jeremy freese's weblog

shuttered

2007-11-14T09:18:00.000-05:00

This blog is closed. The proprietor is now blogging with others at scatter.wordpress.com.

entr'acte, 2

2007-11-04T15:11:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I'm bubbling over and just have to share very positive developments this weekend:

1. I am a step closer to liberating myself from having to rely on the generosity of the University of Wisconsin-Madison for my professional e-mail needs. After deciding that three e-mails over two weeks with no response from Northwestern computing staff was quite enough waiting, I took matters into my own hands and obtained and installed Office 2007. The remaining issues involve what may be fundamental deficiencies in the Northwestern webmail/IMAP set-up. For this, I might have to turn to using a private ISP, although I will try consulting again with NU tech support before I do this. I'm very happy about many aspects of the new job at Northwestern, but I will have to admit that the recurrent experience of having paid support staff to whom you send e-mails and simply do not get any response whatsoever is new for me.

2. Yesterday was an absolutely splendid day for college football: My Hawkeyes won with me in attendance, Iowa State won (meaning that they will not go 1-11 with their only win being over the Hawkeyes), Nebraska lost by giving up more points in its entire history (and to Kansas, to boot), and Notre Dame lost to Navy for the first time in 44 years. I was dressed in full Hawkeye regalia and had a conversation with a Northwestern mother on my way to the game in which she asked where I was from and I said, "Um, actually, I'm faculty here at Northwestern." We had a nice discussion then about how her sons were enjoying Northwestern and what a nice thing enduring undergraduate loyalty is.

3. I have secured tentative agreement from at least some family members for my scheme to host Freese Family Thankgiving here in Evanston. Yes, me, putting on Thanksgiving Dinner for my family. (No, of course I'm not actually going to cook. Have I mentioned that I live right next door to Whole Foods?)

entr'acte

2007-11-02T23:10:00.000-04:00

"Northwestern is only a one point favorite, so the forecast is for a close game."
"Will you wear all of your Hawkeye stuff?"
"Only some of it. I mean, it's not actually possible for me to wear all of my Hawkeye stuff. The foam Hawk head and the black-and-gold-Cat-in-the-Hat hat, for instance. Or my black and gold gloves and my foam Hawk talons."

a little at a time, then all at once

2007-10-31T01:33:00.000-04:00

I have decided to put this blog on hiatus, at least for awhile. When I started it, I didn't really intend it to be anything more than a goofy outlet for whatever cognitive runoff came to mind while I was working--a natural extension of e-mails I would send out to groups of friends. I didn't think that anyone who wasn't already a friend of mine would read it, and, for that matter, I didn't actually think I would stick with it for more than a week or two.

I certainly did not imagine that having a blog would be a way for me to make many new friends--you know who you are--which has been the single best thing about it.

But then, sometime over the past year or so the audience problem caused by all the different relationships I had with people who were sometimes reading--family, friends, students, colleagues, prospective employers--made it harder for me to write with the same spirit with which I started. I've also sometimes felt like I was morphing into some kind of peculiar jester-statesman for my discipline, which I'll profess to some ambivalence about.

Dealing with troll-commenters has also sapped some of my enthusiasm for blogging, especially as having to turn off anonymous comments has reduced comments from non-trolls as well. (It's strange: I blogged along for quite awhile without comments and not missing them, but once you have them, it's hard to feel the same energy from blogging when their number is sharply reduced.)

In any case, I don't want to be melodramatic about this, especially since given my tendencies toward distracted logorrhea I'll probably be back sooner or later, here or somewhere else. (And especially since last time I proclaimed a hiatus it ended up not being for long.) Even so, it seems opportune to repeat how grateful I am to everyone who has been a supportive reader over the years.

assorted

2007-10-29T18:07:00.001-04:00

I have not been blogging steadily lately and will confess to some uncertainty about the future of the JFW enterprise, but, here, let me get you caught up:

My talk at Yale went all right. I was complimented by a couple people on being willing to present null findings, which is a mixed compliment to receive since of course when I collected the data for the project I wasn't expecting null findings.
I stayed in the New Haven Lawn Club after my talk at Yale. I was given a key with a giant plastic keychain that said ROOM #8 in huge letters. When I unlocked the door to my room, I saw that someone else's stuff was still there. Then I looked at the door and realized it was room 9 instead of 8. I wonder if the giant keychains were just a ruse to throw people off the trick that the hotel actually had the same key for every room.
One of the things I did in Cambridge this weekend was go to CSI: The Experience at the Museum of Science. I had fun, but am not sure I would recommend it to anyone else just because most of my fun was from resolutely not sticking to the way the designers intended the exhibition to be done. As one thing: you are given one of three crimes to "solve," do not fall for that. Just do all the stuff for all the crimes, as even if you do not have the little sheets for the other crimes you will have no problem "solving" them as well, and only one of them has an interesting plot twist.
I am contemplating a hunger strike to call attention to the need for Northwestern sociology to change its front webpage to something more elegant and less busy.
Obtaining Office 2007 is all that remains for me to have my computer set up so that I don't have any glaring barriers--other than, well, myself--to being productive in my office. (I use Outlook 2007 for work e-mail and OneNote 2007 as my note-taking platform.) It's unclear how protracted a stumbling block this will be--technically my Northwestern machine has an Office 2007 license but Northwestern does not have the Office 2007 media to install it on any machines. Whatever. I'm not happy about it being my ninth week here and still not feeling like I have my basic computer needs set up.
Hooray for Genarlow Wilson being free! I'll confess that the Jena 6 have failed to rouse much outrage within me, but Wilson: there is the victim of a clear injustice. Added bonus hooray for Wilson saying that he plans not only to go to college but to major in sociology "because I feel like I've been living my major" (story here)
Following the recommendation of a certain clandestine blogger, I've watched all 50 or so episodes of How I Met Your Mother via iTunes the past few weeks. I'm so surprisingly pleased to see that life can go on after Doogie Howser, MD. I feel somewhat guilty/melancholic about the extent to which I feel empathy with certain aspects of the protagonist given that he is supposed to be 8-9 years younger than me, although not as guilty/melancholic as I do about the extent to which I feel empathy with the 18-year-old girl protagonist of Ghost World.
Two thumbs up for Ian Ayres' book Super Crunchers. The chapter on all the evidence about the failure of expert qualitative judgment to surpass simple quantitative algorithms will cause one to wonder what purpose is served by having academics spend so much time pouring over junior-search-candidate and graduate-admissions files.
One-and-a-half-or-so thumbs up for Cass Sunstein's book Infotopia. The chapter on all the evidence about the failure of deliberating groups to surpass the judgment obtained by just averaging individual opinions will cause one to wonder what purpose is served by academics spending so much time discussing issues in faculty meetings (Or, well, it's relatively easy to see various purposes served, but it's less clear how much making better decisions is one of them.)
Oh, and, further evidence of the vanishing cognizance of wringers from american culture, from ESPN.com: "These guys were put through the ringer," he said from Tampa, Fla. "I think we're ready to make an informed decision." (see previous post on subject here)

planes, trains, automobiles, and beavers

2007-10-25T00:19:00.000-04:00

I'm giving a talk at Yale tomorrow. For this, I am taking the first flight out tomorrow to Boston, and then taking the train from Boston to New Haven, so that Friday I can take the train back up to Boston and spend the weekend re-visiting Boston and Cambridge.

I talked to my mother earlier this evening. She was impressed to hear I am giving a talk at Yale. She talked about how proud my grandfather would be if he were alive, that a grandson of his would be flying to the east coast to give a talk at Yale. That cinched the conclusion that I really need to wear a jacket and tie for this.

Yale asked me for a title months ago, and the result is that I'm talking about a project I thought I would have returned to by now but have not. Really, the talk is going to be two, not-yet-published, conference-length talks spliced together into one colloquium-length talk. I wish I was farther along on the projects in question, but I think the talk will go okay if I am not too exhausted from the lack of sleep and traveling. Also, having the research be not what I am working on right now means that I will probably be less adroit in answering any questions than I might otherwise be.

Unrelated: A friend of mine is looking for apartments and saw an ad for an 8th floor unit in a building that a rate-your-apartment service online had a report of some "small rodent" problem. She wondered whether a building with a rodent problem could have rodents all the way to the 8th floor. I said yes. Correct? I also said the only thing for sure ruled out by the phrase "small rodent" was beavers, since beavers are the largest rodent. However, Wikipedia says I'm wrong, and that beavers are only the second-largest rodent, after the capybara. So, question 2: if somebody complained on a rate-your-apartment site about a beaver infestation problem, would an eighth floor unit be safe?

correlation, or causality?

2007-10-24T11:33:00.001-04:00

Above is a graph of the predicted probabilities over the past year of Barack Obama being the Democratic nominee for president, as available on intrade.com. The red line corresponds to when I officially endorsed Obama on this weblog.

my very slow adventures settling in, virtual edition

2007-10-23T17:27:00.000-04:00

Today, I switched my professional webpage so as to list my Northwestern affiliation rather than my Harvard/Wisconsin one. I had forgotten all about this until an NU student apologetically sent a message to my GMail account, saying said she couldn't actually find my NU e-mail address anywhere online.

I am still deciding whether to move my professional webpage from jeremyfreese.com to jeremyfreese.org or jeremyfreese.net. Opinions welcome. I would set up a blogpoll if I had the energy for it right now.

One of Northwestern's staff, meanwhile, asked me either to send a photo of myself for the webpage, or to set up a time to have one taken. I've been avoiding it because their faculty page does something strange with the photos that makes a large percentage of them look like the resolution or aspect ratio is inappropriate. I am unphotogenic enough that I don't need technical deficiencies making my visage more unsightly.

one little boy detective playing a pc game; before long it was morning, and then he just felt lame

2007-10-23T11:21:00.000-04:00

Out of some perverse desire to screw up any hope of getting my sleep onto a proper schedule, I was up until almost 3 last night finishing a computer game, And Then There Were None, based on the Agatha Christie novel. I hadn't played a PC game in several years (indeed, I'm not sure I have since graduate school), but I was intrigued by it because back in junior high I read all of Agatha Christie's novels. I was curious how one would adapt And Then There Were None into a game, especially since the box promised the game was not compromised if you'd already read the book--it was the world's all-time best-selling mystery novel, and still is if you refuse to acknowledge that the first Harry Potter book is a mystery novel.

As a sociological aside, And Then There Were None has its title because the American publishers in 1940 chose not to bring it out under it's original UK title, Ten Little [N-Words]. (That title is based on a nursery rhyme that is central to the plot.) An American paperback in 1964 used the name that had been used by an earlier play, Ten Little Indians. Current versions of the paperback apparently omit the "Indians" as well and go with "Soldiers." The game I was playing used "Sailor Boys."

The game does indeed have a different ending than the book. I used online hints liberally, because there was no way I was giving this a week or whatever of my life. As a result of these hints, I was able to solve a series of puzzles that first had me break a code to open a secret passage to an underground cavern, then take a raft ride to an abandoned village, then build a giant parachute to try to fly off the island, and then find a buoy at sea with a secret German radio beacon. All this, in turn, turned out to be absolutely irrelevant to the solving the murder or anything else with how the game ends.

The game was sold as a Double Mystery Pack, along with Murder on the Orient Express. It promises "an all-new surprise ending." Murder on the Orient Express is one of the two Christie novels known especially for its distinctive solution, the other being The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. My suspicion looking at the materials was that they were going to trade the ending of Murder on the Orient Express with the ending for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I'm not sure I'm going to play through the game to find out if I'm right, though.

i am trying to imagining the sioux city officials response when the faa told them, 'don't want SUX? how about GAY?'

2007-10-22T13:26:00.000-04:00

From AP [HT: MS]:

SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) — City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport's unflattering three-letter identifier — SUX — and instead have made it the centerpiece of the airport's new marketing campaign.

The code, used by pilots and airports worldwide and printed on tickets and luggage tags, will be used on T-shirts and caps sporting the airport's new slogan, "FLY SUX." It also forms the address of the airport's redesigned Web site — http://www.flysux.com.

Sioux City officials petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to change the code in 1988 and 2002. At one point, the FAA offered the city five alternatives — GWU, GYO, GYT, SGV and GAY — but airport trustees turned them down.

Although I bet they would sell more "FLY GAY" t-shirts than they will FLY SUX.

in case I was under any delusions that graduate school was something other than a very long time ago

2007-10-20T00:01:00.000-04:00

Jay uses the example in his sociology class of Radiohead letting fans choose how much to pay for their new album and discovers that no one in his class appears to have heard of them.

Completely unrelatedly, an unusually kind-spirited friend of mine recently had occasion where she was supposed to speak extemporaneously for a few minutes about her "least favorite celebrity." She ended up drawing a blank. I told her that if I had been me, I would have done Paul McCartney (see, e.g., here or here). We then decided that maybe this wasn't a good idea, given that the task was only to speak briefly and that there was some incentive not to come across as a raving lunatic during that time.

academic freedom doesn't mean very much if it doesn't extend to stuff we don't like

2007-10-19T14:41:00.001-04:00

I belong to a perhaps dwindling group of academics who self-identify as liberal but also believe that it is a sad day whenever a fellow academic loses a job for saying something out loud that they genuinely believe. I was proud when UW-Madison went to the mat on behalf of an adjunct professor who believes that the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy. I was sad when Ward Churchill was fired for plagiarism charges that never would have been pursued had he not made an abhorrent comparison between 9/11 victims and lackeys of the Nazi regime. So, no, I'm not prancing with joy around my office because James Watson has been suspended from his administrative responsibilities at Cold Springs National Laboratory--although that's better than his being suspended from his affiliation there entirely, which was the initial report I read.* (It remains to be seen whether there will be a push to rename the school named after him.)

Part of the media coverage on the Watson episode has included bringing up past statements of his as evidence of some putatively larger pattern of despicable speech. I'm intrigued by the very first example that CNN's stories keep using:

In 1997, Britain's Sunday Telegraph quoted Watson as saying that if a gene for homosexuality were isolated, women who find that their unborn child has the gene should be allowed to have an abortion.

Obviously, I believe that women should not choose to abort a fetus because of some indication that the child was otherwise going to grow up to be gay. But, I thought the whole point of bumper stickers like "Keep Your Laws Off Of My Body" and "If You Don't Like Abortion Don't Have One," is that my belief about what a woman should choose, at least in the first trimester, is irrelevant for whether a woman should be allowed to choose for herself whether to have an abortion or not. It's not exactly the same to say that women should have the right to choose, except for a couple of reasons that we have decided are morally abhorrent, in which case she should be compelled to carry the child.

How exactly would we enforce that, anyway? I take it as obviously infeasible to give women information but prevent them from acting upon it, yet still allow them otherwise to choose to abort their fetus for unspecified other reasons. "It's not because he has the gay gene, honest! I just changed my mind, is all." So presumably what would need to be done is to outlaw the screening test, at least until whatever gestational point women no longer have an unrestricted right to an abortion. Even if the screening test was relatively straightforward and involved genetic information really only relevant to sexual orientation, I'm unsure how I would feel about saying the mother has no right to this information, but given the multiple effects of genetics and how whatever genetic information implication in sexual orientation might also be relevant for other traits, it seems even more suspect to me to endorse withholding this information.

Incidentally, I don't actually think there would be much of a market for aborting fetuses because they have some elevated risk of being gay, or even if there was some combination of genes that for sure would lead a child to be gay (note that the possiblility that genetic configuration X results in a gay adult is not equivalent to saying all gay adults have genetic configuration X). Abortion based on the sex of the child, meanwhile, may be a different matter.

* The idea that academic freedom does not extend to retaining leadership posts is the only way I can feel comfortable with what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard.

yen for ham fighting

2007-10-19T11:03:00.001-04:00

To ask why I would be looking at the Wikipedia entry for "Professional Baseball in Japan" is to fundamentally misunderstand how I use Wikipedia, but anyway here is a quote from it:

For almost 30 years, until 1906, a game could be viewed freely, as it was considered shameful to take money for doing something the players liked.

Granted, of course all sorts of people do not like their jobs, but it's interesting to imagine making a living and enjoying your job being mutually exclusive as a normative matter.

Speaking of Japanese baseball, I still remember when someone told me that the Nippon Ham Fighters are to be read as "The Fighters for the Nippon Ham corporation" rather than "The Ham Fighters of Nippon."

it's seems wrong that something with a 31.8% chance of not happening should feel like a foregone conclusion, but it does

2007-10-15T09:31:00.000-04:00

Current market-based estimates of the probability of candidates winning the 2008 Democratic nomination:

Clinton: 68.6%
Gore: 11.5%
Obama: 11.2%
Edwards: 3.5%

So, Obama has fallen behind someone who has given no indication of running for President. It's becoming harder to imagine what that 1 in 3 scenario would be under which Clinton does not win the nomination.

I am no longer as pessimistic about Clinton's chances of winning the general election, although I'm not sure if this is just me being lulled into denial about how nasty the Republican negative campaigning against her is going to be.

Prediction markets, incidentally, have consistently failed to reflect the idea that Clinton faces a particular disadvantage over other Democratic candidates should she get the nomination. So while people such as myself like to opine that idea, it doesn't have traction among anyone willing to put money where their mouth is.

alas, poor bucky

2007-10-14T21:32:00.000-04:00

Via Tom, a story by Madison's alternative newspaper here is enough to make a former UW faculty member melancholy about what UW has to contend with in the Wisconsin legislature. Some selections:

Explaining [State Rep.] Nass' 2005 push to make faculty follow codes of conduct, including not making "anti-American" statements, Mikalsen says, "Part of the issue is we have foreign-born professors. Those professors say things."

[...]

Last year, Nass became chair of the Assembly's Colleges and Universities Committee, which oversees the entire UW System. As the UW's foremost critic, he made good on his reputation, joining his GOP colleagues in the Assembly in backing major cuts to specific UW programs and an overall budget that would, over the next two years, force the System to make $120 million in cuts.

Asked how he chose specific cuts, Nass gives a vague answer about looking for ways to reduce spending. It's Mikalsen who responds: "We know where they're hiding the money. We're able to go after line items."

[...]

Among the cuts proposed by Republicans: 17 administrative positions (which Nass considers "duplicative"); 25% of the UW's communications and marketing staff; and $4 million from a special fund to retain "high-demand" faculty. [I presume this is the same fund that was just created to try to help staunch the exodus of midcareer-faculty-with-mobility-options from Madison.] In the capital budget, the Assembly has also eliminated funding for new student dormitories and student unions.

Sigh.

bull

2007-10-14T17:58:00.000-04:00

I haven't been feeling very bloggy lately. It hasn't been due to my being a tornado of productivity on professional fronts. Indeed, between moving, getting settled in, having a friend visit, and dealing with a post-all-that malaise, mid-August to mid-October has been the least productive two month period for me since graduate school. All this is further evidence that blogging and professional productivity have this curious curvilinear relationship for me: my less productive times professionally correspond blog-wise to the times when I am posting (relatively) little or a lot.

This past week, I finally switched my e-mail from forwarding from my Northwestern to my Wisconsin account to the reverse. Then today, I switched it back again. I'm having a couple of different problems with Northwestern's e-mail servers. My hope is that these will move toward being resolved when I have a desktop machine running Outlook in my office. I worked out the specs on my computer with staff here on July 17. I've been here since the first week of September. Last week the machine finally arrived, and now I'm waiting for computing staff to install the software. The cause of the delay in getting a machine is not entirely clear to me, other than that the problem was in getting the order actually placed and not with Dell filling the order and shipping it out. Anyway, suffice it to say that this has one more week to resolve itself before I officially Flip Out.

The computing problems are perhaps the most emblematic way I've let myself be thwarted by things from getting off to the best start work-wise here at Northwestern. Accordingly, this afternoon I am writing a little document to myself "Motivational Bull" to articulate my short- and medium-term priorities and try to get myself more oriented toward action rather than whingeing around in my head.* I got the phrase "Motivational Bull" from an earlier post by Chris. Looking back at that now, I realize that he might have meant "bull" in the sense of "bull[bother]". I thought he had meant it like a papal bull--a motivational edict to the self--and thought that was a felicitious and inspiring turn of phrase.

* If I could make four changes to Standard American English, they would be: (1) To make the word "whingeing" commonplace, (2) To make "y'all" standard and free of Southern connotation, (3/4) and to adopt the Australian preferences of "potato gems" for "tater tots" and "fairy floss" for "cotton candy."

blink

2007-10-10T18:30:00.000-04:00

Prompted by, of all things, a colleague, I have resumed playing 5-minutes-per-side Scrabble with random strangers over the Internet (user jfreese on ISC). No offense, but you probably don't want any part of me at 5-minutes-per-side Scrabble. I'm much better at it than the regular 25-minutes-per-side Scrabble, or, more accurately, I'm less worse at 5-minutes vs. 25-minutes than most players are. Equivalently, having five times as much time to think about one's moves doesn't benefit me nearly as much as it benefits other people. I cannot shake the sense that this fact bespeaks something more general, but I'm not sure exactly what it is. I suspect it's not flattering.

BTW, as far as I can tell, three things separate intermediate from novice players from Scrabble:

1. The mental default is to try to score in two directions (if a triple word score square is not involved). For this, obviously, it helps the more 2- and 3-letter words you know.

2. The mental default is to look for a bingo whenever an S- or blank- is on one's rack, keeping them on the rack otherwise unless one has a quite good play. (With 5 minute, where one has no time to ponder, I don't even contemplate using a blank tile for anything other than a bingo until it's the end of the game.)

3. The player very much takes into account the tiles left on one's rack when making a play. I might overthink this in longer games, actually, which may be part of the reason I don't improve as much if given more time.

the five things i hate most (not in order)

2007-10-08T22:58:00.003-04:00

1. Wicker furniture
2. Coconut
3. Bats
4. War criminals or SPSS (tied)
5. The New York Yankees

The Yankees are six outs away from being out of the playoffs. My hopes are up, and yet I have this dismal, accursed feeling like they will escape this peril and continue to torment me.

Malcolm Gladwell once compared rooting for the Yankees to rooting for Wal-Mart against a mom-and-pop-store. This is the single truest thing Malcolm Gladwell has ever written.

Update, 10:32pm: Only three outs left. Please, please.

Update, 10:34pm: Jeter pops up. Two outs left. Please-please-please-please-please.

Update, 10:36pm: Abreu hits a home run. Cleveland's lead down to two runs. Bother!

Update, 10:39pm: Rodriguez flies out. One out left. Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.

Update, 10:41pm: Strike out! O, happy day! Happy day! Better than a chocolate malt with extra malt!

muncholesen by proxy

2007-10-08T18:26:00.000-04:00

ESPN.com story about a woman who "possibly" has fabricated stories of hitting 16 holes-in-one in six months:

She's practically a neophyte, new to the game five years ago, and now at age 47 has reported more holes-in-one in six months than most PGA Tour players make in a career. By one count, she did the 16 in 118 rounds this year. That comes to a hole-in-one once every 30 swings on par 3s, a rate of success that causes Dean Knuth, creator of the U.S. Golf Association's Slope Rating System and a Golf Digest contributor, to blurt this assessment: "That's impossible." David Boyum is a math guy with a Harvard Ph.D. and co-author of What the Numbers Say. He puts the odds of Gagne's feat at "1 in 2,253,649,101,066,840, 000,000,000,000,000, 000,000."

Update: The golfer has posted a maniacal response to the story on her blog.

even without the special scatologically-themed exhibit...

2007-10-07T12:53:00.000-04:00

Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry is substantially cooler than the don't-get-me-wrong-it's-cool-in-its-own-right Boston Museum of Science. Regarding feces of a more masculo-bovine sort, I wanted a photo of this quote because I thought it was resonant with my complaint about the American Sociological Association having as its most recent conference theme "Is Another World Possible?":

(The complaint being that, as rapid and thoroughgoing as innovation takes place in our society, it takes a remarkably narrow perspective to be able to see the world as mired in the kind of stasis that would lead someone to ask if a different world was possible. Then again, the conference logo suggests that sociology's dream is to encase our existing world in one made of cold, gray stone, which I would agree would require a special conference just to figure out if it is even possible, especially since the logo also appears to advocate tilting our planet 90 degrees upon its axis before placing it in the stone case.)

Other things you can do at the Museum of Science include walking inside a model of the heart, using a computer to try to make your own clone, and playing an alpine ski video game (granted, I didn't follow what the connection to science or industry was for the last game):

If only it had a special laser hair restoration exhibit.

turns out all along that pi was just a hip shorthand for 'pisces'

2007-10-06T09:41:00.000-04:00

So, I have an immediate answer whenever the paparazzi ask what most puzzles me about the gender I am not: "The whole horoscope thing." Of course, I understand that there are many women who reject horoscopes entirely, but still both personal experience, survey data, and perusal of differences in women's and men's magazines all indicate a much greater affinity for horoscopes among women than men.

Last night I was in Barnes and Noble and saw Danica McKellar's Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail. McKellar was Winnie on The Wonder Years. The book is supposed to help girls become interested in math. When the cover promised "horoscope inside!," I thought it was a joke, but, no, there is a section where she consults with an astrologer for a section about how the different astrological signs correspond to different math personalities.

The book cover also promises to answer "do you still have a crush on him?", but I didn't look to see what math it uses to determine that.

BTW, also in Barnes and Noble, a friend and I stood completely engrossed at the graphics novel table for a half hour reading the entirety of Robot Dreams, a book about a dog who wants a friend and so builds a robot, which he then takes to the beach where tragedy ensues. I think I'm going to go back and buy it for my coffee table collection.

inside the sociologists' studio

2007-10-02T00:01:00.000-04:00

I'm on the schedule to speak at the proseminar Northwestern has for its first-year graduate students. According to the e-mail, in addition to discussing research projects, thoughts about graduate school, and perspective on the profession of sociology, professors will also be asked to answer the following questions (apparently inspired by the show Inside the Actors' Studio, which I've never seen):

1. What is your favorite aspect of sociology?
2. What is your least?
3. What turns you on [creatively, spiritually or emotionally] about your work?
4. What turns you off?
5. Do you have a “side profession” that you dabble in other than sociology?
6. What advice would you give to your “younger grad school self” if you could go back in time?
7. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

I think that for #7, my answer is just: "No worries, mate." (Not only for the implied eternal benefit, but also because it would vindicate my theory that God is Australian.)

am i the only one who did not know this?

2007-10-01T11:24:00.000-04:00

When you snap your fingers, almost all of the snapping sound comes from the contact of your middle finger with your palm, not from the release of your middle finger from your thumb. (If there is anyone else who was unaware of this, you can block your middle finger from hitting your palm to confirm that this is so.)

overheard (or, i know this much is pru)

2007-10-01T00:01:00.000-04:00

(the Prudential building in Boston and the building next to it that one of my friends thinks is supposed to look like a chess queen)

"That the Pru and the building next to it are supposed to look like the King and Queen from a chess set (far right in this picture) -- did you make that up? I've twice mentioned this idea to other people and they didn't believe me."
"You were the one who told that to me. Seriously."
"No way! You were totally the one who told me. You are always mixing me up with other people. Totally."
"I have no idea who told me this if you didn't. I certainly don't vouch for it being true. I didn't even believe it when you told me about it."
"That's so weird. I didn't believe you when you told me about it either."

coitical mass

2007-09-30T17:55:00.000-04:00

E-mail from a special JFW correspondent:

Just had tea with friends who were at this week's Moynihan Conference at Harvard. Among the speakers at the conference was Karl Zinsmeister, Bush's assistant for domestic policy. Apparently, his talk focused on the institution of marriage as the "cure to all of society's ills" - drug use, incarceration, teenage pregnancy, etc. In fact, says Zinsmeister, strengthening the institution of marriage is the single most important thing we can do for our country. Having some appreciation of the fact that he was talking to a room full of social scientists, Zinsmeister was careful to specify the causal mechanism which makes this so, stating that the reason that marriage is so important is that it "harnesses the nuclear reactor of male sexual energy."

I suppose we should all be thankful that boys make it through adolescence without vaporizing everyone for hundreds of miles and poisoning the groundwater for generations.

making money making money

2007-09-29T10:11:00.000-04:00

NYT has a story about a couple that was arrested following their attempted use of "Liberty Dollars" at a restaurant. The couple has a blog about their arrest. I've just now spent several minutes reading the website for Liberty Dollars, "America's second most popular currency." This guy is making his own money and selling it. The pitch is that the money is backed by actual silver, although the silver it is backed by is only about half what silver trades for on the open market. Since buying these dollars is a purchase that fundamentally makes no sense--other than the mirth of having a coin with Ron Paul's face on it--the guy has to come up with reasons why one should do it anyway, and he does it with gusto. Wrap your head around these consecutive sentences:

Just imagine, while your US Dollars are losing purchasing power, the Liberty Dollars are appreciating in value and rewarding everyone holding the new gold and silver currency that keeps pace with inflation.

Plus the Liberty Dollar is easy for merchants and customers use because it functions dollar-for-dollar with the US dollar as its "unit of account" is exactly the same.

Anyway, I don't think much was gained by arresting the couple in the NYT story, but I might support keeping them in jail anyway just to keep them from breeding.

carpe podium

2007-09-28T13:24:00.001-04:00

WSJ article on "Last Lecture Series," in which professors are asked to deliver a lecture as if hypothetically it was the last one they would ever give, with a story about a public lecture by a professor for whom the Last Lecture was not hypothetical [HT:RPS].

breaches

2007-09-27T09:32:00.000-04:00

Northwestern's policy makes it technically breach of contract if faculty members discover an incident of academic misconduct and try to handle it themselves rather than refer it immediately to the Dean's office. I like this idea so much more than Wisconsin's policy, which required you first to meet one-on-one with the student and only pass it forward if you intended to implement any punishment. An interesting twist is that if a lecturer or junior faculty member at Northwestern and tried to handle it The Wisconsin Way, the student could turn around and try to blackmail the teacher for their misconduct-misconduct.

First incident of undergraduate plagiarism that I had at Wisconsin involved a class where the TA caught the student. I don't remember if this was the case where the undergrad's reference to their "35 years of experience in the field" was the giveaway that perhaps the student had not written the text in question, or the one whose paper included "(see map on page 537)." Anyway, the TA was convinced this was an anomalous experience. "Good student; sociology major" he said, more than once.* I had to meet with her and she had a story for how some emergency had happened and she was scared about turning in the assignment late and so took something quick off the Internet. I believed her. After all, she looked really remoseful and scared. But there was another assignment out and ten seconds of Googling revealed that one to be plagiarized as well. Turns out, she had even been lying about being a sociology major.**

* No, I didn't really understand why the idea of her being a sociology major was supposed to make her less like to commit misconduct, either.

** All that evidence that people in positions of authority aren't any better at detecting when people are lying, but they do believe that they are: you don't believe it applies to you until confronted with the fact that it does.

they bother you up, your mum and dad. and if they don't get you...

2007-09-26T15:40:00.000-04:00

...writing a book regarded as wildly brilliant in one's late twenties or early thirties surely will. Case in point: Douglas Hofstadter, whose I Am A Strange Loop I started reading last night. I remember reading Hofstadter's 1979 Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid when I was a senior in college and thinking this was the most miraculously clever book I had ever read in my life. Hofstadter says readers mostly missed the real point of GEB--regarding consciousness--and that he is going to take a second try at the heart of the matter at IAASL. He also says "I would characterize I Am A Strange Loop as being my own best shot at describing what 'the human condition' is." A hundred pages in, the human condition is apparently wildly disorganized and as much about indulging the self-admiration of Douglas Hofstadter as anything else. I remember there being a current of that in GEB, but now it has gone from current to a scorching thermonucleoelectro wave.

At least I think this is what's happened. I was a lot younger when I read GEB, and so I'm wondering if I would be less enamored of it if I read it now. This is when you know an Established Brilliant Person has really bothered up a book, when you not only want to discard the book at hand, but it makes you question the work that led you to conclude they were brilliant in the first place.

Update: OK, now I just went back and started looking at my copy of GEB and, particularly, my mark-ups in the margins. The new hypothesis is that I am misremembering GEB--specifically, I recalled the good parts of the book and forgot how many problems I had with the character of many of his arguments, even back them. Plus, the cleverness of Godel, Cantor, Turing, etc., rubbed off onto my assessment of him much more then than now, perhaps. It bothers you up, aging does.

his dark materials

2007-09-26T00:09:00.000-04:00

My next-door colleague Gary Alan Fine has a restaurant blog, running for more than a couple years now. How did I not know this?

Also, in the annals of "Oops, I Did It Again," I hypothesized that I would have better motivation to perseverate while exercising if I listened to an audiobook rather than music. So I bought The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) on iTunes. I did listen to it while I exercised, then I also spent 9 more hours over the last two days not exercising but listening to it all the way to the end. (Very highly recommended, btw, at least in audiobook form.) Says a friend, "You should just decide you are only going to listen to it while you are exercising." Yeah, right. Those stories about women suddenly having the strength to lift cars off of their children are more plausible than the idea of me suddenly having a burst of will-muscle that would allow me to do that once I am into a story.

Still not as bad as when I sat around listening straight through to the final 12 hours of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix audiobook, my least favorite of the HP series anyway.

there is nothing in sports journalism more delicious than reading cricket news when you know hardly anything about cricket

2007-09-24T13:07:00.000-04:00

Actual paragraph, encountered just now:

The architects of the Indian triumph were the two left-armers, Rudra Pratap Singh and Irfan Pathan, both of whom scalped three wickets to scupper the chase. Singh struck in both his opening overs, having Mohammad Hafeez caught at slip and knocking Kamran Akmal's off stump out of the ground, but Imran Nazir played a blinder at the other end to keep his side ahead of the asking rate.

Left-armer! Wicket-scalper! Chase-scupperer! Slip-catcher! Stump-knocker! Blinder-player! Ahead-of-the-asking-rate-keeper!

overheard plus

2007-09-24T10:48:00.000-04:00

This one was actually submitted by JFW premium subscriber from Dwarfamor, ME:

"I really think I want to do something to make a difference this year."
"Me, too. The difference I am committed to making is that I'm going to go to my classes."

Another friend e-mailed me to say that her department has decided that this fall they will have a retreat. The idea being to talk about some larger and weightier issues about structure and collegiality. Northwestern sociology had a retreat this summer, although it was held in a conference room and was not that different from how you'd imagine a seven-hour faculty meeting. In the case of my friend's retreat, they are having a professional moderator--intriguing occupation, that--and they are talking about going to a lodge. As my friend was telling me about all this, I just kept thinking one thing: this is the best premise for an academic murder mystery novel that I have ever heard in my life. Sort of like Straight Man meets And Then There Were None.

the honeymooners

2007-09-23T15:56:00.000-04:00

"Mom, have you ever been to Chicago?"
"We went there for our honeymoon. It was awful."
"What happened?"
"Before we went, my father said to me 'You go there, you look straight ahead. You don't look at anyone, or they'll stab you'."
"."
"And then we were staying on the nineteenth floor of this hotel and it had a fire."
"."
"That wasn't really so bad. What was bad was the entire time I was there I just kept thinking somebody is going to kill me."
"Well, that was 54 years ago."
"Yes, that was back when there wasn't as much crime."
"If you come visit, I promise you won't get stabbed."

norms of engagement, 2

2007-09-22T20:21:00.000-04:00

So, the discussion of the norms about blogging conferences, colloquia, seminars, etc., has extended into one of the longer threads Orgtheory has had, and I appear there to be staking out a lonely position. Most of the other participants seem much into the idea that "manners" provide the overriding principle for academic discourse. I see manners more as superstructure and other principles as constituting the base. Asking for permission is an action done with different kinds of ideas about the obligations of the other person to respond favorably. Sometimes, one asks permission with the understanding that it really is entirely the right of the other person to decline. Other times, one "asks permission" with the idea that the other person ought to have a good reason if they are going to decline, or else they are practicing bad manners themselves.

When I talk about a specific situation being "fair game" for blogging, perhaps one can say that courtesy implies a ritual exchange of asking permission and having it granted--in other words, "asking permission" in the second sense above. Whatever. I would prefer a world in which faculty feel comfortable engaging in discourse about ideas rather than feeling they have to go through some mutual grooming exercise beforehand, but others clearly disagree.

Still, in terms of the idea of what is genuinely within a speaker's discretion to squelch public commentary about, I am surprised at how some of the commentators regard things as private that seem to me obviously not private. While I still believe in the basic heuristics that anything that can be put on a CV is fair game for blogging, I think three other heuristics are even harder to argue with, although maybe one can say a person should "ask permission" with the presumption it will be granted:

1. If a talk is fully open to the public, it is fair game for blogging.

2. If a talk is open to individuals with media credentials, it is fair game for blogging.

3. If a talk is recorded and made available publicly on the Internet, it is fair game for blogging.

I mean, come on. Again, none of this means people should not be "polite" in offering criticism of others' work, etc..

More generally, I think another way I diverge from the other commentators is that I'm not just concerned about what's right for the speaker. The academic blogger wants to write about something because they have a reaction, and their prerogative to be able to share that reaction with others should not be regarded lightly.

norms of engagement

2007-09-21T22:53:00.000-04:00

A post on orgtheory about a seminar talk has led to a discussion thread about the appropriateness of blogging seminar talks. I offer my reaction there. I think a pithier statement of part of my stance is "If it's vitable, it's bloggable," meaning that any scholarly product that can be reported on somebody's CV is something that can be blogged about. "Invited presentation at xxx university" regularly goes on the CV, and thus is fair game, at least by default. The allowance I would give for a "research seminar" versus a "department colloquium" is that with the former one should--at least under most circumstances--respect some kind of statement like "Please do not engage in public commentary on this paper without the author’s permission." The default, though, is that it's bloggable.* A colloquium, on the other hand, is in my mind just like a conference presentation, where asking the audience to refrain from public commentary is an out-of-bounds request.

Northwestern sociology has a colloquium in which the department takes much pride. I assure you that if I feel like blogging about something that's presented there, I will.

Also, I just feel like I have to restate here: Public discussion about sociology ideas and about projects on the leading edge of the discipline is a good thing that should be encouraged as much as possible.

* At least if the presenter is a faculty member.

8 random things about me, continued!

2007-09-21T17:36:00.000-04:00

To this day, sometimes I will be walking down the street, and I will suddenly stop and say out loud, incredulously, "Dan Myers has 279 Kiss songs on his iPod." Then I will smile, shake my head, and continue walking.

Six more!

(ongoing series) things i used to have disdain for but now do without remorse

2007-09-20T14:42:00.001-04:00

3,657. Gratuitous self-citation.

don't forget, mateys!

2007-09-19T10:16:00.000-04:00

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. So get out your eyepatch and your fake hand hook and threaten to swash the buckle of those you love today. Remember if you are low on inspiration and need to see some buccaneers, all you need to do is look on the sides of your buccanhead.*

Why am I not talking like a pirate in this post? Because I'm not talking in this post, and it's not International Type Like A Pirate Day. And I'd sooner slice off me dubloon with a cutlass than make ye a podcast.

(Speaking of which, TMZ.com now has this feature where you can leave audio comments on posts and listen to other people's audio comments. I'm not sure if I fully get podcasting, but I certainly do not get what would be fun about listening to random stranger's audio comments. I think I must place a higher premium on the efficiency gains from the 'skim' affordances of reading than many other people do.)

* Joke stolen from CC. Today is all about piracy, after all.

8 random things about me!

2007-09-19T00:01:00.000-04:00

Normally I don't do memes, but Jim tagged me for this one asking me to provide eight random things about myself and I thought why not. So I've spent the entire day today working on the list of everything about me from which I would sample. Sometime during my second hour of just typing "I am typing right now (still)" over and over again, I looked at the lists that Jim and other people who have done this meme have made, and I realized they weren't serious about the "random" part. They were choosing "arbitrary" things that were disproportionately "quirky" and/or "interesting."*

So, now I don't know if I'll do my eight arbitrary, potentially quirky/interesting things or not. One pseudorandom thing about me, though, is that if you want to see my face scrunch uncomfortably, all you need to do is make me listen to a pop song that conspicuously uses an unnatural, Chaucerly sentence construction in order to make a line rhyme. Examples:

From "Hey There Delilah", by the Plain White T's:

Hey there Delilah
I've got so much left to say
If every simple song I wrote to you
Would take your breath away
I'd write it all
Even more in love with me you'd fall
We'd have it all

From "Dream Vacation" by the Gear Daddies:

And late at night when the kids is all asleep
Then off to the lounge for a nightcap we can sneak
I know our lives they ain't the stuff of dreams
But for one full week we can live like kings and queens

Seven more!

* I reserve the right to write an entire future post about Wicked Anomie's #3 random thing.

keeping the room like this would have taken my aspiration for an uncluttered lifestyle too far

2007-09-18T10:28:00.000-04:00

(eszter's photo of me working away in my living room before my furniture arrives)

dispatch from the syracuse airport

2007-09-17T18:52:00.000-04:00

My talk went okay, as these things go. My tendency not to sleep well when I travel continued, and so I was tired. I'll be happy to be back in Chicago, where I won't be doing any plane travel for a month and have a good chance to settle in and find a productive equilibrium.

Before the talk, I got an e-mail saying that it was a good thing I wasn't giving the talk two days later, as Wednesday is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Although having a parrot on my shoulder might have added some color to otherwise bland slides.

After the talk, someone came up and asked me if I knew that four out of the five people who voted to delete my Wikipedia entry are, according to their profiles, members of the Singaporean Defense Forces. (?!)

In perhaps a related phenomenon to how you only get free wireless anymore in cheap hotels, free wireless here in the Syracuse airport.

for whom the belle trolls

2007-09-17T05:43:00.000-04:00

First, my Wikipedia entry gets deleted for lack of notability. Then, I discover that the mysterious troll prone to leaving especially abusive comments on this blog isn't even my troll at all, but someone else's troll who just comments here because the other person doesn't allow anonymous comments and summarily deletes all of hers. (I did some investigating after the troll's penchant from using details I've revealed about my family to criticize me escalated to invoking my deceased sister. Batbother crazy, I know.*) So, anonymous comments are off, permanently, and any comments from Mary or a Mary-like substance will be immediately and forever deleted, as however bad it is to have an abusive troll, it's way worse to feel like some abusive troll's sloppy seconds.

Hmph. I now feel even more stupid for whatever mental energy was used up contemplating this person's past remarks (or, even, writing this post). It's one thing to wonder why somebody could go from reading various innocuous things you post to drawing all kinds of negative conclusions about you as a human being; it's another just to realize that all along the person only baits you because of your perceived connection to someone else. Oh, well, I suppose I can keep pining for a mentally imbalanced person to walk into my blog life who will hate me for me and be trolly-true to me alone. A boy can dream.

To certain people that I value as commenters but who stop commenting when I turn off anonymous comments because they are too lazy to set up a Blogger account: come on, I can help you set one up if you want.

Another thing I really liked about having anonymous commenters was that, when I would talk about academia, graduate students would comment anonymously because they didn't feel comfortable posting under blogger-identities. I regret this, as many of those comments were insightful and instructive. But, even setting one psycho troll aside, it's probably time to stop anonymous comments. I'm starting a new chapter of my life, and have uncertainty where this blog fits in it anyway, but I might as well scale back on providing opportunities for defamation by complete strangers.

I'm otherwise happily visiting Cornell, btw, where I am giving a talk later today on health disparities. I'm staying in the hotel that is run by the hotel management program, which means especially energetic service from fresh-faced college kids. Three people immediately greeted me as I got out of the car that brought me from the airport, and the person who came around for turndown service was oddly persistent when I said I did not need turndown service (which I've never understood anyway) or any extra water. Even so, it hasn't been as striking here as at the equivalent institution at Penn State, where the servers for breakfast looked so nervous about making a mistake that I would not have been surprised to learn they were wearing shock collars under their uniform.

* "Batbother crazy" is one of my two favorite expressions for insanity that we used back on the farm; the other is "Kookier than a cack-handed cricket bat."

my diploma is all boxed up and ready to drop in the mail

2007-09-15T14:54:00.001-04:00

My Hawkeyes are losing to Iowa State 12-0 at halftime. The same Iowa State that was schooled last week by the University of Northern Iowa, and the week before that by Kent State.

Plus we blew an opportunity just before the half due to poor clock management. As much as I believe in Hawkeye coach Kirk Ferentz, I am amazed that someone who makes $2.7 million as a football coach chronically handles end-of-game situation. The Hawkeyes greatest and most exciting victory in recent years, in fact, resulted from the team managing the clock in so badly at the end of the game that it confused the opposing defense.

I'm glad we don't have to play Michigan this year, as I don't think we would beat them.

BTW, I used to not have anything against Iowa State, and would root for them against anyone other than my Hawkeyes. After all, the state between two rivers is sufficiently small and belittled by outsiders that we have to stick together. Then I realized that the was no way the state of Iowa could support two quality BCS football programs when states like Ohio only have one. Thus my magnamity was gutted by demography. The Hawkeyes and Cyclones are like Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, while they are intertwined by a common blood of funding, one must die for the other to live. I would be all for a merger, giving Iowa State basketball while Iowa gets football. So long as the resulting program plays in the Big 10 and doesn't use that godawful cardinal color.

you asked for it: why is sociology commonly an "easy" major?

2007-09-15T00:01:00.000-04:00

A couple of commenters asked for my "take" on why sociology is reputed to be a relatively easy major at many colleges and universities. Okay, why not? I'm just to going to write it as a series of observations and conjectures, though:

1. The intrinsic substantive difficulty of a field, whatever that means, is not a good place to look for the explanation of why some majors are easier than others, as instructors have the capacity to vary greatly the difficulty of courses on the same topic. There was a minor scandal many years ago at the University of Iowa over all the athletes who were talking "Watercolor" because it was an easy course to get a good grade in. The craft of watercolor itself is (I hear) very difficult and a course on it presumably could be made extremely hard.

2. That said, so many people are so resolutely incorrigible and freaked out about math, it's probably safe to assert a tendency in which the more a substantive enterprise involves math, the more difficult a major in that enterprise will be perceived as being. Most sociology dissertations are not quantitative, so it's not surprising there tends to be minimal math in sociology classes.

3. With varying directness at different universities, majors are a source of revenue for departments, so one might expect the "equilibrium difficulty" of a major to be whatever maximizes the number of students. All else being equal, it might be simpler to explain why an easy major would attract more students than a hard one, so perhaps difficult majors are bigger explanatory puzzles than easy ones.

4. One reason a student might choose a hard major over an easy one is that the hard major is perceived as offering greater career rewards. Any major that has to put up bulletin boards for undergraduates about "What can you do with an X major?" is more likely to be an easy major.

5. I'll conjecture that departments less dependent on students for revenue because of grants and other revenue streams tend to offer harder majors. Sociology has only modest funding from grants. BTW, if true, an implication might be variation in difficulty of majors is higher at research universities with considerable grant revenue (spread wildly disproportionately around departments), than at liberal arts colleges.

6. "Sociology" is sufficiently mysterious to high school students that very few enter college with the idea of majoring in sociology. Sociology commonly picks up many majors who only decide to major in sociology relatively late, and after taking some course after intro. For this reason, sociology has a greater cost to trying to impose any kind of prerequisites on students. Multicourse sequences are more difficult than courses with no prerequisites, especially as the latter often have to offer redundant conceptual content with one another.

7. Professors differ in the psychic rewards they derive from being seen as tough, presiding over a tough course, telling classes on the first day that a third of them will either drop or fail, etc.. Sociologists tend to be less stoked to give large numbers of students bad grades than practitioners of some other disciplines I could name.

8. Sociologists are, professionally, better at generating non-individualistic explanations for individual failures. So they tend to be constitutionally more squeamish about making distinctions among students, which inflates grades and makes the major easier.

9. Consistent with a broader aversion to hierarchy, sociology draws disproportionately from the pool of those who would be fine abolishing grades altogether. I'll conjecture the prevalence of this attitude in a discipline is correlated with how easy it tends to be. Any discipline in which a leading textbook is titled "Down-To-Earth X," or something equally hippie-friendly, is more likely to be an easy major.

10. Even after all the foregoing, I would want more evidence before I conceded that sociology is typically an easier major than most majors in the humanities or fine arts. Sociology is identified as a "social science," though, so when people call it an easy major, the humanities are not the comparison group in mind.

overheard

2007-09-14T00:01:00.000-04:00

1.
"She's kind of nosy."
"That doesn't surprise me."
"It would surprise her. She's the kind of nosy where she would be appalled to hear that someone else was saying she was nosy."
"That's exactly the kind of nosy I am."

2.
"[Prominent sociologist] says that if you see a coincidence and you don't know how to explain it, there's a social network operating."
"I know a woman who has dated two dwarves. Is that a social network?"
"Did the dwarves know each other?"
"No, different cities, completely unrelated. If they knew each other, it wouldn't be much of a coincidence, would it?"

3.
"I heard you can play shoots and ladders online. But it's not S-H-O-O-T-S, is it?"
"It's C-H-U-T-E-S."
"What's a chute?"
"What do you mean, what's a chute?"
"I don't know what a chute is."
"It's like, um. It's like a slide. My apartment has a garbage chute down the hall."
"Yeah, but you don't call it that."
"Of course that's what I call it. It's not a garbage slide. It's not a trash tunnel."
"You haven't called it a chute before."
"That's true, but that's just because this is the first conversation I've had about it, ever."

yo, berkeley folks: don't go lecturing gwen

2007-09-13T14:07:00.000-04:00

Or else she'll open up a jar of whoop-bother from her well-stocked cupboard of family stories, like she did yesterday.

am i the only one who cannot see a headline about hurricane humberto without thinking about lolita?

2007-09-13T01:57:00.000-04:00

At least it's not Hurricane Humberto Humberto.

BTW: The Wikipedia entry for Lolita includes the following statement by Nabokov: "I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more." Nor, to my knowledge, are hurricanes named Lolita, although who wouldn't rather have their home wrecked by Hurricane Lolita rather than Hurricane Humberto? Anyway, if Nabakov's statement is true, I'm trying to think if there are other candidates for novels that killed off a first name?

there for everyone to see

2007-09-12T09:29:00.000-04:00

New faculty orientation at Northwestern yesterday. Most interesting part was the description of how NU has a system of online course evaluations in which anybody with northwestern.edu domain access can read all your evaluations from students. In fact, when students are registering for courses, there is a link to a course's previous evaluations right next to the link where they would sign up for it.

So: at UW-Madison, your salary is public but your course evaluations are private, and at Northwestern, your salary is private but your course evaluations are public. Which would you prefer?*

Anyway, upon completing this post, I am going to block out everything else today, including you, dear readers, and get some writing done. My authorial back is against the wall with a couple of paper deadlines I have coming up, and that doesn't even include the talk I am giving at Cornell on Monday. (The world is laughing at Britney Spears for a disaster borne of underpreparation. I am not. At least I won't be wearing a sequined bikini-thing in Ithaca.)

I am set up here at the dining room table of my apartment. I spent a good deal of time yesterday unpacking my boxes, but it was like trying to ladle out a lake, especially as presently there is not nearly enough shelf space for all the books I brought with me. Plus, it's unclear whether the computer whose specs I worked out with an IT person in July has yet been ordered.

* "Public" to any user within the university's respective domain, and public in the sense that anyone with copy-and-paste capability can circulate more broadly. Prior to last fall, Wisconsin's salary information was on the web, and memorably one commenter posted a link to my own salary. Wisconsin changed to making salaries public only within the UW domain--in a strange moment of official candor, the spokesperson's stated that the reason for the change was that having the salaries accessible to all on the web made it too easy for other universities to poach UW faculty members because of how low the university's salaries are (at least, how low they are prior to receiving a retention offer).

i think i may have blogged this before, but some things are so true that they bear repeating

2007-09-10T00:01:00.000-04:00

ABBA's "Take a Chance on Me" is the saddest song in the history of the world. It came up on iTunes again, and I couldn't listen to it all the way through. Aboriginal dirges about the loss of their land and society and how they are not building McMansions on top of Uluru are not so sad. "They'll Need a Crane" by They Might Be Giants, while also sob-in-your-Snapple sad, requires a more refined sensibility to appreciate and even then still isn't as sad.

The first verse, in case you don't remember and for some reason want to be thrown into melancholia:

If you change your mind, I’m the first in line
Honey I’m still free
Take a chance on me
If you need me, let me know, gonna be around
If you’ve got no place to go, if you’re feeling down
If you’re all alone when the pretty birds have flown
Honey I’m still free
Take a chance on me
Gonna do my very best and it ain’t no lie
If you put me to the test, if you let me try

It's made much sadder by it being very cheerfully. Is this song part of Mamma Mia!? Is Mamma Mia! being done as a high school musical? I've always said I'm lucky I'm not one of those people who has to wear a cyanide pill in a locket around his neck, as there are faculty meetings I would not have survived. I think a gawky high school girl singing this song with sincere enthusiasm could likewise send me over.

really just a variant on the half-empty versus half-full thing

2007-09-09T14:57:00.000-04:00

My unhappiest semester at Madison included having a graduate student in my methods course allegedly express a desire to kill me that was sufficiently convincing that one of the student's peers reported it to the department. I don't think I would have been bothered about it if I had not already, for still the only time in my career, started a file about this student because their classroom and other behavior was so aggressively peculiar. Even then, it's not like I moved that file to the front of the drawer and wrote "READ IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH" on it. But I do remember feeling enormously disenchanted that I was teaching graduate students and had to deal with something like this, the same disenchantment I felt with the two plagiarism cases I had to handle over my four times teaching that course.* Oh, and also that time a graduate student raised their hand as I was in the middle of explaining something about sampling theory to ask, "Will this be on the test?"

Chris posted some advice to graduate students in response to Drek's advice, which was itself inspired by Fabio's excellent series of posts of advice. Chris's #3, though, is part of a lesson I've found especially valuable as a faculty member. Faculty often make broad assertions about "the graduate students" in their department--or about "the undergraduates" or "my colleagues"--but those assertions commonly reflect less the overall distribution of students than what part of the distribution the person chooses to focus on. In other words, assessments about "the graduate students" in a department reflect whether one chooses to focus on those students who are most rewarding or least rewarding to interact with. In retrospect, and as per Chris's advice, I should have focused more on the fun of teaching the most rewarding students and done better about not being made surly by the least rewarding students.**

In general, I let the disappointing part of the distribution of things influence my attitude more than it should, including of sociology itself. I am getting better about this, although, as with so many things with me, progress is uneven and slow.

* The first of these was the paper at the top of the stack of the first assignment of the first time I taught the course. In other words, when I sat down for the very first time as a professor to grade graduate student work, the first paper I read had several paragraphs cut-and-pasted from a book review online.

** I taught over 100 sociology students in those four years--not to mention students from other departments--so of course there was going to be variation. Madison's cohort sizes have shrunk the last three years, but there was an incoming cohort of 39 one year when I was there. Northwestern's typical graduate cohort size is 8. For someone teaching a required course only offered once per year, I'm much more happy with the idea of a cohort size of 8 than 39.

i feel like the opening credits of the jeffersons, only with george being single, white, and taller

2007-09-08T11:08:00.000-04:00

View from my apartment, just now:

I originally wanted one of the lower floor units in this building, because I figured having a view would be lost on me. So far, though, I love it. I've got my bed positioned so I am going to be able to wake up each morning and see the lake.

The other time when I could look out of my bedroom window and see for miles was, well, growing up on the farm. Pretty in its own way, but a very different view.

hmm, now where did i pack my green and gold body paint?

2007-09-08T09:17:00.000-04:00

Lying is a young person's game, as of course one of the great virtues of honesty is that then you don't have to remember. Yesterday, while standing down by the loading dock with the movers, I was distracted when a maintenance guy for my apartment building said hello to me.

"Where are you coming from?"
"Madison." (Not a lie, strictly speaking, since I was just there. But, really: I haven't lived in Madison in two years and it feels more like four.)
"Packer fan?"
"Yeah." (Lie! I am completely indifferent to the fate of the Green Bay Packers. I don't really follow the NFL. To whatever extent I do, there are some teams I sort-of root for and some I sort-of root against, and the Packers aren't either. Worse still, I don't know if it was trying to seem manly in the presence of movers or what, but I said 'Yeah' with enthusiasm.)
"Great! I've been hoping for more Packers fans. We lost three in the building last year..."

I was afraid he was going to ask questions that would reveal my ignorance of any fact about the Packers other than their quarterback's name, but men are usually good about not penetrating the affable bubble in casual conversation that presumes any non-effete male maintains a working knowledge of the NFL). Still, the guy tracks Packers fans. I worry that now I'm on a track where this lie will be compounded with other lies, and I am eventually going to be sitting in a bar with a giant foam wedge of cheese on my head.)

i wonder if this person is in the right line of work

2007-09-07T16:50:00.000-04:00

From CNN.com:

"If they told me at the outset the iPhone would be $200 cheaper the next day, I would have thought about it for a second -- and still bought it," said Andrew Brin, a 47-year-old addiction therapist in Los Angeles. "It was $600 and that was the price I was willing to pay for it."

the ethnographer next door

2007-09-07T00:06:00.000-04:00

So, they are renovating the sociology houses at Northwestern. The office next door to mine has an especially fetching new paint job:

I want to paint my own window frames now. My walls are Seven-Year Itch. I was thinking of doing light blue, although a friend on the phone just now made the intriguing suggestion of black. Stay tuned.

when i say 'p.s. you rock my world', the 'p.s.' stands for public sociology

2007-09-07T00:01:00.000-04:00

Fabio presses the question of the possibly declining public presence of sociology (links to previous posts by him and by me). I'm not sure if we are actually in disagreement about sociology's past. As for understanding what happened between then and now, one of his bullet points especially caught my attention:

Major sociological studies used to have a major impact on the way we thought about the world. For example, the Coleman report really rocked people. The Moynihan report was another shocker. When was the last time sociologists rocked anyone’s world? Sure, we may publish the occasional contrarian article, but it’s been decades since the work of sociologists has changed how the educated public views social life.

I agree these were important documents that captured considerable public attention that does not have any clear analogue to anything in my own time as a sociologist. But, question to ponder: how did the discipline of sociology respond when these people went out and rocked the world? In the case of the Coleman Report, sociologists were pleased with Coleman until his mid-70s research finding evidence of "white flight," and then there was a campaign by the then-ASA president to formally censure him. In the case of the Moynihan Report, sociologists have been at the front of denouncing what was taken to be its thesis (the "tangle of pathology" argument regarding black families and especially young black males), and, as far as I can tell, that there was something very ugly and possibly evil about the Moynihan Report remains a conviction of many of those in the pertinent areas of sociology.*

Why aren't sociologists today out there world-rocking? I don't know. It does seem fairly obvious to me like large swaths of sociology today are tied as a matter of identity and norms to seeing the world in terms of a fairly restricted and predictable set of ideological positions, and "predictable" and "world-rocking" do not go together well. Indeed, I think the ideological uniformity of sociology not only hinders our ability to be taken seriously as the kind of honest interpreter of human affairs that is part of Fabio's vision, but also makes us bad at making arguments to the public, as we spend a lot of time in seminars not really arguing with one another but arguing against (caricatures of) people not actually in the room (Republicans! economists! evolutionary psychologists!).

In any case, history suggests that when a true world-rocking work of sociology appears in the world, you may know it by this sign: that the other sociologists are in confederacy against it.

P.S. Now I'm playing "P.S. You Rock My World" by Eels. I love that song. Pay the 99 cents from iTunes if you've never heard it.

* Criticism of the Moynihan report is the origin of the phrase "blaming the victim," which has indisputable cautionary utility for moral and social thought but has come to be understood by many sociologists as a logical fallacy, like "affirming the consequent." The enduring rhetorical power of the charge of "blaming the victim" in sociological debate can be seen in last year's debate between Eric Klinenberg and Mitch Duneier in ASR (in noting this I do not intend any broader assertion about that debate).

while i love my iowa hawkeyes, i cannot defend their capacity to distinguish correlation from causality

2007-09-06T12:56:00.001-04:00

(me, at a tailgate party from the Hawkeye game last weekend. the guys behind me are playing a rousing hawkeye-themed version of that favorite game of midwestern tailgating, cornhole)*

From the Des Moines Register:

Not all students - or faculty - are happy about the University of Iowa's plan to schedule more Friday classes.

But the U.S. Surgeon General recommends an emphasis on Friday classes, and a University of Missouri study shows that students with Friday classes drank just half as much as classmates who were starting the weekend a day early.

"The evidence there is pretty strong that having students in class on Fridays helps reduce binge drinking," said University of Iowa Associate Provost Tom Rocklin.

The Missouri study surveyed 3,341 students at the Columbia campus on their drinking habits over four years and compared the data with class schedules and transcripts.

Students whose first Friday classes started at 8 a.m. or earlier drank an average of 1.24 drinks, compared with students whose Friday classes were noon or later who drank an average of 2.52 drinks, according to the study, which was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

* The Charlie Brown shirt has been in the rotation of attire I wear to Hawkeye games since I was an undergrad. Back then, Charlie Brown was part of what "everyone knows that everyone knows" about culture. Now, it's something where people feel like they "get the reference," like the drunk guy who looked at me for a few moments and then started shouting, "Hey... I get you! I get you, Charlie Brown! I get you!"

home!

2007-09-05T16:26:00.000-04:00

I am writing this from the Whole Foods that is immediately next to my apartment in Evanston. I am going to average one meal a day here for the foreseeable future.
My apartment is absolutely lovely. Too bad it is too large for my needs and way too expensive for what I can spend on rent without getting nauseous.
The renovations on my office were going to be done by the time I arrive--the thinking was they might be done before my arrival back when I was thinking I would come at the beginning of August rather than September. When I walked into my office, one of the windows was hanging diagonally outside its frame. I'm not sure when it will be fully operational.
Because I went through Northwestern's preferred mover for the stuff in Madison rather than just trying to find two people and a van, my 37 boxes are going to get loaded three times (office -> small local truck -> big truck -> small local truck -> office), will take a week or more to arrive, and will cost several times as much. I'm still amazed at how long it took me to pack my Madison office, but it was a useful exercise both for the purging and for the intellectual taking-stock that was involved.
I'm feeling both happy and enthusiastic.

still in madison

2007-09-05T09:11:00.000-04:00

Like everything else, this has taken longer than expected.

dispatch from madison

2007-09-03T11:55:00.001-04:00

I've come up to Madison, where today I will complete packing up my office. I started putting my back issues of the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review in boxes to move them, and then I stopped. I should not move them. Yet I am having trouble not moving them. Argh. I just took them out of the box and put them back on a shelf. What to do?

For now, I'm going to worry about other things I'm packing. But, what to do with paper copies of major journals? Tossing them feels like a big decision because of its permanence--as in establishing henceforth I will not accumulate print journals. This is, after all, the 21st century. Put them on the free table, where eventually they will get recycled, right?

deleted from wikipedia!

2007-09-02T22:33:00.000-04:00

I have been judged to have failed the notability criterion, and so my entry is gone from Wikipedia. Read the neurosisogenic non-debate (because of its unaninmity) about my non-notability here.

Update: So we're clear, I'm not upset or anything about this. I can think of a few dozen people in sociology, at least, who deserve Wikipedia entries more than me and don't have them. This does not mean that it isn't neurosis-and-various-other-emotions provoking to watch anonymous people with no clear connection to your discipline debate your notability.

(And, now, due to troll-baiting, I also can't resist pointing out that: given the affinity for textbooks in their stated "notability" criteria, and that the CDA-Stata book and software gets used a lot as a graduate-level textbook and has been very successful by any standard for such books, I am over the bar on Criterion #3. I hate that I just wrote and am going to post that sentence.)

who's jeremy freese?

2007-09-02T08:33:00.000-04:00

I was linked by the front page of DailyKos yesterday for my post on the Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich. One thread in the comments was "Who's Jeremy Freese?", which included the following in a response from somebody apparently connected to UW:

He's an odd guy, but very insightful.

I can't really complain about that. Maybe I'll use it as my third blurb, after Ann Althouse's "The best sociologist in the world" and Kieran Healy's "The Italy of academia."

One of the college friends I am hanging out with here in Chicago is a firefighter and member of the firefighter's union who follows politics at least as closely as the median American. I asked him over dinner, "What's the thing with firefighters and Chris Dodd?" His response: "Who's Chris Dodd?"

bullets of relocation miscellany

2007-08-31T20:49:00.000-04:00

I am at a Travelodge in downtown Chicago, waiting for other friends from college who are going with me to this football game to arrive.
The movers today were un-be-bothering-lievably efficient, and so a task which took until past 5pm two years ago was done by 12:30. Unfortunately, my things were moving onto an empty truck, meaning they won't arrive at my apartment until Thursday at the earliest.
The movers verified that I was indeed, in their approximation, moving a ton of books, and this isn't even counting the Madison books, which are at least 1/2 and maybe 2/3 as many. If it wasn't for the books I've bought in the last two years and the elliptical trainer, I think my Clutter Reduction Effort made this move roughly stuff-neutral with the move two years ago, amazingly enough.
I had my last meal in Cambridge/Boston at the Legal Sea Foods in Logan Airport, which was fitting because I think I managed to have like ten meals in my last two months at Legal. O, the chowder. O, the popcorn shrimp.
No matter what the blurb on its cover may claim, A Farewell to Alms is not going to be "the next economics blockbuster." It's far too boring for that. I'm only 75 pages in, but at least it helped me sleep on the plane.
Yes, I finished my effort to visit all the exhibits in the Boston model solar system. The Sun, as it turns out, is only a quarter-section of the Sun. Saturn, as I said before, has been temporarily removed while its site (the Cambridge Public Library) undergoes renovation. With a friend who knew where in the library it had been, we calculated a spot outside the site for the picture that corresponds to the arc of Saturn's orbit. And, um, we thought if I couldn't have the real Saturn model in the photo, at least I should have a ring:
Intellectually and professionally, the time since ASA in Cambridge has felt like circling an airport. I am looking forward to getting my stuff, getting settled in, getting into a work routine, and getting started on building a life here. Root for me.

there is no sense in which i am proud of this, even if it does entitle me to a free coca-cola sportscar

2007-08-31T07:09:00.000-04:00

(accumulated coke zero caps in my office file cabinet drawer)

The movers arrive in 50 minutes!

the protestant genome and the spirit of capitalism

2007-08-31T00:01:00.000-04:00

I've started reading A Farewell to Alms, a book about the economic history and macrosociology of the last two thousand years. It received an enthusiastic write-up in the New York Times (here), and I think its publication date might have been accelerated as a result.

The moral and political implications of the book's argument, either if it is true or if it comes to be regarded as true, are so breathtaking as to be hard to understate, especially in a hastily written blog post by someone who is moving.

The argument, most briefly, is that part of what led to the Industrial Revolution was a more longstanding improvement of the species over the preceding several hundred years, and, although the book is coy about saying this improvement could be either "cultural" or "genetic," it's clear that author's inclination is "genetic." The seemingly obvious implication if that were true--although I am uncertain from the 30-odd pages I've read so far whether the author will actually connect the dots he draws right there on the page--is genetic variation among people with ancestry from different parts of the world on traits pertinent to socioeconomic attainment. Good to have ancestry from the regions of the world that were the leaders of the Industrial Revolution or otherwise socially close to it, and bad to be from regions that were not close. In this respect, the argument could be interpreted as providing the historical backstory for The Bell Curve. So, it's important, especially given that it is by an economist and all the recent hoopla for economics as the enterprise that has the apparatus to uncover hidden insights into social affairs and the independent-mindedness to speak unpopular "truths."

As I said, I haven't read enough of the book to be able to begin to evaluate its evidence, and moving isn't exactly allowing great focused cognitive space for reading. I'm approaching the book with a lot more skepticism than the author of the NYT article. I know I post perhaps surprisingly little about the substance of social science on this blog, but it doesn't get more substantive than the history of human organization and the causes of social inequalities, so I'm putting y'all on alert about this book if you haven't heard about it.

dispatch from my apartment, surrounded by boxes

2007-08-30T11:01:00.001-04:00

So, I spent an inordinate amount of time this week getting the stuff in my apartment 75% packed, and now someone is here being incredibly efficient with the remaining 25%. It confirms my then-untutored suspicion that the two people who did the equivalent task in Madison were totally inept (because, in effect, they did the task roughly only as fast as I would have, and I take for granted that I'm inept.)

Anyway, I'm sitting here on my laptop, and apropos of nothing I was wondering about how the presidential candidates who have no chance are doing. As in, not how they are doing in the polls, but how they are maintaining a positive presence despite the absolute futility of how they are spending their time. Chris Dodd apparently has received an endorsement from a firefighters union. This fact is announced on his webpage by his banner photo being with a group of firefighters, the endorsement being the "Live Update" at the top, the endorsement being the photo headline, and the endorsement being two of the last five posts on his blog. Perhaps he will show up at the next debate in a spiffy dalmatian suit.

What propels these men forward? Back in 2004, I was convinced that Kucinich was just staying in the race to find some cute young wife out of the deal, a conviction regarded by friends as preposterous right up until it was shown to be exactly right. But what propels him forward this time? I was looking on his website for a position paper regarding legalizing bigamy, but did not see it.

I can't really look at the Republican minor candidates sites without being quickly made surly, but something to note more generally is that, on the prediction markets, Ron Paul (at 4.5% estimated probability of winning) might one day soon catch John McCain (at 5.6%). A guy in Cambridge is inkjet-printing paper signs supporting Ron Paul and stapling them to telephone poles around Cambridge. You don't see anyone doing that for John McCain.

BTW: I feel good about all I've discarded as part of my War On Clutter. I was particularly pleased with how many no-longer-needed cables of one kind or another I had thrown out, until I realized that the cable I need to upload photos from my digital camera has gone mysteriously missing.

what about little dogs? do little dogs pay taxes?

2007-08-29T11:48:00.000-04:00

Leona Helmsley, who allegedly once told her housekeeper "Only the little people pay taxes," has left $12 million dollars to her Maltese, which works out to $2 million more than the sum of what she gave to the four children of her previously deceased son.

Speaking of doggy discrimination, I was on the bus the other day when the driver refused to let this woman with cerise hair on with her pit bull. As he closed the door, he said to the passengers nearest to the front--a woman with three children who had been let on, no questions asked--that "A chihuahua, fine. One of those things, no way." Where are the symbolic interactionist criminologists to consider whether part of why pit bulls are so violent is the way they get "labeled" by social authorities?

one of those moments where i think: that's kind of sketchy, and kind of brilliant

2007-08-29T00:22:00.001-04:00

I was talking this evening to someone who works as a graduate student in one of the natural sciences. He was working on writing a review of a manuscript that the professor who runs his lab was asked to review. The idea is that the professor will briefly read over the article and the review, make any modifications that seem worthwhile, and then dispatch with his review responsibility by sending it off. The student seemed to think it was all a useful pedagogical exercise, in addition to just so happening to save his advisor the better part of a day's work. Is this common in the natural sciences? Has anyone heard of someone doing this in the social sciences?

perhaps miss teen usa should start administering the gss question on whether the earth goes around the sun, or the sun around the earth?*

2007-08-28T11:19:00.000-04:00

1. If you have not seen this yet, and you enjoy laughing at beautiful young people embarrassing themselves on national television in ways that would probably haunt them for the rest of their lives if not for the fact that their beauty will allow themselves to select into adoring and/or infatuated peers, then you absolutely have to watch this (HT: Jennifer Lena, whose blog has moved).

2. Sure, it's funny, but if your intellectual trajectory has ever had cause to cross the literatures on "health inequalities" and "digital inequalities", you might see an analogy between the logic of the coherent part of her answer and various writings that wildly overattribute the cause of inequalities to differences in what can be straightforwardly characterized as "access."

3. I love that I was listening to "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs just before I pulled up the clip.

* See previous post on the GSS question here, as well as Omar's instant classic original post here.

Update: Dan Myers, himself a winner of many boy-beauty-pageants in his youth, has posted this clip as well.

evidence the facebook scrabble people really don't understand how scrabble passion works

2007-08-28T00:01:00.000-04:00

Days! How precious!

regarding the purported glory days of public sociology

2007-08-27T14:25:00.000-04:00

For whatever reason, after a couple different exchanges with the proprietors in which we believed the problem to be fixed, I am still not able to comment at Orgtheory (boys, eventually I'll start to take this personally). Fabio has a post about a speech that Orlando Patterson gave on the occasion of Malcolm Gladwell receiving the ASA award for "Excellence in Reporting of Social Issues." Says Fabio:

Patterson noted that until the 1970s or so, you had quite a few sociologists who captured the public’s imagination such as David Riesman and C. Wright Mills. After that time, prominent sociologists decreased in the public imagination.

Fabio raises several hypotheses for why you might believe Patterson or not. On the negative side, I would like to raise another, which is just that ideas of the existence of "quite a few sociologists who captured the public's imagination" then as opposed to now is wildly overblown. Evidence? If Fabio had just included blanks instead of the names of Riesman and Mills, experienced sociologists would have guessed exactly which two names to fill in. If there was such a public sociology efflorescence back then, why wouldn't there be a larger pool of salient examples? (Especially since The Lonely Crowd was published in 1950 and The Power Elite in 1956, and apparently Patterson was talking about a 20-30 year period.)

Not even to mention that Tuesdays with Morrie probably outsold The Power Elite and The Lonely Crowd combined. Why doesn't sociology do more with its Tuesdays with Morrie legacy. I say, Every Day With Morrie!*

BTW, Dan has written an enthusiastic post about Gladwell's acceptance of the award. Meanwhile, I seem to remember being on a panel at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings this spring in which another panelist, a sociologist of some prominence, alleged with considerable irritation that Gladwell interviewed the sociologist Duncan Watts for three days for the Tipping Point and then wildly undercredited his contribution in the book.

* OK, so I don't actually say that. However, I do have a friend who has talked about getting an EDWM tattoo.

Update: Thanks to Brayden, the commenting problem appears resolved.

bullets of moving miscellany

2007-08-27T01:36:00.000-04:00

Today I finally snapped out of my denial about moving in a week and made big progress. Regarding the concurrent effort to pare things down, I threw out well over half of the cables of one kind or another that were in different boxes in my apartment. The biggest single reduct was being able to get rid of several hundred feet of telephone cable and connectors I had saved from back when I had apartment configurations and dialup that required me to string phone line from one end to the other and back. I was surprised at the unnatural nostalgia I felt for cords.
Price per 1.5 cubic foot boxes for carrying books when purchased last month at the U-Haul store in Madison, WI: $1.70/box. Price at TAGS Hardware in Cambridge, MA: $6.49/box.
ASA found and sent me my lost iPod! While I may have ambivalence about never having considered naming my blog anything other than "Jeremy Freese's weblog," I benefited from naming my iPod "Jeremy Freese's iPod." I returned the replacement I had purchased to the store. Given that the night before I had spent my insomnia time reading the blog of the kid who developed the soldering-iron-and-software method of hacking an iPhone, I was tempted to trade up to an iPhone rather than just get my money back.
I did not do as well as I had aspired in getting rid of books, but some will not be moving back with me. The Tao of Pooh just made the cut, the Te of Piglet did not. I entertained getting rid of almost all my reference books--who uses a print dictionary anymore?--but in the end could part only with my Random House Word Menu.
I have an extra ticket to the Iowa Hawkeyes versus Northern Illinois football game at Soldier Field on September 1. I'm just saying. Presumably this year I will be subdued in the Hawkeye regalia I wear to the game, just from not wanting to haul too much of it with me on the plane out there.
The unfortunate situation with my housing is unchanged. Briefly, I have an absolutely fabulous apartment but, due to a planned roommate situation falling through, it's much more money for much money space than what I want to pay. Not sure if I should try one last craigslist assault regarding this.
I have completely fallen off the wagon on the one Coke Zero a day thing. More generally, I've been living the lifestyle of someone who will return to looking like a narwhal. This has got to stop when I get to Evanston!

uranus!

2007-08-25T00:01:00.000-04:00

(me, a bunch of small children, and uranus)

Okay, so I have been advised by counsel to skip the story of how I was almost murdered at this incredibly sketchy Citgo when all I wanted to do was see Uranus. Uranus is in the Jamaica Plain public library, and a lovely friend who cares very much about my personal safety and well-being was kind enough to drive me there, with the unexpected bonus treat of a delightful little "urban adventure" on the way. (In truth, what happened was no big deal, but keep in mind I don't have that much experience in cities and so get rattled easily. And also, when we finally got to the library, I discovered that there was a bloody prosthetic hook dangling from the handle of my car door.*)

We got to the library and looked all around, but Uranus was nowhere to be seen. So we asked and Uranus was down in the basement, where some kind of story hour was going on. Luckily it was almost over, and so we didn't have to wait long. There were still children around, but we went in and got the necessary photo nonetheless. I now have eight photos down in my quest to visit every site in Boston's model ~~social~~ solar system before I leave, and have only Saturn and the Sun left with one week to go before I move.

* Mom: I'm kidding about the hook.

it's not like you are only spending money when you pay at the pump

2007-08-24T10:45:00.000-04:00

Discover Your Inner Economist has this quote from another economist to the effect that, "A person who has never missed a flight is someone who has spent too much time waiting in airports." I was recently in a conversation with some friends in which the women were bragging about how of course they have never in their lives had they ever run out of gas while the men, at one time or another, all had. I wish I would have been in touch with my Inner Economist enough to retort that "A person who has never run out of gas is someone who has spent too much time standing in gas stations," as I think this is exactly right. As much of a pain as it is to run out of gas, if you imagine the extra time spent by someone who always refills at 3/8 versus someone who refills over 1/8, the former goes to the gas station 14 times for every 10 times for the latter person. If we budget getting gas at 7 minutes per stop and saying the latter runs a 1 in a 1000 risk of running out of gas, then running out of gas would have to be enough of a pain that a person is willing to trade 46.6 hours of their time to avoid it. So being proud of never running out of gas is like being proud of having spent a week of vacation time standing at Citgo.

This is the prelude to an anecdote that ends, improbably enough, at Uranus, but that will have to wait until later.

overheard

2007-08-24T00:01:00.000-04:00

1.
"I told her that you and I write together."
"You always say 'write together.' I always say 'collaborate.'"
"I never say I collaborate with anyone. Saying somebody is a collaborator always makes me feel I'm saying they are like the Vichy government."
"Yeah, I'm not really like the Vichy government. Except I wouldn't mind being headquartered in a resort town."

2.
"I think maybe I'll read the pigeon guy's paper to see what all the fuss is about."
"If you download it, can you send it to me?"
"I think he has it on his website."
"I don't know his name. All I've heard is 'the pigeon guy.' Do you think I can Google 'the pigeon guy' and get it?"

water, water everywhere / nor any drop to drink

2007-08-23T11:38:00.000-04:00

I received an e-mail this morning from a friend saying that the Today Show was broadcasting a dispatch from Fort Dodge, Iowa -- only 16 miles away from my hometown of Manson -- because of flooding in the area. I look online and the story is that Manson is even more the center of the flooding than Fort Dodge. This was the first I heard of it, so immediately I called my mom.

Our land is on a rise, so for us to get flooded out would require something Biblical. * Still, apparently we have water in our basement, which we've had recurrently since moving into the house 27 years ago. Worse, says my Mom, something with all the rain has caused the switch for our well to break, so my parents have no running water. They are catching rain in barrels to use as their non-drinking water. Plus the septic tank is full and so the toilets won't flush. I didn't ask for details on how they are handling that.

I have a photography-inclined reader from Manson--if you read this, you know who you are--so maybe I'll get some photos of the flooding. The golf course is always an especially compelling flood zone.

* Or, more properly, anti-Biblical, given the whole rainbow thing. I remember my Sunday School learnin'! (Although, wait, is the thing with the rainbow symbolizing God's promise not to flood the world again actually in the Bible, or is it part of the non-scriptural overlay given to various Old Testamant episodes?)

a better title might have been: re-discover your inner economist

2007-08-23T00:01:00.000-04:00

I read the first six chapters of Discover Your Inner Economist by the economist and popular blogger Tyler Cowen today. I don't read his blog, but given how much people enjoy it, I was expecting the book to be better. Indeed, I kept reading despite not feeling I was getting much out of it because I kept presuming it would get better. It didn't.

While reading it, I was reminded of the line in Ghost World where Enid says some kitsch performer has gone from being "Past being so bad it's good to being bad again." In this case, one of the main parts of book's overall argument is to go past being counterintuitive to where it is intuitive again. Earlier popular economics writers like Steven Landsburg have created a stage in which another economist talking about how much of the world of interpersonal relationships and intrapersonal striving is not, in fact, like buying bananas at the supermarket can be called channeling one's Inner Economist, instead of, well, one's Humanity. That is, sometimes Cowen is arguing to a popular audience against standard economics and more toward the view the popular audience would have if it hadn't paid attention to some of the excesses of standard economics in the first place.

Apparently also, if you have a Ph.D. in economics, you can give whatever life advice and theories about human nature that you have and pass it off as manifesting economic expertise. Much of the book is about Cowen's vague ideas about the human need for "control." The last anecdote that made me decide I couldn't justify spending any more time with the book began:

On a more personal level, a willingness to give up control can make us better teachers. When we teach our children how to drive, we like to pretend they will never do anything stupid. We give them a lecture about the long list of things they should never do.

My approach is different. I taught Yana, my then-fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, how to drive. One day I started with: "The first thing we are going to do is hit the curb. Drive over the curb, just not too fast." This is the best way to learn where the curb is. Yana is going to find the curb anyway, sooner or later, so let this learning occur under safe circumstances.

Some people might find these expositions more interesting or amusing than I did, but they also provoked this recurrent sense that we were straying far for a book that said it was going to be about incentives. He has this whole chapter about how to appreciate art better, parts of which were interesting, but even then I kept wondering how particular points were "economic." It's as if anything that evinces wisdom in a social setting is to be understood as channeling your Inner Economist.

* This column by Landsburg in Slate singlehandedly stunted my growing interest in economics for almost a year, by making an enterprise that I was coming to better appreciate suddenly seem ludicrous (the stunting abated when I realized that Landsburg was not the ambassador of mainstream economics he presents himself as being).

(ongoing series) how the english language would be different if it had been designed by quantitative social scientists

2007-08-22T12:51:00.001-04:00

19. There would be more exact synonyms for "suggest," that most magical word of assertion without authorial commitment or responsibility.

There are too many suggests in this thing I'm revising, so I just changed one to "indicate." But, compared to "Our results suggest that X", saying "Our results indicate that X" is so strong. I guess I could use "raise the possibility that X", although going to that well too many times is way more conspicuous than when one does it for "suggest."

Complete non-sequitur addendum: I don't feel like this is worth a post unto itself, and yet feel compared to share it with you if you haven't seen it: a mash-up combining "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Bootylicious." The video isn't that compelling, but the mash-up of the music, which apparently dates from 2001, is fabulous:

you know you are in a gay resort town when...

2007-08-21T08:35:00.000-04:00

I wanted to have a magazine so I would have something to read on the ferry ride back from Provincetown to Boston. I went into the store that said it was Provincetown's Largest Newsstand. I would have preferred to buy, perhaps in order, The Economist, The Atlantic, or Harper's. The store had none of these, but it did have an entire rack of gay porn magazines and an entire rack of nongay porn magazines (granted, GQ, which isn't specifically gay, and Details, which as far as I know is still a strange kind of closeted gay*, were on this rack as well).

As we figured out when we arrived at the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown, yesterday just happened to be the 100th anniversary of the laying of the original cornerstone by Teddy Roosevelt at this monument, and so Provincetown was having a special celebration. So, there was a parade. The parade was comprised mostly of Freemasons, and thus the day combined a disproportionate number of male couples walking around with a disproportionate number of men-in-fezzes.

I am neither gay nor a Freemason. Having this instance to observe them both side-by-side, however, gay culture makes a lot more sense to me than Freemason culture. I think whatever goes on behind the closed doors of Freemason temples must be either wilder than anything I can imagine or more boring than anything I can imagine; there can be no in-between.

Back in Boston, we went back and forth trying to find the Boston Massacre site before being informed by a street vendor that it was just this circle of cobblestones in a little triangular intersection, without any explicit plaque marking it as such. Our photo, there:

We also had dinner last night at Cheers; by this point, everybody there really does know our names.

* When it was a Conde Nast publication, Details fabricated reader's poll data to downplay its percentage of gay readers.

to the sea!

2007-08-20T07:25:00.000-04:00

(my favorite sign in the Old North Church)

Full day of Boston tourism with my niece and sister yesterday. Today we are taking some kind of high-speed ferry to the Cape. This will be my first time going to the Cape, and will allow me to avoid giving an embarrassed "No" answer when I tell people I spent two years at Harvard and they ask me if I ever made it out to the Cape.

Of all the places we went yesterday, I think we spent the most time in the bar that served as the inspiration for "Cheers."

random bullet points about violence and moving

2007-08-19T00:54:00.001-04:00

I didn't get to walk around much while in NYC. On my way to Central Park with a friend, though, we passed a corner where two down-and-out-looking men were arguing loudly. "What the bother are you doing?" shouted one, "Woman walking with her kid and you bother with her like that." The other man was gesturing menacingly toward him with this thing that looked like a homemade bullwhip. We just kept walking. It did remind me of how pleased my mother was on the phone back when I told her I had decided against moving to New York.
Yesterday in Harvard Yard I saw a woman with an uppermost-crust English accent go absolutely apebother on her seven-or-so year old daughter. The daughter was wheeling along the bike with tassels on the handlebars and, as part of a tantrum, had the idea to just leave it on the ground and walk away, at which point Posh went postal. Nothing physical, just shrieking, still disturbing, and yet also with the accent she still sounded classy. Made me wish again I had gone through my original plan to disappear as part of this fellowship and emerge with a bushy head of hair and a plummy English accent.
Sister B and her daughter are coming in town to visit. This meant I was supposed to do some cleaning today, although the most productive parts of that were more pre-moving stuff than cleaning per se. On the latter, however, I continue to marvel at how ubiquitious mop technology is given its fairly small advantage over pushing a rag around vigorously with one's foot.
Part of my pre-moving preparations are that I made real progress in my plan to get rid of 25% of my wardrobe. This includes various T-shirts and sweatshirts that I have been saving not because I have any plans to wear them again, but because I have one nostalgic connection or another. My plan for these, I think, is going to be to take photos of them and make them into a Flickr set, then discard.
So far, so good, with my effort to lower my use of profanity by substituting "bother."
First things I did today were cash in my accumulated spare change and buy a replacement iPod. The change came to within $10 of what the iPod cost. Which means that, for the past two years, I could have just been throwing my spare change in the wastebasket, if in addition I paid attention to my belongings enough not to lose my iPod. The ongoing tax imposed by my absent-mindedness, especially when its consequences are compounded by being sleep-deprived and traveling like at ASA, gets so bothering tiresome. Ugh. I don't know why Apple can't help people track down lost/stolen iPods since they can match the serial number and iTunes store account of any iPod that plugs into iTunes.

well, there goes the rest of my career

2007-08-17T17:01:00.000-04:00

(first facebook bingo - rewraps for 85 points)

I reactivated my Facebook account this afternoon, after learning they have an application that allows you to play Scrabble.

At one point during my time as a junior faculty member, I started playing online Scrabble through this international server, played 112 blitz games (5 mins each side) in a period of six days, and then canceled my account and haven't logged in since. Various lessons about my can be drawn from this episode.

I have been a complete bother up work-wise anyway since returning from ASA. I did buy a bunch of boxes today to pack up my office, so if I'm not going to make progress on any of the four papers I want to finish up in the next six weeks, at least I can make progress on moving.

(ongoing series) things in this world that are plentiful and yet i wish there were still more

2007-08-17T00:30:00.000-04:00

931. Novelty socks.

(Even though I don't wear them myself, sticking instead to my ever-expanding collection of argyles.)

Speaking of novelty socks, once upon a time I was talking to this woman who was all excited because she had received a letter inviting her to participate in a novelty sock scheme. There was a list of 3 names, and you were supposed to send a pair of novelty socks to the person whose name was at the top, then send a new list with your name at the bottom to 8 more people, etc.. Only I don't have those numbers quite right, because if everyone participated one would end up getting 71,347 pairs of novelty socks. I told her that she would end up getting no socks. She said my prediction was indicative of a larger character flaw of mine, namely a lack of faith. When I talked to her again a couple months later, she reported receiving no socks. She repeated that my prediction was indicative of a larger character flaw of mine, namely a lack of faith. I decided afterwards that she was probably right about this. I mean, what is more worth an implausible leap of faith than the prospect of many thousands of novelty socks?

overheard

2007-08-16T08:14:00.000-04:00

"Thanks for liberating my car."
"No problem. I was going to put a dead body in the trunk, but none were available."
"Everything went smoothly?"
"I was hoping for more of an ordeal. I thought I would have stories."
"I have no idea how I am going to do the Madison part of my move."
"You still have stuff in Madison?"
"My office."
"U-Haul."
"You know full well that I cannot drive a U-Haul truck in Chicago. Not even Evanston."
"You'll have to hire someone to drive it for you."
"They also re-keyed my office, charmingly enough, so I have to move out during a weekday."
"Why would they re-key your office? And why wouldn't they wait until you moved out?"
"I have absolutely no idea. The mysteries of Madison. Anyway, maybe I'll go buy an iPod today. Sooner I get another one, sooner I can lose it again."
"I say you wait until they make one you can put directly in your head. Then you can be bionic like your Dad."
"Maybe I should buy an iPhone just for all the non-phone features."
"How is that going to keep you from losing it?"
"I would probably lose it even faster, but I'd be so cool until then."

blogging, public sociology, and your cat

2007-08-15T13:01:00.000-04:00

Jay Livingston, who I had the pleasure of meeting at ASA, has posted about the session on blogging on which I was a panelist. He has me saying:

“People say they don’t want to read about your cat,” said Jeremy Freese, “but in fact the posts about your cat are the ones that get the most response.”

I appreciate the nod, but this isn't really what I said. I did invoke the idea of blogging about one's cat. However, this was because when I introduced myself I said I had started blogging after seeing Kieran's blog, but I didn't want to misrepresent my own blog as having the same content orientation as Kieran's. So, what I said was that Kieran had once told me that when he started blogging he wasn't sure what he wanted to do but he knew I didn't want to blog about his cat, and I said that I didn't have a cat but if I did, I would almost certainly blog about it sometimes.

Chris was the one who said something about there being the idea that nobody is interested in what you had for lunch and then it turns out that, indeed, some people are interested in what you had for lunch, and might even be more interested in that than some serious post you spent a lot of time on.

Later, I made a related point, which is that audiences very much influence the content of blogs, as content of subsequent post tends to bend in a direction toward those previous posts that get the most response. I cited one example at the panel, which I won't repeat here, but I could cite others and, for that matter, this blog as well. Eszter argued against this as a normative argument--she argued that people should follow their muse because the explicit feedback they get isn't even a good indicator of what posts people actually like--but I intended the statement mainly as a descriptive one, as part of what typically happens with blogs.

I might write more about the blog panel later. Scott from Inside Higher Ed was there; I was sad we didn't get a story out of it, although he has provided good coverage of ASA.

dodging reviewers

2007-08-15T12:47:00.000-04:00

Wicked Anomie, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at ASA, posted a list of tips for getting your paper published based on a session of journal editors at ASA. One of them:

[A]nyone you name in the acknowledgments will NOT be called upon to serve as a blind reviewer. That statement may sound obvious, but think about it this way: if there is anyone you DON'T want reviewing your paper (nemesis, archenemy, etc), acknowledge their brilliant advice on an earlier version of your manuscript.

I regard this as ethically sketchy and am somewhat surprised an editor recommended it. Nonetheless, from a purely strategic standpoint, my recommendation would be that the smart thing to do if you are going to insert a name of somebody who has not read your paper into the acknowledgments as a way of having them off the list of possible reviewers, remove that person's name after the paper is accepted. There is someone who has acknowledged me on at least one paper on which I most certainly did not provide feedback prior to its publication, which you might imagine was irksome for me to see, both because of the private implication to me that the person is trying to dodge having me review their paper and the public implication that I provided help on a paper I think is of quite low quality.

BTW: I don't typically include acknowledgments in manuscripts I send under review. I wait until after the paper is accepted and add them. (I'll sometimes have them on drafts I circulate, and will usually not include them in the version I send for review.) Is that unusual?

asa rulz

2007-08-13T01:11:00.000-04:00

I started today with the $28 (plus tax/tip) breakfast buffet, and am ending it now with a $26 (plus tax/tip) room service pizza.

BTW, I don't know if Fabio has this in his "grad school rulz", but while it's good to be able to describe your dissertation to another person in 2-3 sentences, those sentences should be delivered without using air quotation marks 5 or more times.

Also, the outgoing chair at Wisconsin came up to me and said people had been mentioning to her how I had linked to a couple of selections from her webpage in saying she should start a blog. She said, "You should have linked to my Hoops and Hurdles memo, that's my favorite one." We then discussed our favorite memos that she had sent out as chair, hers being the annual memo she send out regarding sexual harassment, mine being the memo she sent out to rally collective support for normative restraint as a solution to unsustainable growth in the cost of the free printing offered to graduate students (an approach was has basically worked; I thought about posting her memo along with a detailed rational choice analysis of the rhetorical strategy by which it worked).

I have enjoyed ASA, but I have not spent as much time interacting with several of those I would consider in my "most cherished circle" of sociology friends as I would have liked. Of course, every time I text Sal trying to get his whereabouts, his first response is always that he's out loitering in the parking lot.

dispatch from my suffering from insomnia in my hotel room, manhattan

2007-08-12T01:48:00.000-04:00

I just came across this site where the challenge is to name all 50 states in less than 10 minutes. With no especial rush, I did it in 2:53, although when I finished I was a bit surprised I hadn't missed any as I swept across the country.

Brief as it was, I don't think this is the best use of my ASA time. Ugh--I hate when I am unable to sleep.

dispatch from manhattan

2007-08-10T22:28:00.000-04:00

Back in my hotel room at ASA. I am pinch-hitting a presentation for someone at 8:30 tomorrow morning, but have it under control. My presentation at the orientation to the Minority Fellows Program this afternoon went well enough. I also spoke there last year. The two experiences easily rank #1 and #2 of most interesting and engaged audiences I've had in speaking at a major professional conference.

Earlier Tina showed me her iPhone, which is the first time I've handled one. I tried to text a message and could not get it to type a single word correctly, although sometimes it's suggested correction was correct even though it did not share a letter with the word I was trying to type (apparently it understands, e.g., if you miss every key to the left). That I found maddening, but then Tina showed me the photo program where you can scroll through programs and flip them around and zoom in and such, which was amazing. As was the ability to do the same thing with maps. Tina was excited to actually be able to use the phone on the iPhone, as that part doesn't work in Canada. If it wasn't for the text messaging and two-year AT&T lock-in, I would have been sold, even at $600.

So far my visit to New York has affirmed that New York really is too much for me, even though I recognize that Midtown and Downtown--where I was today--are much different from Uptown. Even so, the commotion inside me is so much I don't think I could handle so much commotion outside, all the time. The honking alone when I walk around outside nudges me toward disequilibrium.

BTW, I thought about not paying the $15/day to have wireless in my room. Since I can check my e-mail on my phone. My resolve for this crumbled in less than a half hour.

with lyrics like these, who would have ever thought the halcyon era of boy bands would come to a crashing end?

2007-08-10T00:08:00.000-04:00

So, a friend was effervescing to me on the phone about this show "Mission: Man Band", where they take some guys from 90's boy bands who didn't go onto any solo glory and put them together to give them one more shot at glory. Kind of like when I was a kid and the cars that were the losers in the preliminary rounds of the demolition derby would have a special round and the winner would go on to the finals, as if a car that had already lost in one demolition derby and participated in a second was really going to be a good contender in the finals.

I wasn't hooked on my friend's excited recap until I realized one of the guys was the lead singer of the group who did the song "Summer Girls," which my friend didn't even remember. "You know, the Abercrombie and Fitch song." "What Abercrombie and Fitch commercial was it in?" "No, it's the song where they say 'Abercrombie and Fitch' so many times you think it has to be a commercial."

The lead singer is the recruit into Mission: Man Band. Apparently his life had gone down a negative spiral as it was after their one song in the sun, but then he also now has leukemia. It makes the video poignant, as it was only eight years ago and the guy looks like he presumes he's got bigger days in front of him, as opposed to this video being the apex of his career.

What's especially notable about "Summer Girls" is it has some of the best rhymes in the history of half-hearted-hip-hop. My three favorites:

3. Fell deep in love / but now we ain't speaking
Michael J Fox was Alex P Keaton

2. (as part of the chorus)
New Kids On The block / had a bunch of hits
Chinese food makes me sick.

1. (perhaps the best rhyme in the history of boy band music)
When you take a sip / you buzz like a hornet
Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole bunch of sonnets

(ongoing series) lessons i have learned the hard way

2007-08-10T00:01:00.000-04:00

3,684. If someone reveals their romantic history includes having dated a dwarf, they will get touchy if, every time thereafter when they are talking about a former significant other, your first response is, "Hey, was that the dwarf?"

Update: Postdated this post to 2008 by accident. Thanks, Nina, for alerting me to the problem.

no one ever said the 's' in 'asa' stood for security

2007-08-09T12:54:00.000-04:00

OK, I have way too much today to do to be blogging, but: ASA has opened their new online messaging service, and it's structured in such a way that anyone with a lick of sense who received the e-mail with their own username (their e-mail address) and default password can immediately deduce anybody else's password. Which means one can pose as anyone else and leave messages for whoever under their name. This is not especially different from what one was always able to do with ASA, since it's not like the old messaging systems ever had any kind of security to verify that people were who they said they were. And it's not like when you leave a message at a hotel for someone you are asked to prove who you are, etc.. What it adds the veneer of security that comes along with there being a nominal password, so spoofed messages are likely more credible.

Plus, you can also use the new system to send e-mails to anyone! So, if you've had any pent up inclinations for poison-pen e-mails, just pick your favorite senior sociologist and go. Maybe Fabio will post a special edition of his "Grad School Rulz" about how you can use the ASA messaging system to destroy your rivals on the job market.

(Needless to say, I changed my password before posting this. If you change your password, you can also set the system to forward messages to your e-mail account, so that you don't have to wonder if anyone has left you a message so long as you are checking your e-mail.)

the emperor's new book

2007-08-09T10:03:00.000-04:00

Attend a workshop at Yale yesterday on "analytic sociology." Unusual format: instead of presenting your own paper, you had 20 minutes to present someone else's paper. Not as a discussant, but rather you were supposed to present the other person's paper much as you would your own (the main differences being that you say use "[name]" or "s/he" where in your own paper you'd say "I", and you can inject much more explicit praise of someone one's paper where for your own this would be considered tacky). Afterward, the author had 10 minutes to expand or correct or otherwise comment, and then it was open to the floor for discussion.

The stated reason for this format is the idea that other people can present one's work more clearly than one can. I don't know if this is true. However, the workshop brought together papers that are supposed to be appearing in an edited volume on the topic, and having to give the paper to someone else to present on your behalf is a good motivating mechanism to make sure one has a relatively full draft to present to others. (At least, it worked for me, for 2 of the 8 papers, the author did not have a complete draft in time and so they just presented their own.)

My paper on preferences was nicely received but not fully understood. It's a tricky argument, briefly and imperfectly made. I will have to endeavor to make it clearer, although I'm only going to be able to do so much since I am already up against the word count. My presentation (of someone else's paper) went all right but was not an especially pleasant experience, as when part of the paper that I had glossed over quickly turned into a main matter for the discussion, I kept sitting there feeling like I had let her down.

BTW: Anecdote from the conference was that somebody made a reference to Sociologist A having made a "emperor has no clothes"-ish dig about the incomprehensible writings of Eminent Sociologist B in a very public forum.* What had actually happened was that A used a hypothetical example of a scholar with incomprehensible writing and somebody in the audience said "B!", and now the story has become changed to where it had been A who said "B", so he's presented as like the kid who said the emperor had no clothes when he was really like the kid who gave a hypothetical example of a naked person and some other kid said "The emperor!"

* That of B's work I have attempted to read is, in fact, mostly incomprehensible to me, and I've never known whether those say they were much influenced by the work are (1) gleaning something from it I have not, (2) gleaning something based on interactions with B or just the occasional clarity around key concepts, or (3) lying. My belief is anyone who has read B will suspect who I am talking about; the problem is more that they may have other suspects as well.

Update: If you suspect you know who Eminent Sociologist B is, but are not sure and think I'm a "tease" for not naming names -- here's the deal: go to this site, paste "joiimuh nhaphynh vidabt chzymukvc qk siau uhvl ietwedeaomgwpbcv" in the box, enter the scholar's first and last name in the "Key" box, and hit "decode." If you are correct, the resulting message will affirm it.

ten points for ravenclaw!

2007-08-07T13:58:00.001-04:00

Vacation message just received after sending an e-mail to a certain newly-former colleague of mine at Madison:

The rumors that have undoubtedly reached you by now are, by and large, correct. I have not enrolled in school this term; instead, with my two best friends I am off to fulfill the final wishes of my mentor--to search for and destroy a set of objects of incomparable evil.

So I thought we should start in the New Jersey-New York area. Because of the various shield charms we will need to place over our camp to obscure ourselves from the prying eyes of our enemies, I will have only intermittent email contact for the next three weeks or so. Please forgive me and tune in to secret radio stations for news of our progress.

If you are writing about a problem in regard to my previous capacity as head boy (e.g., office space, teaching assistantships, creatures or ghosts living in the second floor men’s room), please contact the headmistress or the following:

[e-mail addresses of the Chair, Associate Chair, and Assistant to the Chair]

Courage my friends! I hope to see you safe and sound on the other end of things.

i love the part where samuel l. jackson says he's had it with these motherbothering snakes on this motherbothering plane

2007-08-07T10:01:00.000-04:00

So, part of the detritus of my working-class rural roots is that I have a pottymouth. Actually, having a congenital prudish streak--and having been raised right (hi, Mom!)--I did not use profanity at all, ever, until about eighth grade. Then there was all kinds of peer pressure that I finally gave into, and then the floodgates (f***gates?) were open.

I am less profane-prolix nowadays than I used to be. Still, I've been feeling I should cut down further.

I heard a friend say "Oh, bother!" recently in a context where I would have said "Oh, holy [expletive deleted] purple [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted]!" And I decided this would be central to my new effort at cussreduction: substituting "bother" for the principal profanity. Unanticipated bonus: that it doesn't really work in many contexts infuses a bemusement that helps deflate the negative affect prompting my launching the profanity in the first place.

(A curious fact of my combination of prudishness and pottymouth is that there are some, commonly considered as more mild, words I have an involuntary scrunch reaction to whenever I hear. The other four-letter F-word, the one that appears in the new Harry Potter book, I can't really bring myself to say. And almost all slang terms for body parts I never use as actually referring to their respective body part; excepting the posterior, I always use exactly the same terms for body parts that are used in standard high-school textbooks.)

if you were rudy guiliani, which of these would you bring up with your daughter first?

2007-08-06T15:06:00.000-04:00

(rudy guiliani's daughter's facebook profile. slate story here.)

1. Having your 17-year-old daughter join a group on Facebook dedicated to electing someone besides you to be President of the United States?

2. Having your 17-year-old daughter select both "Random play" and "Whatever I can get" for the "Looking for:" question on her public Facebook profile?

Not from this per se, but I just cannot imagine social conservatives working up loads of enthusiasm for stepping in a voting booth for Guiliani. And wasn't it the Evangelical turnout machine that was supposed to be a main cause of losing the last two elections? So, the Democrats should have a good matchup against Guiliani, unless, well, they nominate somebody who social conservatives viscerally hate. But, surely Democrats won't do that?

(Apparently parenthood is today's theme on JFW.)

it has always seemed to me that one of the main things that would be fun about having two kids is getting to do experiments on them

2007-08-06T11:01:00.000-04:00

Robert Frank, Falling Behind, page 54:

I came to this view in part because of an experiment I did years ago with my two oldest sons when they were five and seven years old. The experiment took three days. On day one, I poured each of them a full glass of orange juice. On day two, I poured each only half a glass. Then, on day three, I poured David (then age seven) seven-eighths of a glass and Jason (then age five) only three-quarters of a glass. (I am not sure that a human subjects committee would approve this experiment today.)

You can guess what happened. On the first two days, each drank his juice without comment. In particular, neither asked on day two why he'd gotten only half as much as the day before. But things played out differently on day three. Jason looked first at his own glass, then over at his brother's, then back at his own, his face registering growing signs of distress. It was obvious that he was struggling not to react. But finally he blurted out, "That's not fair; he always gets more than me."

and perhaps they still are

2007-08-05T11:25:00.000-04:00

New York Times website, right now:

reminder: asa blogger extravaganza

2007-08-05T01:43:00.000-04:00

The ASA NYC blogger get-together, a.k.a. YearlyRojas, is Saturday at 6PM, with the present plan to proceed from the Hilton Lobby. I have misgivings about this plan, as I don't quite get how people who are a little later are going to figure out where we are, but I am passive-aggressive in these misgivings, choosing just to state them publicly rather than act toward any kind of alternative. Anyway, you're invited. You? You. Fabio is offering to buy a drink to people who have pre-ordered his book. Dan is offering to buy a drink to anyone who can name a Kiss song that is not on his iPod. I am offering to thank anyone who pre-orders my drinks.

Also, Tuesday 8:30 am, at an as yet undisclosed location in the Hilton, "Blogs as a Forum for Public Sociology," including Hargittai, Healy, Uggen, Freese, and two people I don't know. Somebody should bring bagels.

baby got bell

2007-08-04T16:50:00.000-04:00

From NYT magazine story about anti-immigrant sentiment in an Illinois town:

A lot of my constituents have brought the question to me: What is he hiding?” Sigwalt told me. “I don’t want to get my butt in a ringer, but I wonder what ICE” — the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — “would find if they went in there.”

Do the NYT copyeditors really not know the word "wringer"? Anyway, "butt in a wringer" is definitely one of those phrases from back in my hometown that I seem not to hear much around Harvard. But what would "butt in a ringer" mean?

website error, or interesting joke?

2007-08-04T15:09:00.000-04:00

From CNN.com:

CNN's photo caption: Anne Hathaway likes to keep her private life private.

P.S. I don't actually know who Anne Hathaway is. But didn't Tom have a story arc about a photo of her? (pause to Google) Yes, he did. I think when it was going on I thought he was talking about the woman from The Beverly Hillbillies.