The New York Post reports on a man “selling grilled cheese on the black market.”
Vanity Fair comments on the story and concludes: “It goes without saying that this seedy sociological phenomenon, like many others, will likely be optioned into a David Simon–HBO series.”
The New York Times reports on how getting information from the Internet has changed students’ perceptions about plagiarism:
It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.
Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image.
Anthropologist Susan D. Blum studied students at the University of Notre Dame and came to this conclusion regarding attitudes toward authorship:
She contends that undergraduates are less interested in cultivating a unique and authentic identity — as their 1960s counterparts were — than in trying on many different personas, which the Web enables with social networking.
If so, this is an interesting change. It suggests the concept of individualism is changing from one where a person develops unique ideas to one where individuals are creative with existing material.
Perhaps this generation tends to think information on the Internet (and other creative material) is common knowledge. One traditional rule about avoiding plagiarism has to do with common knowledge; if it is widely known, then no citation is needed. What is being confused then is the ease in which the information can be obtained versus whether it has an author. It is true that it is often easy to do an Internet search and find something out. That does not mean that the information is known to all – easy access does not equal common knowledge.
It seems like the best course would be for students to cite all external sources, even if a student thinks it is common knowledge.
The job market in sociology is down quite a bit in recent years, according to a report from the American Sociological Association. The results are reported in Inside Higher Ed:
An association report issued Friday shows a 35 percent decline in the number of academic job postings in its job bank between 2008 and 2009, and that drop follows a 23 percent drop between 2006 and 2008, the year that the economic downturn started in full. (While not all sociology jobs are listed with the association, the job bank is a good proxy for the overall market, especially for tenure-track positions.)
While the report holds out hope for coming years, this will be tied to the fate of universities and colleges in general, which are then dependent on the overall economy. If certain pundits are right, such as Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, in suggesting that we may be on the verge of a higher education bubble, the job market could be tight for a while.
Christine Rosen at InCharacter.org writes about our relationship with machines. Her argument: people in the 1800s and early 1900s were awed by machines while today, “the more personalized and individualized our machines have become, the less humility we feel in using them.” Rosen suggests how this came about:
The awe experienced by earlier generations was part of a different worldview, one that demonstrated greater humility about many things, not least of which concerned their own human limits and frailties. Today we believe our machines allow us to know a lot more, and in many ways they do. What we don’t want to admit – but should – is that they also ensure that we directly experience less.
A thought-provoking essay. Machines are now so common and cheap that I think we often hardly recognize how they have changed our lives. In fact, new machines need to be almost life-altering (or have some new image attached to them) to gain our attention. Many of our common machines, like the automobile or many kitchen appliances, haven’t changed all that much over time as they still perform the same basic functions.
Having a sense of awe about a machine might also help us recognize some of the downsides of using new machines. If we are used to computers, we don’t think much anymore about the implications of joining a site like Facebook. Or we may not consider how having a search engine like Google affects how we think or gather and process information. We tend to accept new machines today as inevitable signs of progress (and we are progressing, right?) rather than stepping back and assessing what they mean.
Facebook is being used in New Delhi, India to help police catch traffic violators. From the New York Times:
The traffic police started a Facebook page two months ago, and almost immediately residents became digital informants, posting photos of their fellow drivers violating traffic laws. As of Sunday more than 17,000 people had become fans of the page and posted almost 3,000 photographs and dozens of videos.
The online rap sheet was impressive. There are photos of people on motorcycles without helmets, cars stopped in crosswalks, drivers on cellphones, drivers in the middle of illegal turns and improperly parked vehicles.
Using the pictures, the Delhi Traffic Police have issued 665 tickets, using the license plate numbers shown in the photos to track vehicle owners, said the city’s joint commissioner of traffic, Satyendra Garg.
This is an interesting example of crowd-sourcing as average citizens can make use of technology on hand to help the police. Of course, there could be issues (some of which are discussed in the article) involving privacy and people settings up others. I can imagine the uproar if this was attempted in an American city.
On the other hand, this is an effort that helps make Facebook useful for the common good. As it is now, most of Facebook’s benefits seem to go to individual users who can make or maintain connections with people they know. Could a technology like Facebook be harnessed to better society or is this just a pipe dream?
As a side note to the Chelsea Clinton wedding, some people have wondered whether this means Chelsea is joining the Jewish faith. In the midst of this wondering, David Breakstone of the Jerusalem Post speaks to a sociologist and introduces me to a new term:
“Many non-Jewish spouses are going through sociological conversions rather than rabbinical conversions,” Prof. Steven Cohen, eminent sociologist of American Jewry and personal friend, tells me in another article on the subject that appeared in this paper. “They’re becoming in effect members of the Jewish community without official rabbinical instruction or authorization. Sociological conversions may be the biggest denomination of converts today.”
This term apparently means that people can become Jewish without adopting Judaism. As one writer at Haaretz.com says, “In the Israeli reality, it is no longer true that the only way to join the Jewish people is to adopt the Jewish religion.”
It would seem these “sociological conversions” could have a large impact on what is means to be Jewish in the future.
In April, the Library of Congress announced plans to archive all public tweets since the start of Twitter in March 2006. So what might researchers do with this data?
A recent study provides an example. Scholars from Northeastern and Harvard examined the emotions of Americans through their Tweets. By coding certain words as having positive or negative emotional value, researchers were able to map out data. According to New Scientist:
[T]hese “tweets” suggest that the west coast is happier than the east coast, and across the country happiness peaks each Sunday morning, with a trough on Thursday evenings.
The mood map is cool.
While the findings about when people are happy may not be too surprising, the research does bring up the question about the value of Tweets as a data source. Since it is likely skewed to a younger sample and also perhaps a wealthier and more educated group, it is not representative data. But it could provide some insights into reactions to certain events or for seeing the beginning and end of certain trends.
So what else will researchers study using tweets?
The Houston Chronicle contains an interview with sociologist Michael Emerson about a forthcoming study (to be published in Social Forces) regarding housing choice and race.
First, a bit about the methodology of the study:
Researchers for the Institute for Urban Research at Rice University asked that question to 1,000 whites, 1,000 African-Americans and 1,000 Hispanics in Harris County to determine whether race makes a difference when they select homes and neighborhoods, independent of crime, housing prices and schools…
The housing questions were part of 30-minute interviews conducted for the annual Houston Area Survey. Respondents were asked to imagine they were looking for a house and found one they liked in their price range. They then were presented with computer-generated, random scenarios of school quality, property values, crime rate and racial makeup, and asked the likelihood that they would buy the house.
By using hypothetical situations, researchers were able to isolate the effect of certain factors, such as the racial composition of a neighborhood or the crime rate.
Here is a quick summary of the findings, according to Emerson:
For whites, the percentage of African-American or Hispanic matters significantly. They’re more and more averse to buying a house in a neighborhood as the percentage of African-Americans or Hispanics increases, even when crime is low, property values are increasing, and the local schools are of high quality.
The other result we found was for African-Americans in the Houston area, they’re sensitive to the percent Asian. So as the percent Asian increases, the less likely they are to say they want to buy the house.
And for Hispanics, the racial composition did not impact their preference for buying the home.
One other way to understand how strong the impact is, for whites: The likelihood they wouldn’t want to buy the house when there was racial diversity was equal to the likelihood they wouldn’t want to buy when the crime rate was high.
These findings are similar to those of other studies: Whites prefer not to choose a neighborhood with a certain number of African-Americans and Hispanics, even if the neighborhood has other positive features. The findings about other races are interesting as well – a lot of the housing literature focuses on the preferences of whites which makes sense as they are still the largest group and historically and today tend to have more wealth. But it is important to know the preferences of African-Americans and Hispanics, particularly as the Hispanic population grows.
Interestingly, the racial composition of the neighborhood does not appear to matter to Hispanics. I am curious to see what Emerson and his co-authors suggest is behind this.
Ariel Kaminer writes in the New York Times about shopping at the first Target in Manhattan which is located in East Harlem:
It is a sharp contrast to hopping from store to store for kitchen tools here, socks there, electronics in yet another place… That dominant New York shopping model has its charms, but really, remind me what they are. I like local merchants as much as the next New York nostalgist, but on a torpid summer day there is much to be said for the suburban efficiency of one-stop shopping…
It all seems so convenient (and cheap) that you start to think you should just buy everything then and there, to have on hand when you need it.
But what did I need? … Four Riedel wine glasses ($39.99)? (When the same brand is available at Target and Tiffany, it’s time to re-evaluate the distinction between mass and class.)…
After several hours, I found myself wandering through the aisles with my shopping cart, glassy-eyed from the sheer glut of choices, idly reaching for things that I felt no special connection to. It was time to go.
Kaminer appears to be thinking through the implications of of big box shopping stores that offers consumers many cheap options (and even some high-end fare). Granted, this one-stop shopping has not just been the domain of suburbanites: it has been available in department stores for a long time. But the experience of going to a downtown Macy’s or Marshall Field’s still seems quite different than going to Target. Those department stores were and still are more of an experience and you pay for that experience as opposed to a Target or Wal-Mart or Home Depot where the goal is primarily efficiency and low prices.
Additionally, the construction of urban malls and shopping centers (but usually lacking the abundant parking lots) really lowers the walls between the urban and suburban shopping experience. This Target is located in “the first retail power center in Manhattan” that also features Best Buy, Old Navy, and Costco. Though it is mainly accessible by subway, the dominant world of American shopping – malls and big box stores – is now available to Manhattanites.
Canadian officials have recently decided to make the long-form of their census voluntary. While the move is being made to protect the privacy of citizens, some people are not happy. The Wall Street Journal describes some of the protests:
Statisticians have protested, arguing that fewer people will respond to a voluntary survey, which will make the results less representative and reduce the government’s knowledge about its populace.
The article goes on to talk about how participation and response rates are dropping for many private surveys. If this is the case, might not the information from voluntary long-form be biased? A study done by the US Census Bureau in the early 2000s showed that changing a government survey from mandatory to voluntary dropped response rates by 20%.
Generally, social scientists operate under the assumption that research participation is voluntary. However, governments have the ability to require participation, say in areas like taxes or the census. Additionally, the statistics collected by the census have broad implications for funding, research, and knowledge about a country.
While some may not like such information being in the hands of government, do they not think their bank or credit card company already knows a lot about them?
