In his recent book, Joseph Henrich argues Western culture exists because the Catholic Church got obsessed with incest. Here’s my in-depth review.

Yes you should read ‘Scale’. No, don’t believe everything it says.

Continuing the chapter-by-chapter review of Seawright’s book on Multi-Method Social Science took me longer than I imagined and it should have, but here we go again.

Review of the first chapter of the book “Multi-Method Social Science” by Jason Seawright, published with Cambridge University Press in 2016.

In Finding Pathways: Mixed-Method Research for Studying Causal Mechanisms , Weller and Barnes seek to explain “how the small-N component of multi-method research can meaningfully contribute and add value to the study of causal mechanisms” (quote from blurb). The book contains nine chapters, including the introduction and concluding chapter.

The social science literature is full of discussions about causation and what the best method for causal inference might be. However, a relatively small percentage of them draw on the philosophical debate about causation. Certainly, there is a great deal of talk about philosophy of science on the ontological and metaphysical level, including, for example, engagement with the relation between neo-positivism and realism.

Back at the end of November I learned about the existence of Becky Crew’s new book. At the time it was not available stateside, but I wrote to Becky and asked for a review copy, and she kindly had her press guy send me one. I am finally getting my review posted, and none to soon–Andy Farke got his copy from Amazon last week. You can get the book here: Amazon, Amazon.co.uk (temporarily out of stock as of this writing), New South Books.

[Note added in press: Matt published his last post just as I was finishing this one up, so I am posting it without having read his beyond seeing that he also mentions All Yesterdays .] It was back at the Lyme Regis SVPCA in 2011 that I first saw the material that’s now available as the new palaeoart book All Yesterdays [amazon.com, amazon.co.uk]. It was the first talk of the conference, billed as an

Hi folks, It’s been a while since I posted here. I haven’t gone off SV-POW! or anything, just going through one of my periodic doldrums (read: super-busy with Other Stuff). I’m writing now to draw your attention to two books that I’m pretty darned excited about.

Reinventing Discovery, the book by Michael Nielsen we all have been waiting for, has finally been published on Friday. Today I flew to Boston for the Microsoft Research eScience Workshop: Transforming Scholarly Communication, and reading the book on the plane was the perfect preparation for the workshop.