Maplust

I just can’t help myself: I love me some visual data.

Update 1.

Now it’s just getting absurd.

Oh, for God’s sake.

Checking Out

I have a novel idea for an intro to soc class - one that has been inside my head long enough that it is threatening to become brain crack.

I don’t really like the standard intro format.  I certainly understand it; when you cram a whole bunch of highly-specialized people into a department and then develop The One Course that (in the darkness) binds them, you’re going to end up with what is basically a hodgepodge of all of their interests.  But let me tell you: it sucks.  It sucked when I took it, and it blew when I taught it.  As I have seen, a good professor can make it work, but I just don’t think the structure is enough to build a really mind-blowing course.

I’m not sure why we do it this way, either.  My political science department offered an intro course for each of its specialties (your typical American Gov’t, International, Comparative, and Theory/Methods); econ has Micro and Macro, at least.  But sociology, along with psychology, offer introductory courses that are something like (to quote from the comments on a paper I turned in a couple years ago) “describing the leaves on trees from a jet at 40,000 feet and 500mph”.  All I came away with, and much of what I felt like I was teaching my students, were tidbits.

My idea, then, is to teach an intro course with a unifying theme.  Something that would be able to unify most of the specialties while being a smidge less abstract than the Big Three Perspectives.  Something classic but not dead.  Something eye-opening.

Something like… suicide.

Depressing, I know.  But every specialty has something to say about suicide, because it’s a sort of ultimate rejection of society.  The Big Three have their perspectives, of course.  I think that teaching methods would gain tremendously because there would be a single focus for each, allowing for a practical comparison of which method does what.  Then each of the usual sections - culture, deviance, family, religion, inequality, organizations, etc. - could all chip in.  An intro student from this class might not know as much about each, since the content would be suicide-focused, but they would know how to address a social (urgh) problem from beginning to end.

If prepared well enough, you could even let the students sort of “spontaneously” determine what to cover next.  This is essentially what I did on the first day of teaching intro discussion sections: I put up six charts of suicide rates (which you can see on the GRAPHIC page above), then put them into small groups to try to come up with theories to explain the variations.  From these initial theories, you could lead them through each of the possible causes, perhaps building a regression model as you go.  And you could incorporate lots of current events and up-to-date research.

There are, of course, some serious problems that could arise.  It is damn depressing, but hopefully that would become known after the first semester (and certainly after the first day), and it certainly wouldn’t be the only intro class available.  The Golden Child raised concerns about it filling out a full semester or getting boring after a month that I think are totally legitimate.

I’m curious about your experience, dear three readers who haven’t already talked to me about this.  Let me know what you think.

Loveliest Wal-Mart

FlowingData can even make the spread of nasty corporations* look gorgeous.  Visualizations like this put another nail in the coffin of paper journals.  My new project for the next three years: learn ActionScript.  Sorry, Beezy.

By the way, if you have any sweet geographic time-series data that you’d to see done up in this style, Nathan at FD would probably love to hear from you.  It’s just a matter of ramming the new data through the code – easily done, and it would add a little pop to your next presentation.

*Yes, I am one of those people.  But I have arguments that convince people of just about any political belief, so I feel justified.

An exercise in quantification and categorization

Is it sociological?  Meh.  Everything is sociological.

Jessica is overweight

The rest of The Illustrated BMI

Replicability and Science

This is a pretty exciting time in the social sciences, I think.  I (and others - um, Drek?  Maybe Jesse?) have often compared this point in the development of social science with the point when astronomers acquired telescopes.  We’ve finally got computers - computers that let you do crazy things like run OLS and ordered logit regressions on 43,000 people in 32 countries in about half an hour, while automatically saving the results to files (thanks, R!).  I knew that computers were a big deal for us, but I’ve also started to realize just how recent they are - one of my stats professors this spring had used punchcards, for God’s sake!  And they both know how to program in Fortran 66 (Beezy, read as: the programming equivalent of speaking Sanskrit).

Now that our scales are tipping a bit more from art toward science, it seems like replication should be (and is) becoming a more important part of our research.  People definitely grouse about it, but I don’t think we go to quite the same ends that those in, say, biology do to ensure that our results aren’t just flukes.

I’ve been trying to build a lot of replicability and transparency into my thesis; I’m doing all of the analysis programmatically in R, from data inputs and transformations to automatic outputs to .txt and .csv files.  Ultimately, I’d like for someone to be able to download this from my (ahem) faculty web page, run it all through R, get the same results, and say, “Well, your results are technically correct, but you used (readily-available method from default package) instead of (insanely obscure method from undocumented package), which would have been a better fit.”  Or perhaps: “Dude, you suck.”

That rather extreme degree of transparency seems somewhat necessary, even if only due to the complexity of most modern statistical software.  I mean, it’s easy to write in a paper that you ran an ordered logit regression.  But that doesn’t tell me about the defaults or algorithms that your software used; and it especially doesn’t demonstrate that you even knew which defaults and algorithms were used.  And that’s okay - I sure as hell don’t know what’s going on in R’s multilevel package half the time - but it’s something that should be made apparent.  Unfortunately, our current review system isn’t well-designed for such things - you send in your article, and that’s that.  Nobody is required or even really allowed to test your analyses to see if they’re correct.  That leaves us with a big honkin’ blind spot to both error and fraud.

Actually, we’re double-exposed to fraud because of the nature of our subjects.  Yes, people can falsify their stats (or, I should add, just screw them up).  But our data is a challenge, too.  It’s not like physics or astronomy - people are far more variable than atoms, and not nearly as accessible as the stars.  How many qualitative researchers have tweaked their participants’ words to enhance their impact?  How many survey researchers have quietly fiddled with their numbers to tweak a p value down a tenth or so?  It’s all too easy, and the pressure to publish is great.  Yeah, we have our professional ethics and all, and I do believe that the valuation of that identity by most would keep them honest - but that identity doesn’t mean much if you can’t get tenure.

E.T. lives!

No, not the Spielberg character.  Edward Tufte!  This is a recent and embarrassing revelation to me.  His book was already so damn famous by the time I heard of it, I just assumed he was dead.

He isn’t.  He’s only 66, and he’s got to be one of the most technically proficient AARP members I’ve ever heard of.  He’s got his own website, where he answers questions sent in to him.  He has videos on Vimeo.

Madness.

The Big Picture

Most amazing photojournalism I’ve seen in a long time.

WARNING: This post is not rules-compliant (ahwoooo-oooh!)

When I started this blog, I swore I would keep it sociological. I’ve done that for the most part. But this… this has to be shared. It was on YouTube for two years before I saw it, which is a damn travesty. Unless you grew up watching Duck Tales, or perhaps if you had a child who did, just skip it. But if you did… oh, shit.

I can’t stop watching it. I live for the moment when Uncle Scrooge turns to look into the camera. I am also fairly sure I am going directly to hell upon death.

Here’s the original, to refresh your memory:

Evidently

I’ve been thinking about evidence and how we know things (dare I say it - epistemology) a lot lately as I write my thesis.  The statistics, the articles… the citations.  My God, the citations.  Science is tedious, and I don’t even have the possibility of turning into a mad scientist - who ever heard of a mad sociologist?

All this methodical, painstaking construction of knowledge has made me sharply aware of how often people make claims in society without scientific backing.  I know non-scientific prognosticators often make ridiculous claims - the “social science” section at most bookstores makes me want to retch - but, damn, I really envy non-scientists’ ability to make sweeping, dramatic True Statements, as well as their ability to make lovely suggestive graphics (see here and here, too) without having to build on, destroy, modify, or even acknowledge any kind of theory.

It’s interesting, though, when scientists and non-scientists can arrive at the same sorts of ideas through different routes.  For example, I am kind of in love with the idea of differential association, despite never having studied it in-depth.  I am kind of totally in love with Neko Case.  But I had never heard her sing about differential association before:

There was nothing to put me in love with the good life
I’m in league with the the gangs guns, and the crime
There was no hollow promise that life would reward you
There was nowhere to hide in Tacoma

It’s cool.  But it also makes me wonder just how much of science - even the pure ones - is just formalization of what people already know, and how much of what people know is a common-sensification of things they learned in high school.

Bah.  I swear I’ll write some decent posts someday.

If you want me, satisfy me

My thesis is on job satisfaction.  The literature is vast and hairy, overflowing with contradictory findings and scholars within and between fields talking past each other.  My review is crawling along.  Give me some analysis any day.

It’s absurd, really, because some of the theories are intensely incompatible with each other and yet can’t seem to get rid of one another.  Is job satisfaction basically a product of personality?  Can increased compensation bribe us into putting up with any kind of on-the-job shit imaginable?  Or is job satisfaction a heavily social construct, derived from socially-formed expectations and reference groups?  Needless to say, I’m not going to solve this one.  But I get to do some cool modeling with a massive dataset.

Every now and then, though, a bit of the real world slips past the PDFs and graphs to remind me just how inadequate our understanding of these things really is.

It’s 5am.  I’ve been working since noon, except for a trip to the grocery store on my bike, during which I kind of hoped that I would get hit by a car so that I could have some extra time for all of this.  Meanwhile, the custodian just got here, and he’s singing.

I dunno sometimes.