lane (technically a bus-taxi-2 wheel
lane) is quite a bit wider than the bus. There´s enough space or
cyclists to pass stopped buses. Note also that Paris stop spacing is
quite wide, I´m guessing around 400m, so you don´t see as much of the
leapfrogging problem -- where the same bus and bike have to pass each
other repeatedly. ]

(If any French readers have access to section drawings of this street
or similar ones, I'd love to publish a few just to show how the
available width has been apportioned.)

It's also increasingly common, on larger boulevards, to see separate
bicycle and pedestrian spaces in addition to the bus lane. Typically,
the large boulevards have always had small frontage roadways on each
side used for accessing on-street parking. These roadways now also
serve bicycles, and are connected by appropriate bike-only segments.
There is still a sidewalk/footpath for pedestrians as well, against the
building face, though nobody worries much about enforcing ped/bicycle
separations.


Further encouragement for both cycling and motorbikes comes from the
abundant supply of parking areas for "2 roues" -- two-wheels.


Finally, the pedestrian signals:




The truth will sound silly, but it's striking how green these signals
are. It's simple: the default setting for pedestrian signals is green,
and they turn red only when your safety requires it. (In Sydney, where
I currently live, the opposite rule applies. There, pedestrian signals
are always red, but if you push a button and wait patiently, often for
a nearly complete cycle of the signal, wondering if you've submitted an
application to some bureaucrat who will get to it after his lunch
break, you'll finally get green for a few seconds. But don't blink or
you'll miss it and have to start again.)

The scourge of two-step signals for crossing major boulevards remains:


The sign means that you'll have to wait for one signal to cross to the
median, and then another signal to cross to the far side. A pain, but
then again, signaling the two phases separately gives you more
opportunities for signals to be green. This is useful if, like me,
you're willing to cross on a red if it appears safe. That way, you
still get the assurance of the green for half of your crossing.

Last year when I passed through Paris, I encountered a funny bit of
sculpture in the Rue du Chat qui Peche ("street of the fishing cat").





"La rue est à nous" -- "The street is ours."

Those words are at least as old as the French Revolution, but they've
never been truer in Paris than they are today. We are a long way from
the Paris of the 1970s, when planners imagined freeways on both sides
of the Seine, and new extra-wide bridges for more car traffic. Today,
Paris is for human beings, but you don't become human in this city
until you get out of your car. As soon as you do, the street is yours.









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Fashion Victim Tutorial: How To Make An Annoying, Painfully Trendy T-Shirt D...

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: Fashion Victim Tutorial: How To
Make An Annoying, Painfully Trendy T-Shirt Design via Princess Sparkle
Pony's Photo Blog by Peteykins on 7/12/10
Gather 'round, kiddies, because I'm going to help you strike it rich!
I've been meaning to devise this tutorial for well over a year, and I'm
distressed that it's still valid.

OK, you want to make an irritating t-shirt? First of all, it has to
feature wings (THIS IS NOT OPTIONAL) and really should include a skull.
Let's start with a pair of wings; it doesn't matter where you steal get
them:


Why are the wings such a requirement? I have no idea. Don't question
me! Basically, the overall vibe you want is caduceus meets tattoo
design + random crap. Like I said, a skull is optional but why take the
chance of not including one? Look, Alexander McQueen died for you, OK?
Place your skull:


Next, you need to add some sort of element reminiscent of Rococo
tracery or shapes found in fleur de lis motifs (resist the urge to use
pseudo-Maori "tribal" elements; the 90s are over). I'm just going to
dump in a simple example of the latter:


Now you need some more-or-less random crap in the background. I
strongly urge you to use old-fashioned handwriting:


DO NOT pay any attention to what the handwriting says, because madness
awaits down that road. OK, it's time for some color. Stick to
grayed-down colors, burgundies, mustard yellows, dull greens, burnt
oranges, etc:


OPTIONAL: why not use some metallic ink? It'll look like absolute shit
after only one washing! OK, now we're ready for the shirt itself. It
should be either black, burgundy, or dull army green. Think drab:


Now it's time to place your design. Here is a crucial point: even
though you've just made a symmetrical work of "art," DO NOT place it in
the center of the shirt. Make it look like the garment was just tossed
haphazardly under the screens:


Not shown above, but crucial nonetheless: sandpaper your silkscreens a
little to give them a totally phony "distressed" look.

Last step: contact the buyer at Nordstrom Rack.

Obviously, these are all suggestions (BUT NOT THE WINGS! THEY ARE
REQUIRED!), and this is a highly-simplified example (not nearly enough
random crap) but I'm sure you'll agree that the tutorial above will
help you make a t-shirt so trendy, so incoherent and badly-considered,
that you will be rolling in money in no time.

You're welcome.

UPDATE: After completing the above from memory, I thought I'd check
Urban Outfitters to see if I could find a good example, and was
astonished to find this meta-ironic version:


I swear I didn't see that before writing the tutorial. Points off for
symmetrical placement, though.

UPDATE: I also didn't previously see this obnoxious Ecko design, which
includes every single motif suggested above:


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On World Population Day, take note: population isn’t the problem

by Fred Pearce.

A green myth is on the march. It wants to blame the world’s overbreeding poor people for the planet’s peril. It stinks. And on World Population Day, I encourage fellow environmentalists not to be seduced.

Some greens think all efforts to save the world are doomed unless we “do something” about continuing population growth. But this is nonsense. Worse, it is dangerous nonsense.

For a start, the population bomb that I remember being scared by 40 years ago as a schoolkid is being defused fast. Back then, most women round the world had five or six children. Today’s women have just half as many as their mothers—an average of 2.6. Not just in the rich world, but almost everywhere.

This is getting close to the long-term replacement level, which, allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, is around 2.3. Women are cutting their family sizes not because governments tell them to, but for their own good and the good of their families—and if it helps the planet too, then so much the better.

This is a stunning change in just one generation. Why don’t we hear more about it? Because it doesn’t fit the doomsday agenda.

Half the world now has fewer than the “replacement level” of children. That includes Europe, North America, and the Caribbean, most of the Far East from Japan to Thailand, and much of the Middle East from Algeria to Iran.

Yes, Iran. Women in Tehran today have fewer children than their sisters in New York—and a quarter as many as their mothers had. The mullahs may not like it, but those guys don’t count for much in the bedroom.

And China. There, the communist government decides how many children couples can have. The one-child policy is brutal and repulsive. But the odd thing is that it may not make much difference any more. Chinese women round the world have gone the same way without compulsion. When Britain finally handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, it had the lowest fertility in the world—below one child per woman. Britain wasn’t running a covert one-child policy. That was as many children as the women in Hong Kong wanted.

What is going on? Family-planning experts used to say that women only started having fewer children when they got educated or escaped poverty—like us. But tell that to the women of Bangladesh.

Recently I met Aisha, Miriam, and Akhi—three women from three families working in a backstreet sweatshop in the capital Dhaka. Together, they had 22 brothers and sisters. But they told me they planned to have only six children between them. That was the global reproductive revolution summed up in one shack. Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest nations. Its girls are among the least educated in the world, and mostly marry in their mid-teens. Yet they have on average just three children now.

India is even lower at 2.8. In Brazil, hotbed of Catholicism, most women have two children. And nothing the priests say can stop millions of them getting sterilized. The local joke is that they prefer being sterilized to other methods of contraception because you only have to confess once. It may not be a joke.

Women are having smaller families because, for the first time in history, they can. Because we have largely eradicated the diseases that used to mean most children died before growing up. Mothers no longer need to have five or six children to ensure the next generation, so they don’t.

There are holdouts, of course. In parts of rural Africa, women still have five or more children. But even here they are being rational—they need the kids to mind the animals and work in the fields.

But most of the world now lives in cities. And in cities, children are an economic burden. You have to get them educated before they can get a job. And by then they are ready to leave home.

The big story is that rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, Muslim or Catholic, secular or devout, with tough government birth-control policies or none, most countries tell the same story: Small families are the new norm.

That doesn’t mean women don’t still need help to achieve their ambitions of small families. They need governments or charities to distribute modern contraception. But this is now about rights for women, not “population control.”

It is also true that population growth has not ceased yet. We have 6.8 billion people today, and may end up with another 2 billion before the population bomb is finally defused. But this is mainly because of a time lag while the huge numbers of young women born during the baby boom years of the 20th century remain fertile.

With half the world already at below-replacement birthrates, and with those rates still falling fast, the world’s population will probably be shrinking within a generation.

This is good news for the environment, for sure. But don’t put out the flags. Another myth put out by the population doom-mongers is that it’s all those extra people that are wrecking the planet. But that’s no longer the case.

Rising consumption today is a far bigger threat to the environment than a rising head count. And most of that extra consumption is still happening in rich countries that have long since given up growing their populations.

Virtually all of the remaining population growth is in the poor world, and the poor half of the planet is only responsible for 7 percent of carbon emissions.

The carbon emissions of one American today are equivalent to those of around four Chinese, 20 Indians, 40 Nigerians, or 250 Ethiopians. How dare rich-world greens blame the poor world for the planet’s perils?

Some greens need to take a long, hard look at themselves. They should remember where some of their ideas came from.

The granddaddy of demographic doomsters was Bob Malthus, an English clergyman who got famous by warning 200 years ago about population growth. He believed that the world’s population would keep increasing till it was cut down by disease or famine. Back in the ferment of the Industrial Revolution, he was a favorite of the evil mill owners and a scourge on anyone with a social conscience.

Malthus hated Victorian charities because he said they were keeping poor people alive to breed. Better that they die, he said. He believed the workhouses, where the destitute ended up, were too lenient, and he successfully campaigned for a get-tough law known at the time as Malthus’s Law.

The novelist Charles Dickens, a social reformer, attacked Malthus in several of his books. When Oliver Twist asked for more gruel in the workhouse, that was a satire on Malthus’s Law. In A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge was a caricature of Malthus. In Hard Times, Thomas Gradgrind, the unfeeling headmaster of Coketown, had a son called Malthus.

I think Karl Marx, another contemporary, was spot on when he called Malthusian ideas “a libel on the human race.” And we are seeing the truth of that today as, round the world, women are voluntarily cutting their family sizes. No compulsion needed.

The population bomb is being defused right now—by the world’s poor women. Sadly, the consumption bomb is still primed and ever more dangerous. Now that would be a proper target for environmentalists.



Editor’s note: Read a rebuttal to Pearce’s post by Robert Walker of the Population Institute.

Related Links:

Of course population is still a problem

To the population doomsayers: What do you propose?

The Population-Poverty Connection

How to trick people into thinking you're good looking

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: How to trick people into
thinking you're good looking via YouTube on 7/11/10



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Google Open Spot alerts Android users to freed parking spaces

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: Google Open Spot alerts Android
users to freed parking spaces via Engadget Mobile by Darren Murph on
7/11/10
Oh, sure -- this has certainly been tried before, but given that things
like this need a critical mass of followers to be effective, we're
particularly jazzed about Google's own initiative. Dubbed 'Open Spot,'
this bloody brilliant Android (2.0 and up) application enables
motorists to search for unclaimed spaces that have been reported by
other Open Spot users, and once they head elsewhere, it allows them to
mark their spot as open and available. Once a spot is marked, the color
gradually fades from red to yellow the longer it remains unclaimed.
We've given it a quick test here on our end, and while it seems snappy
enough (and yes, we definitely received a Karma Point for every space
we dropped), the obvious omission is the ability to add notes to each
marked place. There really should be a way to denote whether a spot is
metered, covered by some wacky city permit law or submerged in a foot
of water -- here's hoping the next update will enable comments. Hit
that source link (or just open up the App Market) to grab it for free,
and jump on past the break to see how your fellow city dwellers feel
about this marvelous invention.
Continue reading Google Open Spot alerts Android users to freed parking
spaces

Google Open Spot alerts Android users to freed parking spaces
originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:02:00 EST.
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We agree it’s WEIRD, but is it WEIRD enough?

Sent to you by Rio via Google Reader: We agree it’s WEIRD, but is it
WEIRD enough? via Neuroanthropology by gregdowney on 7/10/10

The most recent edition of Behavioral and Brain Sciences carries a
remarkable review article by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara
Norenzayan, ‘The weirdest people in the world?’ The article outlines
two central propositions; first, that most behavioural science theory
is built upon research that examines intensely a narrow sample of human
variation (disproportionately US university undergraduates who are, as
the authors write, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and
Democratic, or ‘WEIRD’).

More controversially, the authors go on to argue that, where there is
robust cross-cultural research, WEIRD subjects tend to be outliers on a
range of measurable traits that do vary, including visual perception,
sense of fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, and a host of other
basic psychological traits. They don’t ignore universals – discussing
them in several places – but they do highlight human variation and its
implications for psychological theory.

As is the custom at BBS, the target article is accompanied by a large
number of responses from scholars around the world, and then a
synthetic reflection from the original target article authors to the
many responses (in this case, 28). The total of the discussion weighs
in at a hefty 75 pages, so it will take most readers (like me) a couple
of days to digest the whole thing.

It’s my second time encountering the article as I read a pre-print
version and contemplated proposing a response, but, sadly, there was
just too much I wanted to say, and not enough time in the calendar
(conference organizing and the like dominating my life) for me to be
able to pull it together. I regret not writing a rejoinder, but I can
do so here with no limit on my space and the added advantage of seeing
how other scholars responded to the article.

My one word review of the collection of target article and responses:
AMEN!

Or maybe that should be, AAAAAAAMEEEEEN! {Sung by angelic voices.}

There’s a short version of the argument in Nature as well, but the
longer version is well worth the read.

Of course, I have tons of quibbles with wording or sub-arguments, ways
of making points, choices of emblematic cases and the like in the
longer BBS article (and I’ll get to a couple of those below the
‘fold’), but I don’t want to lose my over-arching sense that there is
so much right in this piece. So before I get into the discussion, I
just want to thank all of the authors, not just Henrich, Heine and
Norenzayan, but also the authors of the responses, who pulled it
together when I didn’t try. The collection is a really remarkable
discussion, one that I find gratifying in such a prominent place, and I
do hope that the target article has a significant impact on the
behavioural sciences.

If you have one blockhead colleague who simply does not get that
surveying his or her students in ‘Introduction to Psychology’ fails to
provide instant access to ‘human nature,’ this is the article to pass
along. If that colleague still doesn’t get it, please stop talking to
them. Really. You. Are. Wasting. Your. Breath. If Henrich, Heine and
Norenzayan don’t shake their confidence, I’m not sure what can.
The weirdest people in the world?
Joseph Henrich,Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan (2010).
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 33, Issue 2-3, June 2010 pp 61-83
http://journals.cambridge.org.simsrad.net.ocs.mq.edu.au/action/displayAbstract?aid=7825833


Abstract

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human
psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples
drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and
Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume
that either there is little variation across human populations, or that
these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any
other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of
the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests
both that there is substantial variability in experimental results
across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual
compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains
reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial
reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning,
reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the
heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD
societies, including young children, are among the least representative
populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these
findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects
of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a
priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is
universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these
empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in
addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from
this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close
by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences
to best tackle these challenges.

Article summary

If you absolutely don’t want to read the target article (you should),
I’ll also provide a bit of summary discussion to supplement the
abstract. Skip ahead to the next section if you just want my response.

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan first survey some of the evidence that
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic subjects – more
specifically, University undergrads – are disproportionately the
empirical foundation for claims being made, either explicitly or
implicitly, about human nature. The evidence here is pretty staggering,
even for someone like me who is suspicious of psychology for precisely
this reason.

A recent survey by Arnett (2008) of the top journals in six
sub-disciplines of psychology revealed that 68% of subjects were from
the US and fully 96% from ‘Western’ industrialized nations (European,
North American, Australian or Israeli). That works out to a 96%
concentration on 12% of the world’s population (Henrich et al. 2010:
63). Or, to put it another way, you’re 4000 times more likely to be
studied by a psychologist if you’re a university undergraduate at a
Western university than a randomly selected individual strolling around
outside the ivory tower.

Moreover, psychology is disproportionately American, and especially
English-speaking, even compared to other scientific fields. 70% of all
psych citations originate from US research institutions, compared with
37% in a field like chemistry, and the top four countries for
psychology citations are all English speaking.

Despite the skewed sampling, psychologists seldom offer cautionary
notes about the source of their data or its potential cultural
boundedness, and likely would be testy if the cross-culturally critical
among us suggested that they retitle their publications to reflect the
source of their information: such as, the Journal of Experimental
Psychology in High-Enrollment American Research Universities:
Undergraduate Psychology Students’ Perception and Performance, a
personal favourite. Henrich and colleagues do a good job of pointing
out where there are exceptions to the pattern, and many of the authors
of comments have been leaders in trying to implement broader,
cross-cultural sampling, but the pattern is pretty pronounced in spite
of noteworthy exceptions.

Henrich and colleagues then go on to use existing studies to contrast
WEIRD subjects with other sorts of people on a series of increasingly
close, ‘telescoping’ contrasts: first, they compare industrialized and
‘small-scale’ societies in areas such as visual perception, fairness,
cooperation, folkbiology, and spatial cognition. The authors then
highlight the contrast of ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ populations on
measures such as social behaviour, self-concepts, self-esteem, agency
(a sense of having free choice), conformity, patterns of reasoning
(holistic v. analytic), and morality.

The authors then examine how Americans specifically stand out from
other subject pools in comparative research to highlight how the
specific dominance of US subject pools in psychological research might
skew our understanding. In particular, Henrich and colleagues survey
the issue of individualism, choice, and other outlying US traits. This
section is among the thinnest in the article, but it is still full of
suggestive data, especially for those of us who are sensitized to the
dissimilarities glossed over in the catch-all term, ‘Western’ (my
Australian wife and I, a Yank, frequently find ourselves contending
with Oz-Sepo contrasts in daily life, even though Australia and the US
would typically be considered quite similar ‘Western’ cultures).

Finally, Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan contrast the Americans who
typically wind up as psychology subjects with the whole population of
the US, highlighting the diversity among adult Americans in such area
as social behaviour, moral reasoning, cooperation, fairness,
performance on IQ tests and analytical abilities. US undergraduates
exhibit demonstrable differences, not only from non-university educated
Americans, but even from previous generations of their own families.

Herich et al. are careful to point out that ‘difference’ is not the
whole story, that there are underlying similarities among the diverse
groups, and they are agnostic about the causes of various contrasting
results. They suggest (2010: 79) that determining a set of criteria for
traits likely to be universals would be helpful to psychology and
behavioural science and offer a few examples.

But perhaps the main point is a cautionary one, arguing that the
developmental environment for WEIRD children may be statistically
unusual in a wide variety of ways from the typical environment of
modern Homo sapiens throughout our species’ time on the planet:

The fact that WEIRD people are the outliers in so many key domains of
the behavioral sciences may render them one of the worst subpopulations
one could study for generalizing about Homo sapiens…. WEIRD people,
from this perspective, grow up in, and adapt to, a rather atypical
environment vis-à-vis that of most of human history. It should not be
surprising that their psychological world is unusual as well. (2010:
79-80)

As a counter-balance to the oddity of WEIRD subjects, and their
overwhelming over-representation in psychological research to this
date, Henrich and colleagues recommend an ambitious cross-cultural
research agenda, changes to publication policy to redress the
imbalance, and a range of other practical, albeit quite difficult,
policies.

They highlight that adding subjects to our pools may not be sufficient
to fix biases that are inherent in research questions, method, or
theory, a point that several of the commentators also discuss, some
with less optimism than Henrich and colleagues (for example, Gosling,
Carson, John and Potter; Shweder; and Baumard and Sperber).

Overall, what most recommends this article is not that these arguments
have never been made before, but rather the breadth and depth of the
empirical sources that Henrich and colleagues draw into the discussion.
For example, Paul Rozin, who arguably has made very similar arguments
before, lauds Henrich and colleagues, writing about the message of
cross-cultural variation, ‘never has it been so thoroughly documented
and elaborated into all the domains in which it is relevant. And never
so convincingly’ (2010: 108). High praise, indeed.

So what possible quibbles could I have with a piece that clearly has so
much so right? Let the picking of nits begin!

Is being WEIRD really what makes them odd?

Henrich and colleagues use the acronym WEIRD (Western, Educated,
Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) to capture the distinctiveness of
the typical subjects used in psychology experiments – university
students in psychology classes – but I suspect that this acronym,
however clever, fails to truly capture how odd these subjects are. One
could add a host of other terms that would highlight other outlying
characteristics of this population, especially differences that may not
be so obvious to WEIRD researchers.

Although WEIRD is terribly catchy and quite manageable, it may not even
focus us on the most important distinctions, nor may it reflect a good
starting point for a truly trans-cultural psychology, carting our own
self-conceptions and obsessions, surreptitiously, into the
cross-cultural comparisons. Is WEIRD weird enough to constitute a break
from typical ways of thinking among the WEIRD researchers? (God, this
if fun. It’s one reason I think the article has legs: rhetorical
catchiness.)

For example, when I brought one of my Brazilian subjects to an American
university at which I previously taught, his characterization of the
American students’ differences from young Brazilians with whom he had
more contact focused on none of these traits (W. E. I. R. or D.). He
was more struck by their large size (both height and BMI, to put it
nicely), their frumpy androgynous clothing (anyone here not wearing a
sweatshirt?), their materialism, their clumsiness and physical
ineptitude, and their ethnic and personal homogeneity. If my Brazilian
colleague were to characterize the oddness of the WEIRD, he wouldn’t
focus on the traits Henrich and colleagues have chosen in their
designation.

From the perspective of my admittedly non-academic Brazilian colleague,
the truly outstanding characteristics of the US students were
characteristics like their body types, the diminishing of gender
markers, and the evidence of extraordinary peer-group conformity in
bearing, expression and personal presentation. His observations are
hardly scientific, but they suggest that focusing on ‘Western-ness’,
education, economic system, wealth, and political system certainly
doesn’t exhaust the parameters of difference and it might not even
highlight the most salient, although it does correspond to patterns of
the Big Variables in Western scholarship about difference (when I was
in grad school, it was the Holy Trinity: gender, class and ethnicity).

I don’t think that my point is a fundamental disagreement with Henrich
and colleagues, but a concern that the parameter of difference we
choose to highlight, even in the simplest designation, might itself be
a culturally-generated bias. Anthropologists are well acquainted with
having our subjects point to traits that are invisible to the Western
research as ‘the crucial’ characteristic for understanding the gap. For
example, ‘rich’ may seem an obvious contrast to poverty, but we know
that not all ‘poverty’ is the same, nor are all ‘rich’ people able to
experience in the same way their material situation. Some economists
have argued that inequality is more crucial for understanding the
experience of deprivation, for example, than absolute wealth. And poor
populations often fix, not on their material deprivation, but on other
qualities to describe their difference from the wealthy (or the WEIRD).
For example, religious differences, family dynamics, or caste might be
salient to people from other cultural backgrounds.

In addition, I worry that some of our cultural ideology and self
deception may be smuggled in under the terms themselves, especially
‘Western,’ ‘industrialized’ and ‘democratic.’ ‘Western’ has been too
comprehensively discussed to really dwell on here, but I’m struck by
both ‘democratic’ and ‘industrialized’ as forms of self description for
Americans, especially. After all, isn’t ‘de-industrialization’ or
post-industrialization a key economic transformation in the United
States, and aren’t many American commentators worried about the
hollowing out of ‘democracy’ in an age of voter apathy and corporate
domination of media and political lobbying?

If WEIRD college students aren’t voting in large numbers, for example,
and feel profoundly alienated from politics, isn’t it problematic to
think of ‘democracy’ as shaping their attitudes? I’d be more inclined
to say we should examine the landless farmers in Brazil I worked with
while studying the Landless Movement to understand ‘democratic’
populations. They had long community meetings modeled on the labour
movement or anarchist movement to come to decisions. I doubt my
university students in the US had experienced anything nearly as
‘democratic.’

Again, I think that my critique is more than a bit unfair, as Henrich
and colleagues are writing for an experimentalist academic community
that needs to be made aware of the distortions introduced by accustomed
research methods. They’re not writing for an audience of
deconstructivist, left-leaning, post-colonial political economists,
anthropologists, or cultural studies scholars. My ‘critiques’ are more
about how we might shepherd the next stage of research if Henrich,
Heine and Norenzayan are successful with their intervention. I worry
that, even if psychologists, brain scientists, and evolutionary
theorists decide that they need to take human variation seriously,
anthropology isn’t going to be ready as a discipline to help (one more
reason I appreciate the inter-disciplinary program that Henrich and his
colleagues are sketching).

So, to sum up this post-Henrich, next stage concern: I worry that
W.E.I.R.D. classification flatters the WEIRD, focusing on traits that
Westerners typically highlight to describe themselves in ways that are,
however inadvertently, pretty self-congratulatory. If we were to call
the same group, Materialist, Young, self-Obsessed, Pleasure-seeking,
Isolated, Consumerist, and Sedentary (MYOPICS)… you get the idea. (By
the way, I’m not committed to this, only to getting my own acronym –
You know the steps in the cheap acronym process: Set acronym. Find
words to fit each letter.)

How the WEIRD get weird

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan are really good in the target article to
refrain from too much speculation about the explanations for the
peculiarity of the WEIRD. It’s one of the many things that I think they
need to be congratulated on, and their openness invites a wide-ranging
discussion of the many likely contributing facotrs. But many of the
specific qualities highlighted in the Henrich et al. piece and in the
responses likely do not stem directly from being either W., E., I., R.
or D., so the classification itself can be misleading.

For example, one of the prime candidates for the cause of some of the
measurable differences is variation in child-rearing techniques,
especially forms of verbal interaction with infants and young children,
their visual and sensory environments, and the manual forms of care
given to children. WEIRDness doesn’t necessarily determine this
childhood environment, even though many childcare practices that might
help to create the psychological statistical anomalies we find in these
populations do correlate with being WEIRD. If English is affecting how
the WEIRD think in ways that make them unusual, for example, there’s no
inherent reason why English speaking-ness necessarily leads to
WEIRDness, although the WEIRD are disproportionately English-speaking
(especially those surveyed for psychological research).

Again, this is not so much a critique of Henrich and colleagues but a
consideration of where we go from here, how we get at human
psychological variation. The point is just that it will not be enough
to try to get populations who are different to Us (if You, the reader,
are WEIRD) in ways that we recognize. For example, although poor
populations within Western countries may demonstrate significant
variation, they might not, and not because variation is not possible;
they might share child caring practices with wealthier countrymen
without sharing wealth or income profile. The choice of comparison
should be motivated by the research question and hypotheses about
relevant causal dynamics, not simply, like the broader reliance on
WEIRD subjects, the result of convenience in sampling.

Who you callin’ ‘SMALL-scale’!?

Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan use the term ‘small-scale,’ although they
are very clear what the term means and that it is not a thin proxy for
‘primitive’ (see p. 123, fn#4). I’m more than a bit uncomfortable with
the term ‘small-scale’ although it is arguably the most acceptable
classification for the groups that are being clustered (and miles and
miles and miles better than ‘primitive’ and other bare-facedly
ethnocentric terms). The problem is, what’s the contrast with
‘small-scale’? If it’s ‘Western,’ than we have an asymmetrical binary
distinction where some groups will arguably fall under both categories
or under neither.

For example, ‘small-scale’ focuses on a cluster of traits that don’t
NECESSARILY co-vary, although they might in until-recently foraging
groups: small, geographically-bounded groups with slight division of
labour, local organization through kinship, self-sufficient in food
provisioning, and face-to-face interaction. The obvious ‘none of the
above’ cases in the ‘small-scale v. Western’ contrast are non-Western
groups who are not small-scale, such as city dwellers in Asia, Latin
America, Africa and the Pacific (outside Australia and New Zealand).
This group would constitute a substantial part of the world’s
population, if not the largest grouping.

And what about Western populations living in small-scale settings? For
example, I live in a very wealthy town of around 2000 people where I
frequently encounter people I know on the street. As members of a
gentrified country town, we grow and eat a lot of local produce, more
so every year for ideological reasons, and, given 5 or 10 minutes, most
of the locals can find kin or age-cohort connections in a process that
is as seemingly obligatory as it is tedious for a ‘blow in’ (local
argot for an in-migrant) like myself to watch. I’m surrounded by people
interested in green lifestyles, self-sufficiency, ‘slow food,’
reconnecting socially – many of them living on million-dollar
properties. We’re obviously WEIRD – waaaaaay WEIRD – but also, in an
admittedly tendentious argument, ‘small scale.’

I don’t think for one SECOND that Henrich and colleagues are not aware
of this issue, but I think that the problem highlights a stumbling
block for anthropologists doing cross-cultural comparisons more
generally: the use of binary classifications is likely to be a nagging
intellectual handicap. Much more useful is to really think through
Henrich’s suggestion, in the same footnote (p. 123, fn#4), about an
‘n-dimensional’ comparative space for talking about cultural
distinctions.

The contrast of ‘small-scale’ to ‘Western’ seems to me to be an
artifact of more simplistic forms of cross-cultural comparison, more
‘primitive’ intellectual projects than the one Henrich and colleagues
are proposing. So much of the discussion in the article, including the
really intriguing graphs showing the wide range of variation WITHIN
both WEIRD and ‘small-scale’ groups, runs counter to the dichotomy,
highlighting the fact that human diversity can’t be too quickly
recuperated with old-fashioned Us-Them thinking. I don’t think Henrich
and colleagues fall victim to bipolar thinking as an intellectual
short-cut, but I worry that there’s dead-falls lurking along the path
of the terminology itself.

My own candidate for one source of the oddity

Although Henrich and colleagues are laudably restrained in speculating
about the sources of differences between WEIRD populations and other
groups, I want to put another candidate on the table that’s discussed
by Lana B. Karasik, Karen E. Adolph, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, and
Marc. H. Bornstein in one of the responses that I enjoyed a lot. They
talk about ‘WEIRD walking,’ the way that WEIRD populations are also
outliers in terms of motor development in ways that many people in the
field overlook.

Karasik and colleagues describe how WEIRD children’s patterns of motor
development became enshrined in psychology through testing procedures,
test items and norms into an understanding of universal ‘stages’ of
motor development (see 2010: 95). Even when cross-cultural research was
conducted, these culturally-specific criteria, derived from examining
WEIRD developmental pathways, meant that researchers were often
carrying with them tools that were ill-suited to study other sorts of
children. Or these psychologists were simply comparing diverse children
to WEIRD ones on standards set by the WEIRD children.

One example of this that I have discussed is overhand throwing, a task
that has been used in some tests of motor coordination in spite of the
fact that different cultural groups demonstrate enormous variability in
the activity because it is a skill, not a universally-acquired
entailment of being human. Some children learn to throw in environments
that support, model and reward the activity; others never really learn
to throw particularly well because their activity patterns simply do
not include the opportunity to learn (I’ve written in a book chapter
that will soon appear about ‘throwing like a Brazilian,’ an analogue to
‘throwing like a girl’).

Karasik and colleagues point out that even such ‘basic’ motor abilities
at crawling are susceptible to manipulation: the trend to put newborn
children on their backs to sleep in the West, for example, has retarded
the development of crawling in a population where children formerly
would routinely sleep on their bellies. In some groups, normal
development may not even include crawling, children skipping the stage
entirely or using some other intermittent form of locomotion, like
‘bum-shuffling’ or scooting about while seated.

In my own research, the physical abilities of WEIRD university students
stand out more clearly as strikingly odd than many of their other
traits, and I’m convinced that the extraordinary inactivity of this
population, coupled with their high calorie diets, has more diverse and
wide-ranging effects than simply leading to an epidemic of obesity,
Type-II diabetes, and other diet-related health problems. For example,
capoeira instruction, a subject close to my heart, has to start at a
much different place for American youth than it does with Brazilian
kids in Salvador where I did my field research. Even teaching salsa
lessons at a Midwestern US university drove home the profoundly
different motor starting point, prior to the lessons, of young adults
in the US compared to Brazilians (and I suspect, to many populations in
Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere).

The point is not just to rehearse the typical alarmist discussion of
the ‘obesity epidemic,’ but also to point out the profound potential
implications of radical differences in activity environments for
children during their development. I don’t think most WEIRD theorists
realize just how powerful an influence sedentary living is on our
psychological, physiological, metabolic, endocrine, and neural
development because most of us, subjects and researchers alike, are SO
sedentary. WEIRD bodies have so much unused energy from their diets,
especially with their levels of activity plummeting, that I find it
hard to believe we understand metabolic patterns that would have
dominated much of human prehistory.

To argue that WEIRD subjects are a good window in on ‘human nature’ is
difficult when, from the perspective of metabolic energy and
expenditure, the WEIRD are such outliers in the whole history of our
species. We know that this radically unusual metabolic situation —
massive energy surplus with less and less expenditure — is profoundly
affecting mortality patterns: in WEIRD societies, most of the leading
causes of death are, arguably, directly linked to the human body’s
difficulty of coping with this situation, and that’s even after
generations of sedentary life in which to adapt. But the psychological
and neurological consequences of sedentarism are less well understood
in part, in my opinion, because most WEIRD researchers have a hard time
even imagining how arduous life would have been. Throughout human
existence, most humans likely have been phenomenally active, and
athletic, compared to WEIRD populations, out of necessity.

I’m going to have to write something more in depth on this, but I just
feel the need to flag it. If I had written a response, I probably would
have focused on this trait because it runs against WEIRD researchers’
self understanding. The WEIRD tend to think of themselves as unusually
healthy, and by measures of things like infectious disease rates, death
from accident, and infant mortality, they certainly are. But from a
broad, cross-cultural view, the extraordinary inactivity of the WEIRD,
coupled with their access to very energy dense, highly processed food
sources, makes them outliers in ways that I’m not sure we fully
comprehend.

Taking issue with some of the responses

A number of the commentators bring really interesting points to the
discussion. A few that I have to single out for special praise are
Majid and Levinson on WEIRD languages; Leavens, Bard and Hopkins on
BIZARRE chimpanzees (the acronym thing is apparently contagious);
Karasik and colleagues on motor development; Chiao and Cheon on brain
imaging; Ceci and colleagues on hiccups in research design; Fessler on
unknown unknowns in shame research; Lancy on ethnocentrism in child
development research… There’s really a lot of great discussion, most of
it building upon what Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan have laid out in
the target article. Again, I can only really recommend that you read
the original.

That said, there are a couple of responses that I have to take issue
with, including a couple that Henrich and colleagues handle far more
diplomatically than I would have.

‘Difference is really uniformity if you just ignore difference’

Lowell Gaertner, Constantine Sedikides, Huajian Cai and Jonathan D.
Brown basically write a piece that says, ‘yeah, yeah, differences,
differences, yada yada…. But the over-arching human universals, the
kind that we label with vague generalities that could be applied to
anything, are really the point, and they’re GENETIC!’ Frequent readers
of our weblog will know that this kind of argument gets me as hopped up
and raving as a post-Halloween kindergarten class. (And don’t even get
me started on errant use of the word, ‘reify’…) Danks and Rose offer a
similar, but less objectionable use of this argument strategy,
suggesting that universality is in the learning process, not in what is
learned.

Henrich and colleagues do an excellent job of shredding the specific
empirical case made by Gaertner and colleagues about the universality
of ‘positive self-views’ (see esp. pp. 119-121), so I won’t dwell on
the nuts and bolts. Flogging a dead horse and all. What I just want to
highlight is that the idea that there is something ‘essential,’ an
obdurate and universal ‘human nature,’ is NOT evolutionary thinking. To
argue against ‘human nature’ is not to be anti-evolutionary.

For some reason, some (though not ALL) theorists try to make the
argument for human variation appear to be against evolution, which is
something I can NOT understand, except in the narrow confines of the
history of feuding within anthropology. Even in my freshman human
evolution course, one of the key arguments from Week Two is that even
Darwin’s classical perspective on natural selection says that species
change and that variation is a fundamental precondition for natural
selection even if stabilizing selection produces patterns of continuity
over time.

But the bigger problem with Gaertner et al. is the common assumption
that, although there’s diversity in ‘behaviour’ or ‘phenotype,’ on some
other higher level of abstraction, there’s unity, even if that unity
has to be stated in such vague terms that it’s essentially meaningless.
Likewise, I’m not convinced that Danks and Rose are on solid ground, or
making much progress by trying to separate out learning processes from
what is learned, and then to argue that the processes are universal. As
an empirical statement, the argument for universal learning processes
is obviously false. Some societies, like WEIRD ones, have extensive,
explicit, segregated systems for formal learning; others have virtually
no separate contexts for learning or have very different sorts of
institutions than classrooms.

I just don’t think I get why some theorists must, as soon as confronted
by evidence of diversity, immediately declare that there’s
‘uniformity,’ at some ‘higher level’ of abstraction. The act can often
sound like a vague rearguard defense, as if there is some underlying
need to demand uniformity in spite of evidence to the contrary. For
example, confronted by the empirical reality of profound dietary
variation in humans, of survival for multiple generations at near
starvation levels, of culturally-induced dietary restrictions, of
eating patterns that are unhealthy and self-destructive, even voluntary
self-starvation or gross over-consumptions, some defenders of
universalism, like Gaertner and colleagues say, ‘the diverse diets are
connected and assimilated by a universal need for sustenance’ (2010:
93).

The point is not that there are no universals; it’s that the
‘assimilation’ of diversity into a meaningless ‘universal’ is a hollow
exercise that seeks to escape from the very point that Henrich et al.
are marking. Gaertner and colleagues argue that apparent,
empirically-verifiable diversity is actually unity at an ‘abstract
process and function’ level, a retreat to an unfalsifiable and
ineffable assertion, especially when coupled with allusions to
‘genotype’ that also can’t be shown to be empirically founded. Even
absolute, empirically demonstrated universality is NOT proof that
something is ‘human nature’; everywhere on Earth, humans deal with
gravity, but this is not due to ‘human nature,’ except that to be a
human is, like all other matter, to have mass affected by gravity.

It would be alright, logically, to retreat to universal declarations
about human universals of process or function ONLY IF the psychologists
who made this retreat would then refrain from making any statement or
implying any characterization of humans more specific than that
abstract universalism. In other words, if you’re going to argue that
the universal trait is the need for sustenance, than you have to stop
yourself from making pseudo-evolutionary arguments about food
preferences for salt-and-vinegar potato chips, fizzy soft drinks, and
‘death by chocolate’ cake, or anything else. That is, you can’t
strategically retreat to abstract high ground as soon as you’re
challenged empirically on sloppy universalisms only to boldly foray
forth into the land of blanket statements about more detailed
characteristics of ‘human nature’ as soon as you think no one is
watching.

What I don’t get, I guess, is the defensiveness. Are the knee-jerk
universalists worried that, if we concede that there might be
fundamental variation in humans, we inevitably move toward racism? If
so, we’re in trouble. Do they think that the existence of human genes
means that we must necessarily be a species of genetic clones? Are they
worried that science can’t be conducted on a topic where one cannot
make blanket universalizing declarations? If so, someone should tell
biologists because they’re in trouble. Is it just intellectual
laziness? Or is it a fear of some previous intellectual error, like the
denial of science itself, committed by some intellectuals in the name
of diversity? I suspect that it might be the last, but, unfortunately,
it often sounds like one of the earlier objections.

I don’t have a problem with saying there are some universals; I just
have a problem with someone, when confronted with evidence that a
particular trait is NOT universal, immediately trying to declare that
it really, really is uniform if we just squint our eyes, blur our
understanding, and step back further from the object of study. What’s
the point?

You say WEIRD, I say nuh-uh!

I’d also take issue with Paul Rozin’s commentary, although I think he
makes some excellent points (and I very much respect his work). My main
problem is the assumption that technologically-driven human development
will necessarily lead the world to become, well, WEIRDer:

But the main point of my commentary is that although the NAU [North
American undergraduate] is truly anomalous, this subspecies of Homo
sapiens is a vision of the future. With the Internet, ready
availability of information of all sorts, computer fluency as key to
success in the world, and ease in negotiating a world where text as
opposed to face-to-face interactions are the meat of human
relationships, the NAU is at the vanguard of what humans are going to
be like. (Rozin 2010: 109)

Perhaps I just don’t share Rozin’s techno-optimistic ‘vision of the
future’ online as a species, but Rozin seems to assume that the
wealthiest, most well educated, most privileged and greediest
resource-consuming sliver of the world’s population is just a bit out
in front temporarily from where everyone will eventually arrive.
Someday, when we grow up as societies, we’ll all be like college
students. God save us if that’s the case, because the environmental
footprint is going to be catastrophic unless a lot changes in the next
few years.

I don’t think I’d be alone in my suspicion that this view of digital
‘modernization’ is reminiscent of many declarations that some new
technology was going to change us fundamentally as a species; so far, I
think the evidentiary ball is in the court of the techno-optimists to
write a plausible account of how that will happen. Just as some might
argue the world is getting WEIRDer, others might argue that the Western
nations are less uniformly WEIRD.

I’d also take issue with Alexandra Maryanski’s commentary, but I’m just
not really sure I get where she’s coming from, so I don’t know where to
start (Henrich and colleagues don’t respond at length to this piece).
On the one hand, Maryanski seems to be aware of cross-cultural
research; on the other, I’m not sure she’s really read it the same way
that I would. The piece is so shot full of rhetorical questions that
it’s hard to follow the logic, but she seems to be saying that, because
ethnographic data on hunter-gatherers says that they have ‘high
individualism, reciprocity, and low levels of inequality,’ then WEIRD
societies are sort of just like the societies in which humans first
evolved…

For, despite all the multiple ills of industrialized societies, WEIRD
societies may be more compatible with our human nature than the
high-density kinship constraints of horticultural societies or the
“peasant” constraints of agrarian societies with their privileged few

So, people in industrial societies are JUST LIKE hunter-gatherers,
except for the gigantic scale, anonymous interaction, replacement of
reciprocity-based relationships with market transactions, and the
unprecedented-in-human-history levels of material inequality. (For the
slow readers, yes, that’s irony.) Oh, and the domestication of plants
and animals, sedentary settlements, high technology, extended classroom
education, mass media imagery, enormous social institutions, changes in
family structure, decrease parent-infant contact, radically new built
environment, completely different, dense social structure…

That’s why I say that, although there’s evidence that she’s aware of
the Human Relations Area Files, I’m just not sure how Maryanski read
them to come away with the impression that the WEIRD are just like the
foraging peoples in the ethnographic record. Maybe the train just left
the station without me on this argument, but I do not get it.

The argument she MIGHT make is that, with the enormous proliferation of
technology and division of labour, WEIRD humans, especially in the
extended adolescent period created by the system of tertiary education
that delivers them as subjects to psychology researchers, demonstrate
what humans might be like if they were utterly REMOVED from most normal
selective pressures. If anything, university students might be
demonstrating the utter nihilism and lack of restraint when normal
external scaffolding on human behaviour and decision making are relaxed
and replaced with fermented motivation, collective peer effervescence,
and complete discounting of any future outcomes…

Might make that argument.

I’m not sure I’m persuaded by it, but maybe slavish obedience to peer
pressure, high levels of inebriation and pizza consumption, cluttered
living spaces, transitory sexual relationships, intermittent
high-stress all-nighters punctuating months-long periods of sloth-like
inactivity except for feeding, drinking and playing video games – maybe
this is in fact what humans choose to do when divested of all
responsibility for themselves with virtually no immediate pressures
except for self-created social ones. Or maybe I’m just describing my
own time in college.

Concluding thoughts

I apologize for this overly long discussion, especially in a blog
format, but I just feel terribly inspired by this piece by Henrich,
Heine and Norenzayan. I can’t thank the authors enough, and I am going
to learn how to use a citation tracker specifically so that I can
follow the subsequent impact of this article.

My reservations notwithstanding, I think it’s a remarkable piece, one
that really needed to be written, and I congratulate the authors on it.
It’s a thorough, well-thought piece, but with the added advantage of
having some especially well-chosen examples and that colossal,
infectious, acronymic hook, the glossy term that captures such a key
idea well. I think the piece will travel well and might actually have a
terribly salutary effect on the WEIRD populations it is targeting.

References discussed:

Arnett, J. 2008. The neglected 95%: Why American psychology needs to
become less American. American Psychologist 63(7): 602-14.

Danks, David, and David Rose. 2010. Diversity in representations;
uniformity in learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 90-91.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000075

Gaertner, Lowell, Constantine Sedikides, Huajian Cai, and Jonathon D.
Brown. 2010. It’s not WEIRD, it’s WRONG: When Researchers Overlook
uNderlying Genotypes, they will not detect universal processes.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 93-94. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000105

Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. Most people
are not WEIRD. Nature 466(1): 29.

Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. The weirdest
people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 61-135 (with
commentary). doi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X Check Joseph Henrich’s
homepage for a pdf of the article and related audio files.

Karasik, Lana B., Karen E. Adolph, Catherine S. Tamis-LeMonda, and Marc
H. Bornstein. 2010. WEIRD walking: Cross-cultural research on motor
development. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 95-96.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000117

Maryanski, Alexandra. 2010. WEIRD societies may be more compatible with
human nature. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 103-104.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000191

Rozin, Paul. 2010. The weirdest people in the world are a harbinger of
the future of the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33: 108-109.
doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000312


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