September 4, 2008 – 9:00 am
…as this nicely written and insightful piece of polling shows. Boy do I wish we knew who lied to them, and when, and about what. Maybe that will be my next project.
September 3, 2008 – 7:30 am
The front page of my hometown rag yesterday featured this teaser: “Got a rambling man? Blame his DNA.” The story it pointed to reports on the new Swedish study locating a particular allele related to commitment problems both in voles and in men.
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August 29, 2008 – 11:35 am
Over on OrgTheory, Steve Vaisey takes sociologists to task for what he seems to perceive as unwarranted political commitment. Apparently because sociologists tend to be “liberal” (as useless a term as that is), we are less objective than we ought to be and we think stuff for partisan, as opposed to soundly scientific, reasons. (I [...]
August 21, 2008 – 8:44 am
I’m sure I’ll end up posting more about this as time goes on, but at the moment I’d just like to get a read on others’ experiences. I just got done with a very frustrating experience with UNC’s honor court, in which (IMHO) they devalued my expertise as a faculty member and the central importance [...]
August 11, 2008 – 2:56 pm
I was called on Saturday to comment for a local news channel about John Edwards and specifically whether these revelations would be a “black eye” (the producer’s choice of terms) for the Democratic Party. My view and expectation: no, frankly, because Edwards has been receding from view for a while and because sexual infidelity and [...]
August 11, 2008 – 1:37 pm
A friend brought this to my attention. Essentially, the author (Josh Rosenthal, about whom I know nothing) apologizes for using material, including both original quotes and the theoretical orientation of the article, from David Grazian’s article four years earlier. You now know everything I know about the episode, but it does seem to raise both [...]
I have been here long enough to disclose the reason for the “ap” avatar I chose. Here it is. When I arrived at college and began writing others via email and newsgroups (then on a VAX 8810), there was someone in the year ahead of me, and like me in many ways, named Andy Perry. [...]
There, I said it. I love ASA. When I don’t get to go to as much of it as I would have liked, I miss it. I know we’re supposed to be cynical about how half-*ssed the papers can be, how much posing is said to go on, and so on. But I love a [...]
The generally quite good culture miniconference today at the HBS (by the way, that is one heck of a facility) was marred by far too much hand-wringing about how cultural sociology is not taken seriously, not paid attention to, the “ugly stepsister” (someone else’s words, pregnant as they are with sexism) of sociology, and so [...]
My chair keeps trying to get me to read stuff that demonstrates that religion is Wrong with a big W. Most recently he asked me to read Evans and Evans’ piece in the Annual Review on the religion-science “conflict” which is rather friendly to religion. He asked me to do so because he thought it [...]
OrgTheory is at it again with their “I’m really not an economist, really I’m not” theme. Meanwhile, I’ve been reading up on the voting literature for a forthcoming article I’m preparing for Contexts on the sociology of voting. I came across Duffy and and Tavits’ new article in AJPS on “pivotality”: more on my reading [...]
Alterman’s blog offers this story today. One wonders if the stations might begin taking sponsorships directly from political candidates — $100K for the anchorperson to wear a McCain button while announcing the news, perhaps?
I know several of us around here have spent time in southern Africa, and I’m interested in your thoughts on these five men, if for no other reason than to celebrate the 90th birthday of the prince of the group. (I added Banda for Jeremy’s sake and that of others who’ve spent time in Malawi; [...]
Sara Shostak and I were among the speakers at a tremendously interesting symposium at Stanford in May on the “E” (environment) in GxE research. The videos of the conference are finally online, and while the interface is clunky it might provide some fodder, along with perhaps Sara’s upcoming AJS special issue and/or Guang Guo’s recent [...]
Y’all will remember my friends over at the JWP Civitas Institute and their Red Clay Citizen blog from a previous post. Today on the Public Policy Polling blog comes this gem:
This is how they worded it:
“Do you think public schools in North Carolina should implement an anti-bullying policy that requires students be taught that homosexuality, [...]
Much has been made of this story, about a North Carolina state employee who retired instead of ordering his department’s flags to be flown at half-staff in honor of Helms’ death. This all has a wonderful Durkheimian quality about it.I particularly liked this letter to the editor, which took the current middle-of-the-road approach: whether or [...]
In case you’ve been in a cave somewhere (or, possibly, in Malawi or detained at EWR for having the wrong name or ethnic origin), Jesse Helms died at the beginning of July 4. Various people have been trying to find something actually nice to say about this pig of a man; two of the better [...]
Some call it grade inflation. Others call it a wide assortment of other terms; I prefer “grade incommensurability”: a given letter grade means different things from different instructors in different departments. An opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed proposes a new statistical approach: simpler than the Achievement Index I and others proposed at UNC a [...]
I got this announcement this morning via email from the culture section. It announces a new site where stories will be posted and comments taken–OK, OK, a blog–on issues of morality in American politics. Visitors are told that we will help “world-class researcher” Dr. Wayne Baker (but we are invited to call him Wayne) with [...]
Over on Gelman’s blog there’s an interesting discussion of a silly Wired article proclaiming that the “petabyte age” makes theory and hypotheses obsolete:
Peter Norvig, Google’s research director, offered an update to George Box’s maxim: “All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.”
This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied [...]
