playing in peoria

[ed. note: Michael Sauder recently escaped from his guest blogging stint at the orgtheory.com village--no small feat considering the ever watchful eyes of #2 and that huge white balloon patrolling the perimeter. To provide him with an alternative perspective on the sociology blogosphere, we invited him to tour the Scatterplot facilities and share his impressions.]

Well, it’s no private jet to Montevideo (one way, alas), but Scatterplot recently agreed to go “halfsies” (their word not mine—I’m not even sure how to spell it) on a bus ticket to their offices in Peoria. While the weather isn’t as nice here . . . and the scenery is a bit drab . . . and the only drinks they have to offer are chicory and off-brand bottled water (”Naive”? From Romania?!?), I have to say that what these Scatterplotarians lack in funds, they more than make up for in friendliness, foosball, and the freedom to leave when I want to. The relaxed atmosphere is refreshing and makes one wonder if other sociology blogs haven’t become a bit too corporate.  Here, for example, I have heard no mention of the “Bottom Line,” and I have yet to be handed a memo about how “hits” are the “profit” of the blog world. It’s also hard to imagine receiving the following letter from Scatterplot:

public sociology in farmtown: #6 what’s going on?

In this episode: details about problems and programs, some startling facts about returning prisoners, a brief eruption around mistaken racial identity, we talk about mentoring. Again, a mosaic of experiences. Remember, these discussions are not being “performed” for Whites; the point is a group dominated by people of color are trying to understand what is going on and what they can do to contribute to solutions.

Next up is a panel of six people from Unitown, all in their thirties to sixties. None were here yesterday for the first day of the conference. They are a White woman who runs a faith-based nonprofit with a significant prisoner reentry project; an Asian woman community organizer; a Black man who has been a local politician and is head of Unitown’s office of equal opportunity; a Black man who is a former prisoner who is now the head of a returning prisoner’s organization, and a Black married couple (both professionals) who have been involved in a lot of different activist projects; she is now chair of Unitown’s Equal Opportunity Commission. I know five of them from the various groups I’ve worked in and have heard much of what they say before. My notes are details that caught my attention.

reasons i am not a rock star

#437. A commercial during the Olympics has brought back that “I’ve Got Soul, But I’m Not A Soldier” song. If I were a musician and that lyric had come to come to me in a dream, when I awoke I would have thought, “That makes no sense,” and started checking my e-mail and foraging for Coke Zero.

Update: I didn’t express this well. The problem is not as much that the lyrics do not make sense per se but that they tautly flout a certain kind of sense. I wouldn’t have any problem if I had the lyric “The number four is a coffeemaker” in my head all day. It would give me a little bit of chronic mental squick, however, if the lyric was “The number four is my favorite prime number.” I’m not going to lose any sleep over it: I’ve got Ambien (but I’m not ambidextrous).

values?

I was chatting with an older male colleague about being on sabbatical but feeling kind of frustrated because I’m spending time visiting my ill mother and talking to her every day on the phone.  He said, “You don’t want to waste your sabbatical that way.  Can’t you get out of all that?”  I just looked at him for a couple of seconds, then said, “I could, if I’m willing to be a total jerk.”

I could go on about all this implies about world views, but maybe I’ll just let this speak for itself.

in the untended garden

After a summer of travel, the tomato plants are looking scraggly, but they are still bearing fruit. Here’s the second delicious tomato we’ve harvested. Looks like we’ll have about 20 more before the season’s over.

overheard

“She holds the record for procrastination. It took her over a year to finish that seminar paper, at least three months of which it was supposedly the only thing she was working on.”
“Wouldn’t the record actually be some enormous tie among all the people who’ve had seminar papers they’ve never gotten around to finishing?”

Also, there was a new cashier in Whole Foods today when I bought my sushi and little carton of fresh berries. She gave herself away as new not by any lack of proficiency, but by looking confused and double-checking that the price could actually be as high as it was.

Also-also, confession: I was usually rooting for Australians over the US in Olympic swimming. Cute yellow caps and names like “Libby Trickett,” come on! Besides, how can any liberal with a demographic imagination watch a relay race between a nation with 300 million and a nation of 20 million and root for the larger one? (BTW, as of this writing, Oz’s 20 million people have won 29 medals, the US has won 57, and China’s home-court advantage and 1300 million people have won 49.)

betrayed again by the asa book fair

While at the recent ASA meetings I spent a few minutes bumming around the book fair. This is usually one of my favorite parts of the conference since, as a grad student, I don’t have the money to buy many books, and the awesome deals towards the end of the conference help to remedy that situation. This year I happened to pick up a copy of Rebekah Nathan’s* book “My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student.” The premise of the book is actually quite interesting: an anthropologist, Nathan decided to spend her sabbatical year by becoming a freshman at her own university. Essentially, she entered the college community much as she might enter the community of a small tribe in the South Pacific.

confidential to jeremy

Dear Jeremy,

If, like me, you suffer from insomnia, do not download this week’s episode of This American Life, called “Fear of Sleep,” and then listen to it between 2:00 am and 3:00 am.  Just a tip.

However, if I stay up just a couple more hours, you may be back on GoogleChat and I could tell you the scariest parts about the episode.  Or not.

Love,

Belle

norms and normativity: what constitutes bullying on the internet?

Paging Eszter Hargittai! And Bob Sutton! And any other sociologists who care!

There is currently a big debate/kerfuffle/brouhaha brewing in the legal blogosphere, or as we not-so-charmingly-and-quite-possibly-narcissistically call it, the “blawgosphere.” The long story not-so-short, in comments to this post, Prof. Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors* suggested that to re-post someone’s personally identifiable comment made on another blog to your own blog post without first notifying the author and giving them notice and opportunity to respond, constitutes bullying in the blogosphere. I interpret Prof. Bartow’s comment to be that if your intent is use someone else’s name and statement to solicit comments/discussion in a potentially critical or uncivil forum or to criticize them yourself, then the civil, collegial thing to do would be to notify that person and alert them to a new forum where they may respond to a discussion concerning themselves/their argument, and to do otherwise would constitute bullying. Indeed, we can all acknowledge without agreeing or disagreeing with Prof. Bartow’s comment that comment threads can indeed take nasty turns and turn into a pile-on of personality-based attacks rather than civil, substantive arguments.

help! i have some righteous opinions that i want to be publishable as the sentiments of the general public

Three words: focus group research.

(Sure, you can do genuine inquiry with focus groups as well, but, if you aren’t so much interested in inquiry as advancing a point of view and want to be relatively efficient about it and yet not so efficient that you just make up interviewees…)

Bonus unrelated hypothetical — Which would be worse: (1) an article that lifts the literature review and theoretical arguments directly from another paper without attribution BUT collects and presents genuinely original data or (2) an article that has an originally written literature review and theoretical arguments BUT presents completely fabricated (though not plagiarized) data?

david brooks, social psychologist…

…is the title of this awesome post by Mark Liberman on LanguageLog, debunking this assertion by Brooks:

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

it’s like pulling teeth.

I had an appointment to get my teeth cleaned this morning. Imagine my surprise when after checking in and updating my paperwork the receptionist handed me a $10 gas card “to thank me for showing up for my appointment today.” Apparently people are so scared of going to the dentist, the office is offering incentives now.*

I was actually a little disappointed when my name got called to go back. I found watching people’s reactions to the receptionist with her cards way more exciting than the gas card itself.

public sociology in farmtown: #5 about the children

(This is the next in a series about a two-day conference I attended on racial disparities in education and criminal justice. I was the first speaker. After that, I attended, listened, and learned. This picks up on day two, after a night spent in a dorm room.) After a buffet breakfast, the morning speaker is a Black educational researcher who does qualitative research on children’s and families’ perceptions of schools, stressing the importance of talking to the people being “served” by institutions. One project involved asking children what their sources of support were and then asking teachers what the children’s supports were; in general the teachers did not know. Children often viewed their families as supportive while the teachers saw the same families as unsupportive or problematic.

briefly noted

I cannot imagine doing a worse thing to my eyes over a two-hour period than watching Beverly Hills Chihuahua.  Maybe standing in a bleach fog, staring directly at the sun.  Even the commercials during the Olympics make my eyes sting for minutes afterward.

behind the genius bar

I guess Apple will let just about anyone serve up the genius these days:

Kid was clearly feeling right at home.

email victory

Way back in May, I reported my attempt to achieve the unthinkable: the zero message e-mail inbox. Mine had swollen to 1300 messages and I had to try to cut it down to get my sanity back. At this time of that report, it seemed like the goal was well within reach. I’d progressed all the way down to 18 messages and summer was about to arrive, ushering in a period of at least slightly diminished traffic. Alas, it was not meant to be. Despite working on this goal every single day since then, I have never been able to get there. A couple of weeks ago, I was flirting with victory and made it all the way down to only two messages–but then vacation struck, and although I read and dispensed with messages every day while traveling, the residue climbed, to 35, 42, 82, 99, and topped back out at 140. But

academic job search pointers from anomie

While law schools do their job searches slightly differently (we do everything differently), I found it quite useful to read through Wicked Anomie’s pointers, which tell one to engage in self-reflection (always good), while also doing all of the obvious things of paying very careful attention to one’s CV and teaching portfolio, and how to do a phone interview.  Anyway, do read her post, and leave your own tips and comments at her blog or here.

email idiocy

I knew this was going to happen. As noted before, a message was sent using an outdated list with the LIST name in the “reply to” field. I use Thunderbird, which shows this field, but my informants tell me that Exchange does not show it by default, which may explain part of the problem. Complaints about not belonging on the list go to the whole list, then complaints about getting the complaints go to the whole list. A wise head (an econ prof) sends to the list telling people to stop sending to the list, to direct concerns to the original sender (whom he names) but people don’t get the message. After four days, the original sender sends a note to the whole list (once again with the LIST in the “reply to” field!!) telling people to contact her directly if they want off the list and giving her email in the text body. More people hit “reply” to say they want off the list, and then more people hit reply to complain about getting all the replies. Then a guy announces to the list that he is tired of getting all the messages, so HE is going to reply to the list to complain every time anybody else sends to the list!! He persists in arguing that this is a good plan even after I send him a private message telling him why this will do no good. Several other people adopt the practice of hitting reply to echo his complaint every time he complains. At this point, about 20 messages an hour are being sent to the list, with no end in sight. The original sender is not on the list.

stata are you there? it’s me, drek.

Like many relatively young sociologists I am an occasional, even frequent, user of Stata. While I have been assured- over and over again- by older and wiser heads that SAS is the way to go, I have generally found that Stata serves my needs rather well. It has been, as I have remarked before, quite free of the sort of insanity that often characterizes statistical software.

That is, until today. Today I was betrayed by my best statistical friend.

the coase theorem in action is a terrible idea

Oh come on now, surely you see the problems with this idea:

The Coase Theorem says that — absent large transaction costs — resources will end up being efficiently allocated, regardless of who holds the initial property rights.

NYU Law School is providing its students valuable real world experience with the Coase Theorem, according to this ABA Journal article.