Friday, June 25, 2010

Knowledge-base Tool Kit: Social Bargaining positions

Image caption: Cartoon inspired by artwork of Scott Adams, United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

In the existing interconnected global social complex, there are two main types of business entities: 1) Owners and/or overseers of profit-driven concerns that supply commodities of various forms, and 2) suppliers of labor. The former group ranges from financiers to the management of manufacturing, service and retail concerns, while the latter essentially comprises of the wage-worker. The global social setup is of course complex enough to obscure the obviousness of its interconnected business relations in all its facets to an ordinary observer, beyond that observer's own immediate role in society and relations directly linked to that, e.g. employer-employee social relations....so, where does that leave an ordinary wage-worker?

Saturday, June 19, 2010

KhoiSan: As the "Oldest" Surviving "Tribes"


The reader may recall having heard the claim that the KhoiSan are the "oldest living human populations" at some point or another. The saying may well have taken the character of something of a religious faith within some circles. When the whereabouts of the source for this "understanding" is inquired, common references have been to the National Geographic human genome project web-page and Semino et al.'s (2001) study regarding the "deepest clades" for instance. The former bases this on rather flimsy material that KhoiSan male gene pools comprises of deep root clades like hg A, while the latter has every now and then fallen victim to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of what is being related in the authors' findings within the contexts that they were made. Fact is the KhoiSan are no more representative of the oldest anatomical modern human beings any more than other living populations.