Category Archives: Sociology

Making the case for reputational rankings

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A statistician argues that the National Research Council’s study of doctoral programs released earlier this week should have included reputational rankings:

Mr. Stigler says that it was a mistake for the NRC to so thoroughly abandon the reputational measures it used in its previous doctoral studies, in 1982 and 1995. Reputational surveys are widely criticized, he says, but they do provide a check on certain kinds of qualitative measures. When the new NRC counts faculty publication rates, it does not offer any information about whether scholars in the field believe those publications are any good. (That’s especially true in humanities fields, where the NRC report does not include citation counts.)

“Everybody involved in this was trying hard, and with good intentions and high integrity,” Mr. Stigler says. “But once they decided to rule out reputation, they cut off what I consider to be the most useful measure from all past surveys.”

In an e-mail message to The Chronicle this week, Mr. Ostriker declined to reply to Mr. Stigler’s specific statistical criticisms. But he pointed out that the National Academies explicitly instructed his committee not to use reputational measures.

I was curious about this when I looked at the list of sociology doctoral programs. Perhaps several of the schools that were lower than I expected, such as the University of California – Berkeley, were lower because of this.

Stigler defends reputational measures but I’ve seen others argue that they prohibit “true” rankings within fields because certain schools retain a reputation even without the necessary output (research, good grad students, etc.). This particular discussion is part of a larger one where it will need to be decided whether reputational rankings should be used or not.

Quick review: Watching The Social Network at Harvard

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This weekend, the movie The Social Network, a disputed origin story about the founding of Facebook, hit theaters to nearly universal acclaim.  I had the opportunity to see the movie on the second day of release and can add my wreath to the many laurels heaped upon this Aaron Sorkin–David Fincher collaboration.  However, since so many others have dissected this film so thoroughly, I will refrain from a typical movie review as I feel I have little to add.  I will instead comment briefly on just how surreal it was to watch this movie at Harvard.

The AMC Loews Harvard Square 5 is located one block off the Yard at Harvard University, and the mood at the 6:30pm showing on Saturday, October 2nd was electrifying.  The audience appeared to be a mix mostly of college students and their professors, and they clearly had come to have a good time.  When the Mark Zukerberg character, played by Jesse Eisenberg, made a crack early in the movie about Boston University students not needing to study, there was a collective gasp.  When the exterior of The Thirsty Scholar made a cameo appearance, there were actual cheers.

This movie was about us–not as representatives of some abstractly-defined generation nor as students coming of age during web 2.0–but as residents of Mt. Auburn Street, two blocks away.  In the men’s bathroom after the movie, I overheard a conversation between two students debating the wisdom of trying to get into one of Lawrence Summer‘s classes now that he is returning to Harvard (after working as director of the White House National Economics Council).

Many of the best movies take us from our own specifics into the universality of the human condition.  While I am sure that The Social Network will do this for many people, it had quite the opposite effect on me.  For me, it took that most abstractly universal of all web phenonmenon–Facebook–and gave it a specific human face.  One that might well have been in the theater with me last night.

Cities using art as a development tool

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USA Today describes the attempts of some cities, including Grand Rapids, Michigan, to use art as a development and economic tool.

This is not a new phenomenon. Richard Florida, in particular, has promoted this with his ideas about the “creative class.” But, perhaps we will see a rise in this sort of activity as cities look for non-traditional economic foundations.

h/t The Infrastructurist

More discussion about teaching “The Wire” at Harvard

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The class revolving around the television show The Wire in the Harvard Sociology Department continues to draw attention. Here is a quick summary of the some of the public discussion:

In a Boston Globe editorial, Eugene and Jacqueline Rivers, co-founder of the Boston Ten-Point Coalition and Harvard University doctoral student, respectively, wrote in support of the class:

One of the most difficult challenges confronting intellectuals is how to discuss the relationship between race and poverty in Obama’s “post-racial” America…”The Wire” can usefully serve as a non-partisan political resource for engaging the issues of race and poverty.’

The two add that the show is smart and creative, and that it can lead to discussion about programmatic responses to systematic inequality in the inner city.

On the opposite end of the spectrum stands Ishmael Reed, a professor at University of California-Berkeley who also contributed an op-ed on the subject to the Globe.

Reed believes that professors like Wilson are more concerned with using “hot courses built around sensational popular culture like hip-hop and crime shows as a way of filling seats in their classroom,” than with seriously examining race and class relations. Reed contends that the show is riddled with stereotypes, and should not be utilized in a university setting.

I would be curious to hear about the outcomes of the course, both for students and faculty.

What these comments about this particular class are hinting at is that there is disagreement about how to best teach courses about race, poverty, and social class. There are numerous resources professors can draw upon, including a wealth of ethnographic work from the last twenty years.

LeBron James, “the decision,” and race

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Comments made by LeBron James several days ago are drawing attention. James suggested in an interview with CNN that race played a role in people’s reaction to his choice to play with the Miami Heat. A commentator at Salon suggests that James is just stating the obvious:

Now, the Aggrieved White Guy funnels rage to the comment boards, as LeBron is shredded for this latest transgression of truth. While many pundits white and black want to pretend that ego alone stoked this bubbling hate cauldron, Henry Abbott, who presides over ESPN’s network of NBA blogs, noticed a unique phenomenon:

“It is literally the strangest thing I have ever seen NBA fans do. If you look at most NBA stories online, there will be some comments on each that are either racist, coded racism, or in line with racist thinking. On the night of LeBron’s decision, those kinds of hateful comments — whether hateful or not — became the dominant narrative, which blew my mind.”

Fans were uniquely angry at James for showing up a mostly white NBA power structure. His race played a role, how could it not? And if you’re still mad at LeBron, if you’re screaming at him for pointing this out, I don’t think his “ego” is what irks you.

It will be interesting to see how this continues to play out. The Q ratings demonstrated that blacks and whites have different opinions about James.

Several things to note about this argument in Salon: it is partly based on evidence from Internet message boards (where people seem willing to say all sorts of things they wouldn’t say in-person) and it provides a typical defense of “the Aggrieved White Guy” who claims he didn’t bring up race at all. On the whole, such discussions need to acknowledge the larger issue: we live in a racialized society where both overt and covert racism take place and have large social consequences.

Transcribing a cultural milestone: the musical scores of Super Mario Brothers

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A pianist has developed a website where he has the complete Super Mario Brothers (the original) score including fingerings. It sounds like he went through a rigorous process:

Karam used professional engraving software and transcribed every pitch and rhythm of the original 8-bit NES game, cross-checking his work with several of the best transcriptions available on the web. He then organized the score into a readable booklet and learned all of the pieces by playing them on the piano every day for several months.
This website is apparently set up to line up with the 25th anniversary of the release of the game.
But perhaps what is more interesting is how this music came to be part of American (and worldwide) culture. I’ve heard people play this music on the piano before and it is instantly recognizable. Some of this is due to the popularity of the game and the eventual Mario series which still is going strong today. At the same time, this game, perhaps more than any other, set off a video game revolution. This music is part of the collective memory for a whole generation.

“Most romantic ‘L’ station” analysis with faulty generalization

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Among other features, Craigslist offers a “missed connections” page where people can try to identify and track down people they ran into in public life. Based on this data, Craigslist recently released a list of the “most romantic” spots in Chicago’s CTA system:

Turns out it’s Belmont. The stop on the CTA’s Red, Brown and Purple lines won the title of Chicago’s most romantic ‘L’ station in a report the Web site released Thursday. The crown for most romantic train line went to the Red Line.

The site did a four-week study this summer of more than 250 missed connections postings (read, “potential hookups”) in Chicago and ranked stations based on a scale called the Train Romance Index Score Total — or TRIST for short.

The TRIST is calculated by dividing the number of missed connections that mention a CTA station or line by the number of riders a year who use that station or line. Then, that number is multiplied by 10 to get a whole number and rounded to two decimal places.

The romantic train line is defined as having the best odds of a passenger spotting another rider across a crowded train or platform and then posting a missed connections listing to get in touch.

The data is limited (a pretty small sample) but the generalization is the biggest issue: does this really reveal what is the most romantic spot on the CTA rail system? It is probably much more indicative of who uses Craigslist (young North-siders?).

My guess is that this was simply meant to be fun and promote Craigslist. But sometimes statistics and arguments like this take on a life of their own…

Another reason for IRBs and ethical guidelines for research

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There is a body of known research from around the mid 20th century that led to the formation of ethical guidelines for research and the establishment of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). Here is another study in the news that shows why these guidelines are necessary:

The United States apologized on Friday for an experiment conducted in the 1940s in which U.S. government researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan prison inmates, women and mental patients with syphilis.

In the experiment, aimed at testing the then-new drug penicillin, inmates were infected by prostitutes and later treated with the antibiotic.

“The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.

A researcher discovered this case while doing research that followed up on the Tuskegee experiments of the 1960s.

More multigenerational and multifamily households due to economic troubles

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The shift away from multigenerational households toward the nuclear family living in a single-family home is an important piece of American culture. However, certain conditions, such as the recent economic crisis, can lead to more multigenerational and multifamily households as people lose the ability to maintain separate households:

It’s happening at a historically high rate, according to new Census Bureau estimates. Nearly 500,000 such folks moved in with family over the past two years, compared with some 400,000 in the 25-to-34 age group traditionally known for returning to live with parents. Together, the two groups drove an 11.4 percent increase in the number of U.S. households containing extended families.

Indeed, the downturn has pushed more people of all ages to cohabit. The total number of multifamily households, including nonrelated roommates, has risen 11.6 percent — to 15.4 million — since 2008. But the surge’s impact is especially profound among the older adults, accelerating a pattern begun during the 2000 recession: 3.4 million more Americans ages 35 and older have moved in with relatives over the decade. Their numbers increased twice as fast as the age group’s population.

Whether this is a long-term trend remains to be seen. It could be that once the economy improves, people will leave these multifamily households and set off on their own again.

But there can be distinct advantages to multigenerational households in addition to pure economic reasons. The young and the old can learn from each other. All ages can provide certain services/duties that households need. Children can have more family members to support them. The typical American household of the last century is not the household that many cultures have had throughout history nor is it guaranteed to be the only household form in the future.

h/t Instapundit

Rebounding from the economic crisis in Dubai

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The economic crisis didn’t just affect American building or construction. The city that has grown out of the desert, Dubai, was also strongly affected and now is making a slow recovery:

Chastened after an extravagance-fueled debt crisis last year at Dubai World, the state-run investment giant, Dubai is getting back to basics.

Glamorous whimsies like a giant artificial island shaped like a palm tree are giving way to more pragmatic priorities meant to revive Dubai’s status as the dominant trading hub between the industrially advanced West and the oil-rich Middle East.

The article goes on to mention a number of factors that need to accompany building and development for it to last long-term including stable governance and a diversified economy.

One factor that is cited as aiding Dubai’s recovery is its established infrastructure.