It's Saturday, a bright, clear, cold day in Yokohama. At The Word Works, we are clearing our inboxes of left-over bits of business. Down at the station the halls in the underground malls are filled with booths selling Christmas cakes, white or chocolate layer cakes decorated with strawberries. KFC has specials on buckets of fried chicken. Couples are planning romantic evenings. Christians, a tiny minority here, will be headed to churches for services this evening.

The service…

Adam Fish has posted an interview with Dutch anthropologist Dorien Zandbergen on Savage Minds. The topic is "New Edge," a Californian fusion of…

Adam Fish has posted an interview with Dutch anthropologist Dorien Zandbergen on Savage Minds. The topic is "New Edge," a Californian fusion of…

In Japan 'tis the season for bonenkai (忘年会, "forget the year parties"). Clubs, companies, volunteer groups, all sorts of organizations hold parties at which food, drink and frivolity mark, in a carnivalesque mode, the approaching end of the current year. There are similarities to "office parties" elsewhere. I wonder about differences. 

The Japanese name for these parties is, to this American-born gaijin striking. Why should the year be forgotten? Does forgotten equal…

I have just posted a review of two remarkable attempts to humanize statistics.  The books are 

Andrew Vickers (2010) What is a p-Value Anyway? 34 Stories to Help You Actually Understand Statistics. New York: Addison-Wesley, and

David Salsburg (2001) The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the…

I knew Hiroshi Tamura as one of the organizers of the Ethnographic Praxis in Corporations (EPIC) conference in 2010. I assumed that he is an anthropologist. I was wrong. He tells me that his academic background was in computer science and engineering. The now-dated bio to which the link I've attached to his name says that he was hired as an account executive by Hakuhodo, Japan's second-largest advertising agency, in 1994. He is…