Tragedy at Taylor

Taylor University, my alma mater (class of 1994) is in the news. Five students were killed in an accident on April 6th. A tractor trailer crossed the median of I-69 just miles from the Upland, Indiana campus. Earlier this week, we learned that two of these students were misidentified. I can't begin to imagine how awful this must be for both families. In one case, a family's hopes have been crushed; not only must they go through the grieving process, but they also have invested an incredible amount of emotional energy and worry wishing for the recovery of their loved one. In the other case, a family who thought they had burred their loved one, is told their daughter has been alive all this time.

I don't typically comment on these things. My heart goes out to all the families involved as well as the broader Taylor community. I also feel for the Marion County coroner, an elected official who lacks a medical background. He's become the scapegoat in this tragedy; with some asking why there was no forensic identification efforts. It appears to me that this misidentification is the product of multiple factors, which can not be reduced to one person or one official. This case illustrates how institutional linkages (public safety, medical, university public relations, and media among others) can function like a child's game of telephone.

Don't feed the men

I'm accompanying a collegue who teaches an inside out course at a State prison nearby. The course involves several inside students (who are incarcerated) and several outside students who are entrolled in this senior level seminar. I'll probably have more to post about this at a later date.

On the first night of class, the outside students were taken on a tour of the facility. For many of us (myself included) this was a first experience inside the walls of a prison. The most uncomfortable dimension of the tour for me was the recognition that these men have no privacy. We walked through housing units where these men live their lives without asking them if they minded. They were gawked at (some gawked right back) and scrutinized.

As we left one of the housing units, I heard one man shout out: "Don't feed the men".

Stata vs. SPSS, act 1

My colleagues here often ask me why I don't like to use SPSS*. I have a hard time explaining to them why I use Stata**, a package not widely used at this institution and not supported by our statistical support people. Fortunately for me, sociologist and short-fiction blogger Jeremy Freese concisely articulates what I've been unable to explain:

At first I worked with SPSS, which I found bewildering because it seemed designed to encourage users to do things in cumbersome and self-defeating way. Then, one bright day, I discovered Stata 5, and after like a forty-some-hour manuals-and-keyboarding-binge, all was bliss.

My experience is similar. I learned a number of neat SPSS programming tricks at ICPSR where I worked with one of the smartest people I've ever met. However, the more SPSS code that I wrote, the more frustrated I got with the packages limitation. As Jeremy writes, it forces you to do things in a cumbersome, repetitive way. SPSS doesn't do arrays well; it's loops are clunky; and the processing is slow. My mentor at ICPSR showed me how to use a powerful text-editor to eliminate some of the tedium in writing tedious code. But, I was convinced there must be more! I found SAS to be a better tool for these sorts of tasks. However, the learning curve on SAS was way too steep. I invested about the same amount of time trying to pick up SAS and Stata. The difference: at the end of these couple of days, I could use Stata to accomplish necessary tasks. As for SAS, I had to keep asking people for help.

* Leaving alone for a moment the fact that technically I'm an ethnographer and mutter my way through most regression tables.

** We also will leave aside the incredible price differential between these programs. Stata has an affordable price-point for student's or others with an academic affiliation. SAS and Stata seem to be pricing themselves to outfits with deep pockets.