sociology in the news!

From the Washington Post blog [HT: rdstevens]:
“A very attractive woman — looked like she just got finished teaching a sociology class at Bryn Mawr College, if you know what I mean — she said, ‘Senator Biden . . . I came fully prepared to be unimpressed with you.’ I said, ‘Well, thank you very [...]

sociologists to the rescue – stat!

Earlier this month, columnist Paul Krugman wrote about Giuliani’s misrepresentation of the differences in US and UK prostate cancer survival rates and  their role in his  misrepresentation of health care reforms proposed by Democrats.
A more extensive listing of Giuliani’s mis-stats appear on the front page of today’s NY Times.
Perhaps one of our home departments should offer up a first [...]

(singing)

Happy Birthday to me, I’m thirty-three.
In honor of that, eleven trios about me.

anomalies of rational choice

Why, rather than bringing myself short-term joy by looking at cheery photos on Cute Overload, or promoting my long-term well-being by being asleep, am I instead reading different accounts of this story over and over again, despite it being one of the more depressing and horrifying things I have read in some time? I [...]

i want to be on the editorial board of this journal

http://math.rejecta.org/
I think it’s actually serious. Thanks to Mitchell Stevens for pointing it out to me (give credit where it is due!).

what’s my line?

I was at a function this afternoon where I entered into conversation with a pleasant woman in her mid-twenties:
“So what do you do?”
“Most of my job is stalking professors.”
Quiz feature: What is her job?
Answer:

go “elf” yourself

This is all over the internet, but now it’s here too: http://www.elfyourself.com.
We all know Omar can blog, but can he dance? Check it out as our household elfs it up.

how do you say, “no”?

Seriously, Any advice on how to say no? I’m not good at it. And it creates problems.

bite me, thomas

Just in time for holiday shopping, those of us who had to return items from the Thomas the Tank Engine trains because they were recalled for lead paint contamination were just sent a friendly email from RC2 Corporation, Thomas’ manufacturer.
Dear Thomas Wooden Railway Parent,
Because you participated in our recent recall relating to Thomas Wooden [...]

diffusion or confusion

The other night I had dinner with a group of people. Two of them had only met me once before. One of those two runs around in a former social circle of mine, the other does not. Despite the fact that when initially meeting them some time ago I had introduced myself as Jessica, and [...]

tomorrow never comes

Procrastinators have all kinds of things they want to do, they just don’t want to do them today. Maybe they don’t feel like it; maybe there are so many other things they feel like they must do today they can’t possibly contemplate embarking on the others. The problem is that it is always today, [...]

get a theory, would ya?

I’m currently in midst of writing reviews for 21 NSF proposals (which need to all be filed by 5:00 tomorrow before I head to the airport to fly out to Washington for the Sociology Panel…argh). Having read most all of them at this point, I can make a couple of recommendations to future writers [...]

gettin’ old

My parents are just hitting that time when they are getting too old to do some stuff, and we are about to begin some difficult negotiations over what they should give up doing and when. Driving is an especially sore point, since they live in the suburbs, where the nearest bus stop is a relatively [...]

academic etiquette now that there’s that wiki

Departments that bring in assistant professor candidates and then make them find out they didn’t get the job from the wiki, rather than notifying them promptly themselves, are the academic-institutional equivalents of people who dump their significant others by leaving a voicemail.

asa: a lobbying organization?

I just got the new issue of Footnotes. It fit in well with my attempt to look busy but avoid doing my immediate work. Two pieces were what I would consider “lobbying” or “position-taking” on the part of the organization (excluding a South African Scholar from the US and a letter of protest to the [...]