Source: http://jeremyfreese.blogspot.com/2006/11/
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 10:33:25+00:00

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if good fences make good neighbors, what do obnoxious fences do?
So, sometime the pleasant picket fence went by the wayside and was replaced by the fence that doesn't let you see into the yard at all. Or, at least, there are a lot of these in Cambridge. The usual height of these fences are about 6 - 6 1/2 feet, which is tall enough. The owners of the property spent a lot time/energy/money renovating their house so that it looks splendid, and then their final act was to put this giant fence up to hide it. This fence is at least 7 1/2 feet tall, on a side of the street that is otherwise unobtrusively fenced. I tell you, this fence is aggressive. I walk by and I feel like it's provoking me. It speaks, this fence. Sneery, taunting things.
Or maybe not, but the fence is too ostentatiously tall for an otherwise laid-back neighborhood. After all, the menace right across the street that they are keeping out is the Harvard Divinity School.
I didn't do this, nor was I the one who added "I agree!", although I do agree. I think if I had written the sign it would have said, "This fence is an atrocity" or "This fence bespeaks an ugly soul." I'm normally not one to give into Schadenfence, but I'm not going to feel bad if some teenager tags this fence.
i am an early-middle-age dog. i should still be able to learn new tricks.
I am working on a paper in which I use the word ubiquitous repeatedly, in reference to something I call the "thesis of ubiquitous partial heritability" (Mom! Are you still reading my blog? Don't I know some fancy words? Don't hear 'ubiquitous' up at the Korner Kupboard, do you?). I keep typing it as "ubiquitious" instead of "ubiquitous," time after time, getting the red squiggle and then having to correct. Why am I unable to internalize this? It's not like I say yoo-BIC-wit-ee-us. Seriously, you're going to think I'm making this up, but I typed it wrong at first for two out of the five times it appears so far in this post. It's like even as I'm thinking about how I can't spell it, my fingers insist on sticking in the extra "i."
As someone who has always prided himself on being able to spell, this is especially painful. But I do know how to spell ubiquitous--if I got it in a spelling bee, I would nail it--I just don't know that I should be spelling that way when I happen to be typing it.
Speaking of spelling bees, I had the greatest idea ever the other night. The big national spelling bee has become an annual hit, but the competition itself is basically more about memorization than spelling, and so then it's a matter of seeing which kid has managed to be able to have her head crammed most full of words she is then able to extract under pressure. Spelling bees are wildly unfair in this respect, though, as the difficulty of particular words varies considerably in ways that are hard to equalize (and the national spelling bee folks don't even seem to try). I suspect the winner almost always would not be able to spell all the words that were presented to competitors over the course of the bee. Plus, they get to stall with all those questions about etymology, etc., detracting from its excitement.
My idea: a National Pi Bee. Get ESPN on board, and some kind of massive scholarship prize. Then, put 12 kids on stage who've been culled in preliminary rounds and given a year to prepare with their families for this like it is basically their whole life. The format is like a spelling bee, except that, each time it's a kid's turn, he has to say the next seven digits of pi. No questions about definitions, no questions at all, and very little luck. Just pure pressure, and pure pi.
Update, 2:30pm: I just misspelled serendipitous "serendipitious", so the affliction appears to be spreading. Why?
So normally I wouldn't buy something pink for a baby girl. But, we have someone expecting in the RWJ program, and I have become associated with a pro-pink proclivity here.
Last year when I made my quasi-annual pilgrimage to the University of Iowa, there was a controversy there over its locker rooms for visiting football teams, which are famously painted pink because a former coach had read about the (hokey as far as I know) psychological evidence that pink stimuli makes otherwise aggressive people more passive and docile. Sometime after that, I was talking to another noneconomist fellow here about our trepidation about presenting in front of economists, who are known to be more masculine and "challenging" in the way they question seminar speakers. "My plan is to wear pink," I said, as a joke, explaining the psychological theory, but then it became one of those jokes that evolved a life of its own. When the time came to present, I wore my aggressively pink shirt.
My talk went well. Another one of the fellows had his talk received more roughly, especially by the economists, and went out and bought a pink shirt for the next time he had to speak to the group (which, indeed, was better received). So, anyway, when the expecting fellow expressed hope that the forthcoming daughter would not be one of those vacuous happy popular kids but instead would have a moody, gothy streak, I offered to get them something to help with the goth socialization as a shower present (in addition to a non-gag present, yes). Anyway, when I looked online and saw I could get a goth creeper in pink, I snapped it up, so she'll be ready in case she has to give any presentations from the crib to economists.
* I know I have posted before that every time I listen to Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" with any kind of specificity I marvel at how a song so completely freaking creepy could be an enduring hit song, but this post has me listening to it again right now and, once again, wow, so completely freaking creepy. I know it has the cowbell, but still. If I were a goth boy getting married, I would want it to be the song for my wedding dance, or maybe the second song after Ben Folds Five's "Brick."
I just thought, rather than delete this or keep it only in the comments field, I would put it out here in the open so y'all would get to see the joys one gets to deal with when one allows anonymous comments. Perhaps one can also see why, by the time sociologists are five years out of graduate school, they commonly exhibit a certain dismissive weariness toward some of the "angrier" persons floating around the periphery of the enterprise. If this be smug and condescending, then Jeremy Freese: smug, condescending.
Regardless, I'm reluctant to turn anonymous comments off, because the majority of people who comment anonymously do not abuse the privilege, and I think I get many interesting and thoughtful anonymous comments I wouldn't otherwise get.
As I responded to the commenter, though: this is my house, and so I would rather this person leave my kitchen. If not, and they want to keep say provocative, albeit maniacal, things calling out myself and/or my profession, they should stop posting anonymously and use their real name, the way everything I say--which includes things other people don't like--goes out under my real name. Given the nitwitness of the person in question--for all I know it could be some 14-year-old dittohead who stumbled onto my blog and has decided to pull our collective chain, which would explain certain things about quality of the writing involved--I suspect to hear from her/him/it again.
Meanwhile: I am way too busy with urgent forthrushing deadlines to be wasting cognitive space on this. Anybody want to guest post for a few days?
Update: Reality check from a conversation with a friend just now on the phone. I'm turning anonymous comments off at least through my return from Dallas/Tulsa on 11/21. I invite reasonable people who presently comment anonymously to create Blogger accounts to comment. The sign-up screen can make it look like you need to set up a blog yourself to comment, but you don't.
Detractors of the boy detective might have thought that I had abandoned my plan to get photos of myself by all the exhibits in the Boston area model solar system. Wrong! When I got back from New York City late Thursday night, I remembered that Jupiter was in the train station. Some investigation revealed that it was in the food court, over on the side where a number of people were sitting. I felt quite self-conscious taking a photo of myself by Jupiter while these young station-hanging-hipsters were sitting a few feet away--not to mention being completely exhausted from my trip--so it's not like I was going for a accurate rendering of my handsome visage or an especially great depiction of the splendor of our largest planet behind me. Nonetheless, it counts, meaning that I now have five down--Mercury, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune--and five to go: the three remaining planets, Pluto, and the Sun.
1. Kim has posted rankings that are based on the Notre Dame group's methodology but drops Social Forces over at Marginal Utility. Why she doesn't send them to Footnotes, I don't know.
2. Dan Myers from Notre Dame has posted his opinion about the Notre Dame rankings.
3. I was told to "CHECK YOUR OWN BIASES!", in boldface no less, by showing skepticism to a ranking which ranks many departments ahead of my own, which is defensible given that my current cloaking of my blog from search engines prevents me from easily linking back to my several posts criticizing the US News & World Report ranking system that ranked my own department #1.
4. While Kim and Dan may feel they have valid points, I think we can all agree that this comment is the true voice of righteous sociology on these matters. Fight the power. Peace. Word. Dude. All we have to lose are our chains.
5. Somebody (and also this) pointed me last night to the Sociology Rumor Mill blog, which has lately taken up journal prestige in its thread as well. It's spawned a Wiki that is meant to summarize key information about the junior search market.
Update: Dan Myers has started a discussion board devoted to professional socialization issues.
The quote won a "Foot in Mouth" award in 2003 as the most "truly baffling comment" made a public official. The runner-up was Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman," meaning that apparently a distinguished panel of judges was more baffled by Rumsfeld's quote than that.
Can I just say: every time I read the Rumsfeld quote, I think, I understand exactly what this is saying, I think it's basically correct*, and not even especially poorly put. I mean, he could have just said, "Things that haven't happened often call attention to matters about which we haven't appreciated our ignorance," but then that wouldn't provide the little set of terms for thinking about it. If anything, I fault him for not completing the 2x2 table and discussing "unknown knowns."
** An economist I know upbraided me for using a fancy word when the two of us were talking, saying that she tries to avoid fancy words because she thinks they are just ways academics speak obscurely on purpose as a way of excluding the common masses from discourse. Of course, being an economist, she readily drops "elasticisties" and "externalities" into conversations, as well as using the word "efficiency" in a way that would wildly confuse an untutored member of the common masses. She justifies these words because she says she needs them for precision, a matter about which I would agree (the language of economists is infectious after you start hanging around them precisely because it's precisely useful--or at least that, and the whole economists-run-the-interface-between-social-science-and-any-hope-of-affecting-social-policy thing.) Anyway, the offending "fancy word" prompting this complaint from her was "epistemological."
We will not be talking here on this blog about how my talk went yesterday. Suffice it to say that it did not go very well, for reasons that are entirely my fault. If one is going to present a complicated argument on a controversial topic, one needs to do a far, far, far-far-far-far-far better job of making one's argument clear than what I did. I could go on, but I will not. Various people on various fronts who have grounds to say I told you so can, indeed, say I told you so. I invite them to forgo doing this. Likewise, I invite those who know me personally and read this blog and might be prompted to ask, "So, did it really not go well, or are you just saying that?" to give me the benefit of the doubt and not actually ask this.
I do not want to sound melodramatic. I did not, I don't think, come across like a complete idiot. I just failed utterly to convey the argument that I wanted to convey, which, being someone who on occasional occasions actually does succeed in giving a clear and perhaps even interesting talk, is disappointing.
In any case, I did get useful feedback from a smart audience, and so from the intellectual standpoint of helping the paper, the experience was worthwhile.
When I agreed to give a talk November 8th, I didn't appreciate that it was the day after Election Day. Even then, I didn't appreciate that I would be up in the middle of the night distracted from whatever work I was doing on my talk by hitting refresh every few minutes to see if another 1% of precincts in Montana have reported their results.
I hate thinking that a nontrivial portion of my mood for the next two years is in the hands of a few thousand strangers in Montana. Nothing against Montana; indeed, I'm quite adoring of Montana right now. I do wish they were faster vote-counters.
Wasn't there a city in Montana that a San Francisco radio station convinced/paid to change its name to Joe as a tribute to quarterback Joe Montana? I wonder how Joe, Montana voted.
You know how I was complaining about how I can't find the cord for my digital camera, and I wondered how many pairs of gloves I would lose this year? Instead, I appear to have lost my pre-winter coat. With my barely-one-week-old iPod in the pocket. It's gone: nowhere in my house or office. For all I know, it could have been stolen. This is the thing with being somebody who is absent-minded and chronically misplacing things: miscreants could actually be ripping you off all the time, and you just attribute it to your own psychological failings.
Anyway: I am very unhappy about this. Given other demands on my cognitive space, I am trying to repress thinking about it for the time being, although this is harder to do when I go outside and notice how cold it is and how everyone else is wearing a coat.
JACKSON, Michigan (AP) -- The party game asked people to name the stupidest thing they had ever done. Police say Jerry Rose answered, "Shot a guy in the head."
Now, Rose is charged with murder and armed robbery in the March 22 slaying of 60-year-old Edgar Hawke.
Just to be clear, this is only incidentally relevant to the point I was arguing, which was more about whether there was a "Big 3" or a "Big 2" followed by subfield-dependent ambiguity as to how SF was regarded relative to the top journal in that subarea. It's weird regardless how some people believe that if you question whether there is a "Big 3" or just a "Big 2," people think showing something is #3 is a knockdown counterargument. I am sure they would also argue that there are a "Big 3" of human sexes, alongside "male" and "female", if one type of intersexedness was demonstrably more common than others.
"Hi... Can I get your pizza without that stuff hanging from the crust that makes it look like a jellyfish? Oh, and could you also hold the bling? Hold on -- (What? Really? Honey, you already had bling today in your omelet. Fine.) -- Okay, could you make that half bling and half black olives?"
Someone, please: Why is Microsoft Word's spellcheck dictionary so awful? I just discovered that it doesn't have "unpersuaded"? How nonobscure is "unpersuaded"? (It also doesn't have "nonobscure," but I don't think that's a real word anyway.) Is this something where they have a product that's deliberately mostly-effective-but-sort-of-lame as a way of getting you to upgrade to a better product, like with their equation editor? Does Microsoft sell a better dictionary?
Also, after finally finding my digital camera (it was in my Scrabble bag!), now I can't find the camera connecting my camera to my computer. Eszter told me I should just buy a memory card reader. I'd rather just be able not to lose my things. I wonder how many pairs of gloves I'm going to go through this winter, since the hegemony of "style" (or, as others might call it, "dignity") prevent me from using little clip-ons to hook them to my coat sleeves.
So, apparently some people have repeated the exercise of providing rankings of the research productivity of sociology departments based on publications in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces (via Chris). The authors appear to be from Notre Dame, which by the authors' methodology (e.g., the selected time window and counting affiliations by where authors are now as opposed to where they were when doing the article), comes out #5, far above its usual reputational ranking and well above where it was the last time productivity rankings were done, although then it was by a group at (my beloved) Iowa rather than at Notre Dame. I think Notre Dame has a number of great people, has made some extremely good recent hires, and is underrated by reputational rankings, but one of the curious things about these rankings is that they have a way of appearing just at the time and using just the criteria that manage to favor the department doing the rankings. When the Iowa group did the earlier rankings, they published a way of calculating them by which Iowa came out #1.
I'm all for departments promoting themselves, and I can understand where departments that feel like they have productive people and are collectively underappreciated would want to get the word out. But I don't much like the process of dressing it up like one is engaged in a dispassionate enterprise that just happens to produce results favoring one's home department.
Anyway, there are many obvious criticisms of using this as a general metric of departmental prestige or even department article-producing productivity, which the authors acknowledge (even if they plow ahead nonetheless). I want to offer an additional criticism the authors don't acknowledge: I want to see a defense of the concept that there is presently a "Big 3" of sociology journals. I think there is a "Big 2": ASR and AJS. Nobody in sociology confuses the prestige of a Social Forces with the prestige of an ASR or AJS. But the bigger problem with including Social Forces is that it's not obvious to me that Social Forces is the "next best home" for articles that don't make it into ASR or AJS. I think that much of that sociology right now is conducted in subareas for which the top journal in that subarea the most prestigious outlet after ASR and AJS, and then Social Forces comes somewhere after that. If that's true, then it really makes no sense to include it in rankings like this, as then there is all kinds of bias induced by whether work is in a subarea for which SF is the top outlet after ASR/AJS or not (e.g., ever noticed how many papers on religion appear in SF?).
I don't really mean to diss Social Forces--especially since, um, they could be getting a submission from me in the next few months--it's just that using them in these rankings raises two irresistable ironies. One is that the way the Notre Dame groups motivates their article is by the idea that reputational rankings of departments are fuzzy and history-laden so we should look to some hard-numbers criterion. Fine, then, I want to see a hard numbers criteria applied to establishing the prestige of the journals included, as then otherwise the authors are just using the same kind of fuzzy history-laden reputational reasoning for journals that they see as problematic in departments. The other is that, even though in the best case scenario, Social Forces is the clear third of the "Big 3", yet it publishes more articles than either AJS or ASR, so it actually ends up counting the most in these rankings.
For the record, I'm not much into prestige rankings for either departments or journals. Indeed, it's for that reason that I think when rankings are offered, they warrant some scrutiny.
I is the blue line in the graph, I′ is the red line. I is the “natural/default/control” entity (e.g., genotype), and I′ is the “intervened/treated” entity. E is the “natural” environment, and E′ is the “intervened” environment. y is the outcome, so y(I|E) would be the outcome for the "natural" entity in the "natural" environment. "---" in the table means that the answer can vary in ways which would imply that the graph would be drawn differently but I’m taking these variations for purposes here as being minor variations of the same plot.
And, because the original point was not so much the eight plots per se as the fact that the figure in stories about genes v. environment, person v. situation, and agency v. structure all as matters of "internal" versus "external" causes, this would be an example of the eight plots using the example of people (given that drunkenness isn't actually a situation, one could substitute "at parties").
I think I can name pairs of people who would satisfy all eight of these stories, actually.
So a question I ask in a variety of contexts, including sometimes on this weblog, is "Coincidence, or causality?" This question has a special self-absorbed counterpart: "Quirk, or incisive exemplar of a fundamental flaw in Jeremy's character?" To wit: I've let the voicemails on my cel phone pile up again. I've got like 17. I didn't check my messages one day, left my cel at home the next, and next thing I know there were 8 messages for me. Who wants to deal with 8 messages? But then I keep putting off listening to them, and new people keep calling (or old people keep calling again), which just makes me not want to deal with it even more*, which just makes it pile up all the more. Am I alone in this? If I'm not alone, is it because we share the same fundamental character flaw?
Sorry if I haven't returned your call. Don't take it personally. You know that if it's anything important you should e-mail me, right?
BTW, I've disconnected my landline at home. I decided that ~$80/month was altogether too much to pay when a high-speed home Internet connection (the main reason I had it in the first place) might perhaps be obtained through certain uncostly means.
* This might be different if I could listen to my e-mails from the most recent message backwards, like with e-mail. Why doesn't voicemail offer this feature?
Almost 6AM, and here I am: sort of reading an AJS article (Bearman, Moody, and Stovel's "Chains of Affection")*, sort of reading through Wikipedia entries on neoclassical economics, and sort of watching the YouTube video for "Don't Let's Start" over and over again.
It's hard not to watch "Don't Let's Start" and not feel a bit of rousing glee, perhaps even as viewings careen into the double digits, but still this deliberate flipping around of days and nights seems wrong. These were not unusual hours for me in graduate school, but, let's face it, graduate school is way back in the rear view mirror at this point. Ah, well, the luxuries of twisted self-experimentation that one can do when one is unmarried, childless, and doing a post-tenure postdoc.
* "Chains of Affection" (a deservedly award-winning article) is based on a saturated sample based in a "midsized midwestern town." The pseudonym for this town is "Jefferson City." This is what investigators from the coasts do to those of us in the Midwest. You wouldn't see researchers doing a study of a "midsized northeastern town" and use the pseudonym "Albany" or of a "midsized west-coast city" and use the pseudonym "Sacramento." See, there is this state in the Midwest, called "Missouri." The capital of Missouri is "Jefferson City."
1. How do a person’s genes and environments combine to produce the embodied characteristics (e.g., the psychology) of the person?
2. How do those embodied characteristics interact with the circumstances of the immediate situations to produce actions?
3. How do the actions of individuals interact with the structure of the networks and societies in which they are part to produce biographical attainments?
Note: more properly, one should add "at a particular point in biographical time" before the question mark for each question.
The red and blue lines are different genotypes or phenotypes or some-as-yet-unknown-word (agencies?). E is the default environment, and E' is the environment with some natural or artifical intervention.
(a) Different genotypes cause different outcomes that are the same across environments.
(b) Different genotypes produce the same outcome that depends on the environment.
(c) Genes and environments both have effects, and the effects of each are not affected by the other.
(d) Environmental cause only has effect for some genotypes.
(e) Genes produce different outcomes in the normal environment, but under a compensating environment produce the same outcome.
(f) The environmental cause makes the effect of genes less than it would otherwise be.
(g) The environmental cause makes the effect of genes greater than it would otherwise be.
(h) Different genes do better or worse in different environments.
Anyway, if somebody ever asks you to think about "genetics and social structure" and you start doing background reading, you'll find that you are soon reading about debates about genes v. environment, person v. situation, agency v. structure. These are very different things. And, yet, you do have a entity and a substrate in which a transformation of the entity occurs and the project of telling a story about how the character of the entity and the character of the substrate caused the transformation to happen as it did.

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