The Desperation of No Ties

I live in Denver now.

I used to understand why people don’t just move to improve their economic situation.  It’s hard to find jobs outside of your area, you’re leaving behind your social network and all the support it entails, it costs a lot more to move than most people think.  But now that I am unemployed and moving… now I understand.

Social network, developed over 20 years?  Still there, but digitized.

Intimate knowledge of good places to look for jobs, good restaurants, street names?  Gone.  I don’t even know where to take my recycling.  Colorado doesn’t even have bottle-deposit recycling.  Barbarians.

Savings from two years of living frugally on a teaching assistant’s salary?  Replaced with growing credit card debt.

I am the highly-educated, privileged white male, and moving is still a big pain in the ass.  I wouldn’t recommend it.

Bitchin’ sociologists!

It is the end of my fourth day in Bostonia, and I required by my sense of justice to issue the following statement:

Sociology, you rock.

Maplust

I just can’t help myself: I love me some visual data.

Update 1.

Now it’s just getting absurd.

Oh, for God’s sake.

Checking Out

I have a novel idea for an intro to soc class - one that has been inside my head long enough that it is threatening to become brain crack.

I don’t really like the standard intro format.  I certainly understand it; when you cram a whole bunch of highly-specialized people into a department and then develop The One Course that (in the darkness) binds them, you’re going to end up with what is basically a hodgepodge of all of their interests.  But let me tell you: it sucks.  It sucked when I took it, and it blew when I taught it.  As I have seen, a good professor can make it work, but I just don’t think the structure is enough to build a really mind-blowing course.

I’m not sure why we do it this way, either.  My political science department offered an intro course for each of its specialties (your typical American Gov’t, International, Comparative, and Theory/Methods); econ has Micro and Macro, at least.  But sociology, along with psychology, offer introductory courses that are something like (to quote from the comments on a paper I turned in a couple years ago) “describing the leaves on trees from a jet at 40,000 feet and 500mph”.  All I came away with, and much of what I felt like I was teaching my students, were tidbits.

My idea, then, is to teach an intro course with a unifying theme.  Something that would be able to unify most of the specialties while being a smidge less abstract than the Big Three Perspectives.  Something classic but not dead.  Something eye-opening.

Something like… suicide.

Depressing, I know.  But every specialty has something to say about suicide, because it’s a sort of ultimate rejection of society.  The Big Three have their perspectives, of course.  I think that teaching methods would gain tremendously because there would be a single focus for each, allowing for a practical comparison of which method does what.  Then each of the usual sections - culture, deviance, family, religion, inequality, organizations, etc. - could all chip in.  An intro student from this class might not know as much about each, since the content would be suicide-focused, but they would know how to address a social (urgh) problem from beginning to end.

If prepared well enough, you could even let the students sort of “spontaneously” determine what to cover next.  This is essentially what I did on the first day of teaching intro discussion sections: I put up six charts of suicide rates (which you can see on the GRAPHIC page above), then put them into small groups to try to come up with theories to explain the variations.  From these initial theories, you could lead them through each of the possible causes, perhaps building a regression model as you go.  And you could incorporate lots of current events and up-to-date research.

There are, of course, some serious problems that could arise.  It is damn depressing, but hopefully that would become known after the first semester (and certainly after the first day), and it certainly wouldn’t be the only intro class available.  The Golden Child raised concerns about it filling out a full semester or getting boring after a month that I think are totally legitimate.

I’m curious about your experience, dear three readers who haven’t already talked to me about this.  Let me know what you think.

Loveliest Wal-Mart

FlowingData can even make the spread of nasty corporations* look gorgeous.  Visualizations like this put another nail in the coffin of paper journals.  My new project for the next three years: learn ActionScript.  Sorry, Beezy.

By the way, if you have any sweet geographic time-series data that you’d to see done up in this style, Nathan at FD would probably love to hear from you.  It’s just a matter of ramming the new data through the code – easily done, and it would add a little pop to your next presentation.

*Yes, I am one of those people.  But I have arguments that convince people of just about any political belief, so I feel justified.

An exercise in quantification and categorization

Is it sociological?  Meh.  Everything is sociological.

Jessica is overweight

The rest of The Illustrated BMI

Replicability and Science

This is a pretty exciting time in the social sciences, I think.  I (and others - um, Drek?  Maybe Jesse?) have often compared this point in the development of social science with the point when astronomers acquired telescopes.  We’ve finally got computers - computers that let you do crazy things like run OLS and ordered logit regressions on 43,000 people in 32 countries in about half an hour, while automatically saving the results to files (thanks, R!).  I knew that computers were a big deal for us, but I’ve also started to realize just how recent they are - one of my stats professors this spring had used punchcards, for God’s sake!  And they both know how to program in Fortran 66 (Beezy, read as: the programming equivalent of speaking Sanskrit).

Now that our scales are tipping a bit more from art toward science, it seems like replication should be (and is) becoming a more important part of our research.  People definitely grouse about it, but I don’t think we go to quite the same ends that those in, say, biology do to ensure that our results aren’t just flukes.

I’ve been trying to build a lot of replicability and transparency into my thesis; I’m doing all of the analysis programmatically in R, from data inputs and transformations to automatic outputs to .txt and .csv files.  Ultimately, I’d like for someone to be able to download this from my (ahem) faculty web page, run it all through R, get the same results, and say, “Well, your results are technically correct, but you used (readily-available method from default package) instead of (insanely obscure method from undocumented package), which would have been a better fit.”  Or perhaps: “Dude, you suck.”

That rather extreme degree of transparency seems somewhat necessary, even if only due to the complexity of most modern statistical software.  I mean, it’s easy to write in a paper that you ran an ordered logit regression.  But that doesn’t tell me about the defaults or algorithms that your software used; and it especially doesn’t demonstrate that you even knew which defaults and algorithms were used.  And that’s okay - I sure as hell don’t know what’s going on in R’s multilevel package half the time - but it’s something that should be made apparent.  Unfortunately, our current review system isn’t well-designed for such things - you send in your article, and that’s that.  Nobody is required or even really allowed to test your analyses to see if they’re correct.  That leaves us with a big honkin’ blind spot to both error and fraud.

Actually, we’re double-exposed to fraud because of the nature of our subjects.  Yes, people can falsify their stats (or, I should add, just screw them up).  But our data is a challenge, too.  It’s not like physics or astronomy - people are far more variable than atoms, and not nearly as accessible as the stars.  How many qualitative researchers have tweaked their participants’ words to enhance their impact?  How many survey researchers have quietly fiddled with their numbers to tweak a p value down a tenth or so?  It’s all too easy, and the pressure to publish is great.  Yeah, we have our professional ethics and all, and I do believe that the valuation of that identity by most would keep them honest - but that identity doesn’t mean much if you can’t get tenure.

E.T. lives!

No, not the Spielberg character.  Edward Tufte!  This is a recent and embarrassing revelation to me.  His book was already so damn famous by the time I heard of it, I just assumed he was dead.

He isn’t.  He’s only 66, and he’s got to be one of the most technically proficient AARP members I’ve ever heard of.  He’s got his own website, where he answers questions sent in to him.  He has videos on Vimeo.

Madness.

The Big Picture

Most amazing photojournalism I’ve seen in a long time.