Whose side... part 1

Tina at Pub Sociology posted the following today:

My work is in social movements, which on the surface seems just the right fit. We are at the beginning of the planning stages, so really I can shape it in whatever direction will suit my scholarly needs. However, it's very clear that what the community organization needs is data that will support its advocacy agenda: information on inequality, bad treatment of the group in question, structural barriers to success for said group, etc. I can help them collect that data, to be sure, by designing quantitative and qualitative measures, administering surveys, conducting interviews, and so on.

There's something that troubles me about the public sociology discourse [or at least what perceive to be public sociology discourse... perhaps I'm way off here]. What happens when such data do not exist? Or the data that do exist are either ambiguous or antagonistic to a particular political objective?

One possible answer suggests that the sociologist (or public intellectual) will harness his/her tools to discover hidden data. This answer is rooted to the a priori assumption of Truth. E.g., the group in question is treated badly; they do face structural barriers; we need only to document and measure the truth. [Additionally, this answer assumes that social science methodologies are up to the task].

I am currently doing some work on hate crime measurement. One of the most serious challenges we face in this work is sorting through all of the movement claimsmaking activity. Activists on either side marshal their experts (public sociologists?) to show how violence against X people is getting worse (or not getting worse). In doing so both sides gerrymander the definitions to achieve measurements that favor their intended outcomes.

What is a public sociologist to do in such situations? Should she pick a side and join the fray, or stay on the side and try to sort things out? In either case there's an uneasy tension. In one, we may be short selling science (that is, if you believe in the science of social science); in the other we may be undermining a cause which we support.

Just one more turn

By way of Timothy Burke.

The Firaxis team has come out with a new version of Civilization. This is undoubtedly bad news. Somehow I've convinced my wife not to divorce me through version I, II, and III of the series. However Tim suggests that this game is...

...the best in the series, hands-down. Pure silicon crack.

I may have met my match. My only sliver of protection here might be hardware limitations. It looks like the game requires a modern video card and I'm not sure the card in my laptop can handle it.

It's nice to see that there are other smart social scientsts out there who share my addiction to this wonderful game.

Budweiser's can't catch a break

When it rains it pours. First Anheuser Busch attempts to mass market an age old college drinking game, calling it bud pong. Then, the company's public relations department expresses shock and outrage when they learn that some irresponsible drinkers were actually drinking beer, instead of water as the rule book states, while playing the game. Now the game is being pulled from the shelves.

I wonder if they knew that drinking too much water is also dangerous? Perhaps they should get out of the drinking game business all together and focus on other things... Like making a beer that actually tastes good.

Lombroso's Children - Thinking about Criminology part 1

In a previous post, I lamented the sad state of my Criminology class. The students appeared to be bored and unmotivated, while I was unambiguously uninspiring and dry. Unlike my other course (the Criminal Justice System) where I seem to consistently find ways to engage (most of the) class in discussion; criminology is hit or miss. This led me to think about the problem of criminology. I'm convinced that Crim is just a hard class to teach at a 200 (sophomore) level. Elaborations to follow.

Criminology is the study of:

1. The making of laws
   
2. The breaking of laws
   
3. The ways society reacts to law breaking

Nearly every criminology textbook that I have ever seen (a topic for a future post) divides the subject into three areas:

1. Concepts of Criminology and law. This is where the big picture concepts, like what is crime, are introduced and defined. This also is where most texts cover the social science dimensions of criminology, explaining how crime is measured and what some of the baseline trends look like.
   
2. Theories of Crime Causation. Criminology does not have an overarching paradigm. Accordingly, there are multiple contemporary perspectives on what causes crime. These range from individual trait theories (biology, psychology, neuro-psychology) to macro-social pressures (environmental disorder, capitalist economy, etc). This is an area that is terribly challenging to teach because of the diversity of ideas... sometimes I think this comes across to my students as a bunch of meaningless words, names, and flowcharts.
   
3. Types of Crime. Property crime, violent crime, white collar crime, public order crime... (different texts vary beyond the universal violent, property, and public order). This too sometimes seems like a laundry list of facts and figures.

This organizational approach is troublesome. While putting all the theory together might allow us to compare and contrast ideas, focusing on strengths and weaknesses of each approach; in practice it becomes overwhelming to the beginning student. The substantive units on type of crime similarly allows us to examine similarities and differences of criminal behavior, they should be married more closely to the theoretical ideas.

This semester, I tried to resolve (some) of these confusions by joining some substantive units with theoretical units. Introducing Trait Theory & Social Structural Theories in conjunction with violent crime; Choice theory & critical theory with property crime, etc. This does not seem to be working either. I think, perhaps, we try to do too much with the basic introductory criminology course. Of course, at the moment I'm at a loss for what to do about it.

There is one thing that I do believe is fairly certain. People like narrative case studies (e.g., cases presented in a story form). I'm going to try and introduce more stories into the presentation of the content. We'll see if that fosters more discussion.

Now off to prep.

Contemplation on Criminology (preface)

I'm going to start a series of posts about teaching criminology in the coming days. Criminology (at least right now) is the class I least like to teach. While my student evaluations generally have been favorable; I don't have any sense that they are learning much in my class.

tonight's class was an unqualified disaster; and I knew it would be going in. While bad classes are usually attributable to me, I think in this case the problem is equally attributable to the content.

In anycase, I plan to use this blog space to re-think the course and organize it in a way that leaves me satisfied that the content is acceptable, even if the delivery leaves something to be desired.

Mark A. R. Kleiman on the Gasoline market

I always enjoy reading professor Kleiman. His logic is sharp and wit sharper. Checkout his post on the economics of the Gasoline market.

Geeksquad to the rescue

It turns out that I did not waste 200 bucks on the Best Buy extended service agreement for my laptop. I thought the coverage lasted two years (which expired a few days before my laptop power source did), but I was wrong; it lasts three! It appears that my laptop will be repaired at no cost to me.

I'm thinking I might go ahead and have them fix some other things that are wrong with the old jalopy while they're at it.

Electronic Resurrection (part 2)

It was too good to last. My darling mp3 player is taking the long lonely road to oblivion. My daring reformating initiative worked for a few days, but the problems returned. When I try to power the unit up, it immediately shuts itself off. I've been able to get it playing by whacking it... not something that one should do to an expensive electronic device. But, from what I can gather from the internet message boards, the device is a goner anyway. Abusing it in this fashion may let me enjoy tolerate a few more weeks.
So now the question becomes:

• Do I send in my beloved Rio for reconditioning at the tune of $124?
  
• Do I join the herd and purchase an i-pod?
  
• Do I take the cheaper route and purchase a portable cd-player that decodes mp3 files?
  

The nice thing about not having money is that I don't actually have to make this decision right now. I will without music on my daily commute [25 minute walk from apartment to office].

Desperately seeking Stata

I like Stata. I find it easier to use than SAS and more functional than SPSS. All of my data are in Stata format, all of my analysis routines are coded in Stata *.do files. In short, I need Stata to do my statistical work.

One of the first things I did here at WVU was to order an upgrade to Stata9. I have Stata8 loaded on my dead-laptop, and the installation CD is somewhere in my box-filled apartment. So, the order was placed on July 19th. It shipped on the 20th and Fedex claims that they delivered the package on 7/25. Unfortunately, they did not deliver the package to my office, department, division, school, or college. Oh, someone signed for it, but I don't know who that is. [I searched the University directory with no luck].

So, we chalked this up as a Fedex screwup. The people at Stata were very nice about this and shipped a new order, this time using UPS. According to UPS' tracking system, the package should have arrived yesterday. I waited all day long for my box of geeky delights. But, at 5:00 p.m., the package was no where to be found. Sighing, I chalked this up to the heavy traffic. [Students are returning to school this weekend, Morgantown's population nearly doubles when the students return].

But today, when I checked the tracking status, I discovered that the package had been delivered early Friday afternoon. Of course, it was not delivered to me. I looked up the name of the person who signed for the package... at least it appears to be in my building. But no-one called me, or brought it to our department. So, Stata waits for me in someone else's office and I won't be able to rescue it until Monday.

I called UPS's customer service to complain. They told me that the package was delivered per their policy. "Your policy is to deliver packages to random people in a multi-floor building?", asked I. The customer service person then starting banging on her keyboard and said.... oh dear, I see.

To make a long story shorter, I am expecting a call from a UPS manager on Monday. Hopefully by then I'll have the software safely in my possession.

oy

Electronic Resurrection (part 1)

I do believe my mp3 player is back from the dead. After spending way too much time fiddling with it... [time when I should have been finishing syllabi], I decided to reformat the device's hard drive. That seems to have done the trick.

Of course I now need to re-rip & encode most of my music.

*shrug*

Electronic Woes

If you know me at all, you should know that I am an undesevering geek. That means that I love techy toys, but am not at all qualified to care for them. Since moving to Morgantown last week:

1. My Laptop Computer stopped accepting power from the AC Adapter & my battery went dead.
   
2. My mp3 player (which I love) refuses to boot up.
   
3. My new office computer was not connected to a printer.
   
4. I lost a jump drive with a relatively important paper on it
   

Perhaps this is God's way of telling me to step away from the technology. I've already decided to forego an internet connection at my apartment & now with my laptop functioning as a really expensive coffee table item, I suppose any writing I do at home will be on a yellow legal pad with a blue ball point pen.

Who knows this might even be a good thing. But I'm pretty bummed about the mp3 player; hopefully I can straighten that out.

World Perks Elite here I come

My travel schedule has started ramp up. I'll be in Chicago tomorrow for an interview, and Pittsburgh next week for a different interview. I was in Flint, Michigan last week [though no air travel required there]. Then I get a few weeks here at the Ann Arbor office to finish two papers, get a survey into the field, and plan curriculum for a workshop before going back on the road [Pittsburgh, then Montreal in a week].

I wonder if its possible for a person like me to actually acrue enough miles to get on the plane early. Actually, why is that even a perk? I understand the benefit of getting to sit in the front of the plane... [i mean, behind first class; first class benefits are fairly obvious]. Sitting in the back [where I usually sit] means that you will spend 15 minutes at minimum waiting for the people infront of you to find all the junk they shoved into the overhead compartment, while the people behind you rush into the aisle, pinning you to your seat. But even still, why would you want to spend more time on the plane [e.g., early boarding] than you need to?

Shrug. I really am planning on to write some substantive posts.... not that anyone's reading.