March 13, 2008 – 12:34 pm
If I were one of you folks near Chicago, I’d be heading out tonight to hear Jessica Hagy promote her book at Quimby’s bookstore. Hagy’s blog, indexed, is one of my favorites, especially this one about my Husband.
I’m teaching grad stats next semester. This will be my first time teaching stats since ICPSR Stats Camp in 2001, so it’s been awhile. My handouts for the course will be in LaTeX, and I’m putting them together using Scientific Word. For some completely inscrutable reason, Scientific Word recognizes CTRL-X for cut [...]
Some questions on publishing:
What are the politics of publishing? Which journals are professional brass rings? Are there journals that might accept my articles but at the same time are so unrespected that publishing in them is tantamount to admitting I’m a lousy academic? The impact factor is one way to go about it but my [...]
March 12, 2008 – 11:32 am
I come into the office and what do I think when I open my door? Ugh, I hate how the letters in my name are too close together.
(No, the other faculty in the building do not have this problem with their nameplates. Yes, if they did, I suspect they are more temperamentally well-suited [...]
Via the awesome Kieran Healy:
1. Go to http://www.google.com/
2. Type “find chuck norris” into the search box
3. Press the “I”m feeling lucky” button
4. Feel the awesome.
Via the just-as-awesome Frank Pasquale:
Song Flow Charts
YOU CAN’T
(more…)
March 11, 2008 – 10:55 am
I received an e-mail about the mini-conference for The Sociological Imagination Group’s miniconference that occurs concurrent to the American Sociological Association meetings. As it’s name suggests, the group takes much inspiration from C. Wright Mills’s book The Sociological Imagination, published in 1949. One of the group’s leaders says in the e-mail:
Mills was a [...]
As long as we’re having name tag ribbons, I think we should also make a sash. The sash should be given as a great honor, worn by a different person each day. We can decide who gets it through a series of competitions. One of the competitions should be at the scatterplot party, and the [...]
March 10, 2008 – 12:00 am
Writing from my elliptical trainer, as I work out and watch an episode on iTunes from Season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This will be my 34th gold star as part of my scheme where I give myself a gold star every day I work out, and for ever day short of 200 stars [...]
At a dinner party tonight, I was asked by an Italian postdoc to explain the process by which either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will become the Democratic Party’s nominee in the general election in November. As I got to the part about the super-delegates, it was clear from the expectant smiles on my [...]
I’ve not been feeling very bloggariffic, for whatever reason. I have been angry at the Confederacy lately. No Confederacy, no Civil War. If not for Civil War and its aftermath, the major city of the Midwest would be St. Louis rather than Chicago. Which means that the structural equivalent of Northwestern [...]
Those red-eyes are so deceiving. Omar and I were at a meeting this week at USC. He chose to stay an extra night so as to avoid the red-eye but spend a day traveling. For a multitude of reasons (first and foremost getting home to relieve the babysitter), I chose to take the red-eye instead, [...]
WickedA: So, Tina, what did you do today?
Tina: I made 20 superhero capes for Kid’s bday party on Saturday. You?
WA: I broke the hinge on Dan Myers’s computer with my voodoo.
TF: Cool.
WA: Cool.
Hallelujah for academic templates! Wicked Anomie has brilliantly one-upped my research statement to lay out a basic template for a research paper. Although she notes that her outline best applies to quantitative work, I have found it helpful in the past to teach my qualitative students a (much more crude) basic layout of a quantitative [...]
I have a theory. That theory is that reality television has benefited the democratic process. I’m sure that seems like a stretch to you, but I have been curiously watching the really unprecedented hoopla surrounding the primaries this (and last) year and it strikes me that the press is treating the races very [...]
OK this is worth looking at. I linked to the “project” page that explains the point. HT darkskywatcher
From a midterm evaluation in my undergraduate course, “Environment, Health, and Society”:
“This class seems to give me the chance to learn some new, outrageous fact every week.” (more…)
From grad students, a series of questions that I have compiled into one big mess. Basically: how do you build a network and does it matter what kind you build?
People keep telling me how important it is to “build networks.” I understand why. I just don’t understand how. So, how do you go about “building [...]
According to the BBC, “British intelligence chiefs tried to guess Hitler’s plans by studying his horoscope.”
Astrology: 1
Sociology: ? - but I’m guessing 0
Yet another fake memoir! That makes two in one week! Of course this new one is not as clearly untrue as the last. Then again, this new memoir has the distinction of coming out, generating favorable reviews, a heart-touching story written in the NYTimes about the author, and within a week being identified as a [...]
A graduate student of mine is writing up a scholarship application that includes a one-page statement of proposed research. In giving this student feedback, I offered the following advice for what to include and the order in which to present it:
My proposed study is about this. Here is why this problem is important. Here is [...]
