Felix Salmon has a great post about the journalistic use of statistics, and it’s well worth the read. Here’s his summary, complete with thoughtful reminders:
Before you start quoting statistics, then, it’s always worth (a) knowing where exactly they come from; (b) verifying them independently if you were fed them by some pressure group; and (c) making sure that they say what you say that they say. Otherwise, you just end up looking credulous and silly.
In the last week, several journalists have addressed the issue of how journalists should talk with politicians about religion. Ross Douthat followed up on his August 29th column with a blog post providing examples of what he is trying to address. And last Friday, Amy Sullivan provided a number of steps journalists could take in order to write intelligently about the religious beliefs of politicians.
This brings several thoughts to mind:
1. What happened to religion writers among major newspapers or magazines? I think most of them have disappeared, even respected ones like Catherine Falsani who used to write for the Chicago Sun-Times. At a time when religion is alive and influential around the world, media sources don’t have dedicated people who can comment on these particular issues. Asking political writers to write about topics they don’t regularly cover seems like a problem. I know media outlets have had to make major cutbacks in certain areas but there are repercussions for this.
2. The burden seems to be on politicians who have “non-mainstream” religious beliefs to explain how they are not dangers to society. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Americans have more unfavorable feelings toward minority religions like Mormons, Muslims, Buddhists, and atheists/non-religious (not quite a minority “religion”). Of course, much of this debate could really be about whether evangelicals are mainstream or not. Their size would suggest they are mainstream as would their political influence since the late 1970s.
Netflix has had a lot of bad press in the last few months. First, they decided to split their online-only streaming service from their mailed disc service, substantially increasing their customer’s prices. Second, word came that they are losing their Starz distribution agreement, which will severely curtail the availability of (genuinely) recent movies on their streaming service.
Now, here comes a potential supply shock on the physical distribution side:
The United States Postal Service has long lived on the financial edge, but it has never been as close to the precipice as it is today: the agency is so low on cash that it will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and may have to shut down entirely this winter unless Congress takes emergency action to stabilize its finances….
Missing the $5.5 billion payment due on Sept. 30, intended to finance retirees’ future health care, won’t cause immediate disaster. But sometime early next year, the agency will run out of money to pay its employees and gas up its trucks, officials warn, forcing it to stop delivering the roughly three billion pieces of mail it handles weekly.
To be sure, a long-term interruption in mail service would be an economic catastrophe extending well beyond Netflix. Nonetheless, viewing this problem from Netflix’s perspective shows just how dependent even web-savvy companies are on physical infrastructure and distribution systems. There will be a lot of collateral damage if businesses can no longer count on a robust and dependable USPS.
Now that some time has passed since the London riots (earlier posts here, here, and here), The Guardian is beginning a series consisting of sociologists talking about what they have learned about the riots from talking with those who were involved. The series starts here:
Many interviewees identified deprivation and inequality as root issues. Some spoke about the lack of work opportunities and access to education, as well as the EMA cuts. Some believed that getting an education was the key to the golden gate, but a year after graduation they were still struggling to find work. For others, also out of work, a university degree had never been on the cards.
But much of the anger was directed at the police. Young people spoke of incessant stop-and-search accompanied by rudeness, arrogance and racism. Some young people talked of Duggan’s death not as a unique injustice, but as yet another example of police murder. Young people spoke of the riots as a means of “sticking two fingers up” at the authorities, and for a couple of nights relishing having the upper-hand…
Finally, many young people talked about the riots as a consequence of the anger and frustration felt at not seeing a future. Unable to see education, jobs and pensions on their horizon, some explained how they sought pleasure in consumerism. But while those they looked up to accessed and displayed these objects freely, for young people they were often out of reach. As consumers first and foremost, the inability to shop made them feel unfulfilled and lacking in self respect. In some places the signs of these divides were part of the architecture around them – the upward mobility of the cityscapes of global capitalism looked increasingly remote.
Some young people hoped the government would hear the riots as a call to close the gap between the haves and the have-nots. But they didn’t think this likely.
I’ll be interested to read the subsequent pieces in this series. While the riots were often narrated by outsiders (particularly here in the United States),
interviews with those involved could reveal the internal motivations that led to actions that outsiders would see as out of line. Such broad and faraway views can be interpreted in different ways as Darnell Hunt illustrated how race influenced how people viewed news coverage of the Los Angeles riots of 1992. I hope we can soon to get to a point where we have some harder data, beyond even the vague statements from interviews offered in this opening piece. While the public may not want to hear the motivations of those who participated (particularly since it may be interpreted as justifying their actions), this is needed information in order to alter structural conditions and help prevent and/or predict future riots.
Indeed, a criminologist also thinks we need more “credible research” regarding the riots. (A side note: I use Newburn’s 2001 piece on evaluation research in my research methods class.)
Looking at the article “Is a college education worth the price?“, I was pointed to Pew survey data released in May 2011 about what Americans think about college. Among the findings:
Nearly every parent surveyed (94%) says they expect their child to attend college, but even as college enrollments have reached record levels, most young adults in this country still do not attend a four-year college. The main barrier is financial. Among adults ages 18 to 34 who are not in school and do not have a bachelor’s degree, two-thirds say a major reason for not continuing their education is the need to support a family. Also, 57% say they would prefer to work and make money; and 48% say they can’t afford to go to college.
These are pretty high aspirations that cut across income levels and backgrounds. Pew suggests the primary barrier to reaching these expectations is money: the need to support oneself and a family gets in the way.
But I wonder if there is another barrier that is partly due to finances and partly due to other factors: it can be difficult to translate aspirations into outcomes. In today’s world and particularly in America where parents have always desired great things for their children (I remember this coming out distinctly in the original Middletown study), what parent wouldn’t say that their kid will attend college? If one comes from a privileged background, a child can see how this path will logically play out: you go through the stages of school and naturally you will move from high school to college (with finances somehow being taken care of and parents socking away money for over a decade in a college fund). But, in lesser circumstances, where is this easy path? It may be doable but there are a lot of obstacles standing in the way.
This reminds me of Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods. While I can’t remember whether she specifically talks about college aspirations, the class-based styles of parenting she outlines could lead to different outcomes in achieving these parental aspirations.
Via BigThink.com, I stumbled across a sociologist making an interesting argument: “closure” is a cultural construction. This sounds both controversial and fascinating as it draws attention to a topic that we don’t think much about: how to grieve and deal with loss as individuals and, perhaps more interesting for sociologists, as a culture.
Two quick thoughts:
1. I would guess Berns argues that closure is more of a cultural development than an actual experience a person has and is emblematic of a therapeutic American culture that emphasizes “moving on.” But I’ll have to read the book to find out. Developing personal or collective memories about traumatic events can be interesting topics to study, as the growing field of the sociology of disasters illustrates.
2. Looking at the blog that accompanies the book, I wonder how much demand Berns will be in with the upcoming September 11th memorials. On one hand, some could find her take on grief to be reassuring and needed. On the other hand, some might be angry. If she does become part of the media circus surrounding the commemorative, I hope she can push a sociological perspective on the proceedings.
A number of commentators have suggested the era of McMansions is over. A new survey of the American members of the International Furnishings and Design Association agrees with this prediction. Here are some of the findings:
-Americans will be living in smaller spaces with fewer rooms by the year 2020, say more than 76% of IFDA members. Eleven years ago, only 49% foresaw less living space in our future…
-Separate rooms are disappearing; they are blending into spaces that serve many different purposes, believe 91.5% of the design experts – which is exactly what they foresaw back in 2000.
-Furniture also is going multipurpose, say 67.5% of the the IFDA forecasters. They see modular, moveable, and smaller-scaled furniture overtaking built-ins and big pieces. There will be more interest in ergonomic designs – designed to fit the human body – but almost none in furniture designed to be disposable…
-Everyone’s working at home. A home office is a given, say more than three-quarters of the respondents, but here’s the news: Nearly 40% of the forecasters see more than one home office under every roof…
In summary: leaders in the furnishings and design field think that Americans will be living in smaller, more multipurpose spaces.
Several questions regarding these survey findings:
1. How much do those surveyed get to set and sell these product changes in the years to come?
2. If the economy improves dramatically in the next few years, are all these predictions moot?
3. How long before these predictions and ideas become the norm set before average Americans in places like furniture showrooms or on HGTV?
4. What do you do with previous findings of the survey?
a. For example, in 2000, roughly half surveyed thought Americans would be living in smaller spaces. The actual Census numbers about new single-family homes: on average, they were 2,266 square feet, 2,438 square feet in 2009, and 2,392 square feet in 2010. This is still a net gain over most of the decade with a dip between 2008 and 2010. So half of those surveyed in 2000 were wrong?
b. The predictions about the drop in separate rooms were the same now as in 2000. Were they right?
c. If those surveyed can be wrong, what does it mean? Do their companies/firms lose money because they mispredicted the future? Is it really difficult to predict the directions in this particular field and anticipate what the American consumer wants?
The young might only think of AT&T as one of the major cell phone carriers. But this ignores AT&T’s long and important history that includes many innovations and cycles the company has gone through:
But AT&T didn’t just conquer the 20th-century via clever marketing, mergers, and strategic deals with the government. In an era profoundly distrustful of corporations, it justified its expansion as a bid to offer “universal service” to the country. “One policy, one system, universal service,” became AT&T’s motto. Rather than breaking up the system, the government would regulate it as a “natural monopoly.”…
For the next 50 years, AT&T would consistently repeat the same cycle to avoid being broken up by the government—innovate, acquire, strategically retreat, then move forward again with a redefined mission. When the public reacted badly to the network’s attempt to take over broadcast radio, AT&T backed off in exchange for a monopoly on wireline service between radio stations. When the government again raised the spectre of a breakup after the Second World War, AT&T agreed to get out of the computer software business, leasing innovations like the Unix operating system to universities for a nominal fee.
Interesting. The research and development arm of this company produced a number of important technological breakthroughs that helped the United States rise to the top of the world heap in the mid 1950s. The company may be once again on the verge of a monopoly but it is hard to refute, to paraphrase a well-known saying, that “what has been good for AT&T has been good for America.”
A professor discusses the reasons why college syllabi keep getting bigger:
Nowadays my course syllabi tend to run to many pages and always include a punctilious day-by-day calendar of the semester stipulating, for example, precisely which pages in what book students need to have read for class. My instructions to students concerning formal written work have also become replete with prescription in a way that I would not have thought necessary even ten years ago. Colleagues concur that instructors at the state-college level can take little or nothing for granted about student preparedness and that everything, absolutely everything, must be spelled out in advance. Without abundant guidance and prescription, students complain of being lost, as perhaps they are, or of “not understanding what the professor wants,” as is perhaps the case…
First-year college students have a drastically diminished vision of what higher education portends for them. The idea of discipline that enabled my UCLA instructors to assume procedural competency in their students, and that enabled most students to acquit themselves during the term with only a minimal syllabus, no longer exists…
The enlargement of the syllabus also stems from the need to define, explain, and insofar as possible justify the course itself, something that no syllabus from my undergraduate career ever bothered to do. The syllabus of my survey of ancient literature (“Western Heritage”) addresses the basic notion of historical indebtedness, the idea of continuity of insight, and of the dignity of knowledge as opposed to ignominy of ignorance. The syllabus also addresses the difficulty of reading; it tells students that an epic poem by Homer or a philosophical dialogue by Plato is not like a TV drama or a movie, in which in the first few minutes, one can predict the remainder…
Some of this effort—and much of the hypertrophied syllabus—is precautionary. It is precautionary on behalf of students, who, from day one, will know in advance every requirement and assignment of the course. It is also precautionary on behalf of the syllabus-writer, who seeks protection from petulant students claiming they never knew the schedule or failed to receive procedural knowledge concerning the semester. Syllabus in hand, no one can plead ignorance.
The general idea is this: today’s college students need college explained to them, point by point. This could quickly turn into a generational argument that is bigger than just college classes: the role of college has changed from a place of learning to four years of job training. Society, and consequentially, college students simply don’t know what college is about when they should and professors have to do the extra work to explain it. This could also be tied to the issue that a number of college students are not ready to do college-level work.
There may be some truth to this but, as the article hints at, there could be good reasons to have longer syllabi:
1. Expectations are made clear from the beginning. This could cut down student’s anxiety as there is less “guesswork” involved. If a relatively short document (compared to books/journal articles) can help eliminate ignorance, why not?
2. Why not have a short part of the syllabus that explains what the class is about? Certain subjects, like sociology, are relatively unknown and a one or two paragraph introduction can give students a engaging foundation.
3. I like having the day-to-day calendar for myself so why not provide it for the students as well? Perhaps this is just because I like to be organized.
4. I wonder if a detailed and longer syllabi just by its thoroughness conveys to students the importance of the task. Some students may groan at seeing how much there is to read but others will feel the gravity.
We could transfer these ideas to another context: would many employees find it acceptable if they came to work each day with little idea of what to expect? On one hand, we should promote internal motivation but some structure is helpful. We can rue the loss of “gravity” and “mystery” that students have or feel regarding college or we can try to convey these ideas in our syllabi and what we say and do in the classroom.
h/t Instapundit
I’ve written before about sociology being considered an “easy major” by athletes. A new report looks at some notable schools and considers how clustered male athletes are within majors:
Since the NCAA invented the APR [Academic Progress Rate] in 2003, critics have worried that it would discourage athletes from choosing difficult majors or from changing course once they started down a given track. Some have anticipated a “clustering” of athletes in certain majors, such as sociology or communication, and others have expressed concern about the creation of broad programs such as general studies with athletes in mind.
A 2008 analysis by USA Today found that clustering happens at most institutions, and of the three sports programs Shalala compares, Miami football is most questionable, with 62.5 percent of the team studying one of two majors. While clustering on a small scale isn’t necessarily unusual, researchers who study the phenomenon say the 25-percent mark is where things start getting fishy.
A full 37.5 percent of Miami’s junior and senior football players were majoring in liberal arts in 2008, and 25 percent in sports administration. The same 37.5 percent of Stanford’s junior and senior softball players were in one major — but it was human biology — and 36.8 percent of baseball players majored in sociology. Notre Dame athletes didn’t cluster at all, according to USA Today’s analysis.
While this report by Donna Shalala, president of Miami, seems tied to troubles their football program has with violating NCAA regulations, the USA Today 2008 analysis offers more insights. While sociology is lumped within the social sciences, you can mouse over the graphics and while the most clustering seems to happen in the social sciences, the sociology clusters are numerous.
Alas, this collected data is still limited:
Assisted by sports information and other school offices, USA TODAY obtained the majors for about 85% of the athletes in the study. For most of the rest, no major was listed. Primary or first-listed majors were used in the cases of students with multiple majors.
Initially, part of the intent was to compare the percentages of athletes in a major with those of the student body as a whole. That is, if 30% of baseball players are in sociology, is 30% of the entire student body enrolled in sociology? However, short of getting athletes’ private records and the federal reporting code of each athlete’s major, large-scale comparisons are unreliable because some schools have multiple versions of some majors.
The NCAA collects similar information, but does not release it and has no current plans to study it.
Hmmm…I wonder why the NCAA has no interest in analyzing this data.
