Monthly Archives: October 2010

Considering “polls gone wild”

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The Associated Press released a story yesterday with this headline: “Polls gone wild: Political gripes in Internet age.” It is an interesting read about the role polls have played in the 2010 election season and I have a few interpretations regarding the story.

1. The griping of politicians about polls does not often seem to be based on the methodology of the poll. Rather, I think the politicians are trying to curry favor with supporters and voters who are also suspicious of polls. I would guess many Americans are suspicious of polls because they think they can be manipulated (which is true) and then throw out all poll results (when there are methods that make the polls better or worse). Some of this could be dealt with by dealing with innumeracy and educating citizens about how good polls are done.

2. There is a claim that earlier polls affect later polls and elections and that overall, polls help determine election outcomes. Are there studies that prove this? Or is this just more smoke and mirrors from politicians?

3. If there are charges to be made about manipulation, it sounds like the political campaigns are manipulating the figures more than the reputable polling firms which are aiming to be statistically sound.

4. Stories like this remind me of the genius of RealClearPolitics.com where multiple polls about the same races are put side by side. If one doesn’t trust polls as much, just look at how polls compare over time. The more reputable companies show generally similar results over time. Basing news stories and campaign literature on just one poll may look silly in a few years with all of these companies producing numerous polls on almost a daily basis.

Still issues regarding welfare and poverty to be solved

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Even though the welfare debate in America has been limited recently (or perhaps people think it was a relic of the Clinton presidency), several new books have been published challenging the idea that there are not problems still to be solved. One of the books found that those who were once on welfare but then took jobs did not come out ahead:

But Stretched Thin challenges this supposed success story. Even in the prosperous economy of the late 1990s, it shows, finding a job was not usually a ticket out of poverty. Co-authors Sandra Morgen, an anthropologist, and Joan Acker, a sociologist, both at the University of Oregon, and Jill Weigt, a sociologist at California State University, San Marcos, surveyed more than 900 people, most of them white single mothers, who were taken off the rolls in Oregon or denied welfare benefits in early 1998. They found that more than half — 55 percent — wound up taking jobs that paid wages at or below the poverty line. Two years later, the authors found, nearly half still had family incomes below the poverty line.

If the goal of the welfare reform was to help people move permanently out of poverty, these books suggest there is a lot more work to do. And now with more Americans living in poverty, this could be the time to start working on the complex set of challenges.

What to do with a sociology PhD: become the father of the hedge fund

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A common question arises regarding sociology degrees: what can you do with that? The man behind the hedge fund, Alfred Winslow Jones, held a sociology PhD from Columbia University before going on to becoming a financial writer and inventor:

In fact, by the time the article hit the newsstands, Jones was already well in the process of setting up his own investment firm, A. W. Jones & Co. While reporting on the latest investment strategies, Jones had begun to contemplate a new approach, one that would include selling short some stocks in a portfolio as a way to protect against the market’s uncertainties.

Such a portfolio, Jones would explain to his investors, was a “hedged” fund..

In 1941, Jones received a sociology doctorate from Columbia University. For his research, he interviewed 1,705 residents of Akron, Ohio about their attitudes toward corporations and property. He found that, despite local labor unrest and political tensions, Akron was not divided rigidly along class lines. His dissertation was published as a book titled Life, Liberty, and Property, which became a much-used text in sociology circles…

Landau highlighted Jones as the man who had started this trend, noting however that the sociology Ph.D. “actually seems to be more interested in things other than finance,” including finding self-improvement alternatives to welfare and organizing a Reverse Peace Corps to bring foreigners to work with poor Americans. Jones was quoted complaining that “too many men don’t want to do something after they make money.” Many of Jones’s early investors, Landau wrote, were scholars, social workers and others whom Jones had met over the years and was trying to free from financial concerns.

Sounds like an interesting life. It would be fascinating to hear Jones talk about how his PhD in sociology helped push him toward his financial inventions and actions. Was it something about the way sociology views the world that helped him develop the idea of the “hedged fund”? Perhaps sociology gave him some unique insights into the operation of economic markets. Additionally, it sounds like Jones had some sociological thoughts about what one should do with an accumulated fortune: it should be put toward new social ideas and goals.

The presence of error in statistics as illustrated by basketball predictions

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TrueHoop has an interesting paragraph from this afternoon illustrating how there is always error in even complicated statistical models:

A Laker fan wrings his hands over the fact that advanced stats prefer the Heat and LeBron James to the Lakers and Kobe Bryant. It’s pitched as an intuition vs. machine debate, but I don’t see the stats movement that way at all. Instead, I think everyone agrees the only contest that matters takes place in June. In the meantime, the question is, in clumsily predicting what will happen then (and stats or no, all such predictions are clumsy) do you want to use all of the best available information, or not? That’s the debate about stats in the NBA, if there still is one.

By suggesting that predictions are clumsy, Abbott is highlighting an important fact about statistics and statistical analysis: there is always some room for error. Even with the best statistical models, there is always a chance that a different outcome could result. There are anomalies that pop up, such as a player who has an unexpected breakout year or a young star who suffers an unfortunate injury early in the season. Or perhaps an issue like “chemistry,” something that I imagine is difficult to model, plays a role. The better the model, meaning the better the input data and the better the statistical techniques, the more accurate the predictions.

But in the short term, there are plenty of analysts (and fans) who want some way to think about the outcome of the 2010-2011 NBA season. Some predictions are simply made on intuition and basketball knowledge. Other predictions are made based on some statistical model. But all of these predictions will serve as talking points during the NBA season to help provide some overarching framework to understand the game by game results. Ultimately, as Gregg Easterbrook has pointed out in his TMQ column during the NFL off-season, many of the predictions are wrong – though the makers of the predictions are not often punished for poor results.

Why American road sign lettering will change: better readability

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The Infrastructurist sums up the research behind the change to federal policies about road sign lettering. Road signs in coming years will need to be changed to move away from all CAPS in order to improve readability, particularly at night:

The shift reflects years of research into how drivers—particularly the elderly—react to road signs. In the late 1990s researchers at Penn State’s Pennsylvania Transportation Institute compared traditional highway signs to those with mixed-case Clearview lettering. They sat people age 65 to 83 in the front seat of a Ford Probe and approached a sign until the person could read it, repeating the tests with various fonts in both daytime and night.

The results, as the name Clearview suggests, were clear. Mixed-font Clearview was readable from roughly 440 feet away, whereas typical all-cap lettering was readable only at a distance of 384 feet. By expanding the interior spaces of certain letters, Clearview also reduced halanation—the process by which letters blur together late at night. In darkness Clearview became readable at 387 feet, against 331 for the standard highway font style.

All told the researchers found a 16 percent increase in readability with Clearview. On a typical 55 m.p.h. highway this translates into “two more seconds to read and respond to a sign,” they concluded in a 1998 report.

While this will cost money in the short term, it should lead to an improved driving experience. But it is also interesting how an issue like this can become fodder for political debates about how much money the government should be spending.

Debunking the myth of poisoned candy

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Amidst an argument about how the supervision of Halloween activities due to fear has spread to other arenas, sociologist Joel Best is mentioned as an expert who every year tries to remind people that poisoned candy is not a threat to children:

Take “stranger danger,” the classic Halloween horror. Even when I was a kid, back in the “Bewitched” and “Brady Bunch” costume era, parents were already worried about neighbors poisoning candy. Sure, the folks down the street might smile and wave the rest of the year, but apparently they were just biding their time before stuffing us silly with strychnine-laced Smarties.

That was a wacky idea, but we bought it. We still buy it, even though Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, has researched the topic and spends every October telling the press that there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger’s Halloween candy. (Oh, yes, he concedes, there was once a Texas boy poisoned by a Pixie Stix. But his dad did it for the insurance money. He was executed.)

There is little or no evidence for this problem – and yet the stories continue. This might be considered an “invented social problem,” a situation where people fear something that doesn’t really exist. In contrast, many people are trying to get people to recognize valid social problems, like poverty or fighting certain kinds of cancer.

I wonder if this fear about candy is linked to general fears that suburbanites have about their neighbors and outside forces that might affect them.

A new book considers the “Hipster”

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A new and short guide to the Hipster has been published: What Was the Hipster: A Sociological Investigation. One writer gives a concise guide to when the term came into popular usage:

According to a panel convened by n+1 last year at the New School, the term “hipster” re-entered the contemporary lexicon in or about 1999 (it had earlier been used interchangeably with “hepcat” in the Beat era), with the arrival of modish young men in trucker hats on Bedford Avenue.

This seems to be one of those buzz words that is difficult to define exactly. And what percentage of hipsters live on college campuses?

The book title also seems to suggest that hipsters have already had their time. If this is the case, what is next?

The kind of music debates I like: the Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones in the psychedelic era

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This past Sunday’s Chicago Tribune featured a book excerpt where two music critics debated the merits of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the psychedelic, late 1960s, Sgt. Pepper vs. Their Satanic Majesties Request era. An interesting read if only for the suggestions that the Rolling Stones laughed their way through the psychedelic era while the Beatles, Paul McCartney in particular, couldn’t stop themselves from wanting to be accepted by the British establishment.

The next biggest US TV network: Univision

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Amidst lower ratings and numerous articles about how to avoid TV all together, the big four American TV networks have some major competition: Univision. With already decent ratings and a growing Hispanic population, Univision may just be the network of the future:

With double-digit ratings growth this season, Spanish-language broadcaster Univision is off to a better start than any of the major English-language networks, and the future is promising as well.

The new census is expected to show a nearly 45% increase in the number of Hispanic Americans since 2000, to a total of 50 million. This couples with continuing audience erosion at the major networks and Univision’s recent deal with Mexican programer Grupo Televisa, which locks up the source of much the network’s popular programing for at least another decade.

Just a few years ago, the notion of Univision catching and surpassing them would have had mainstream network executives rolling with laughter. They’re not laughing now.

And they’re not talking publicly about it either: When asked to comment, the Big Four nets refused.

So while the big 4 networks are chasing edgy 18-49 year olds (or older viewers), Univision is capitalizing on the big demographic changes taking place in America.

How will the big 4 networks respond? They have been having troubles for years, losing viewers to cable and other media. Might we see some crossover programming from Univision and other Spanish-language stations reach the air through older broadcast networks?

College courses created by students include looks at Mad Men and Seinfeld

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The University of California-Berkeley has a program called DeCal. In the program, college students teach other college students for college credit. One recent article about the program highlights how some of the courses take a longer look at television shows:

That’s because the popular show based in the 1960 is the subject of a fall course.

It’s a two-unit class that meets once a week in the school’s DeCal program. It focuses on the “thematically, symbolically and historically rich television series.” DeCal classes give a platform to students who want to dig into atypical subjects, according to the university.  This fall’s topics range from a class on the “Sociology of Seinfeld” to longboarding. DeCal is run by the students themselves, but the classes give real college credits…

The teachers…say they are covering the following themes:

  • contemporary culture
  • politics of the 1960s
  • the role of women, class and society
  • the family unit

Students have more than just a television show to watch as homework, they are also given supplemental reading assignments.

I can imagine one category of reactions to the article: “of course, when you let students teach their own courses for credit, you will end up studying television shows.”

On the other hand, there are courses like this at other schools where media content, film, movies, and other cultural products, are analyzed. As one of the student teachers suggests, Mad Men could be read/watched as saying important things about our culture. Not only does it offer some reflection on early 1960s life, it also could be read as how people in 2010 view that era.

Overall, teenagers (8-18 years old) and emerging adults (18-25) consume a lot of media-produced stories like Mad Men. Courses like this might help them better understand what they are viewing and how it lines up with the real world.

(I would be curious to know what kind of evaluations these kinds of courses receive. Do students perceive that they learned more or less in a student taught course? And then, did they actually learn more or less?)