Just me and my flip chart

Jim Nolan's mad photography strikes again. He snuck into my Qualitative Methods Seminar this morning to see my maniacal pedagogy in action. I love flip charts.

WVU in Winter

Morgantown is pretty in the snow. My colleague Jim Nolan snapped the above photo from his office window yesterday afternoon. My view is similar. The little yellow buggy-car on the raised track is the PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) which, somewhat ironically, is neither personal, nor rapid.

Ding Dong - The Beast is Dead

It's over. This morning we finally closed on the Money Pitt that has been our house for the past 4 years. I had to bring money to the table, but somehow I was able to pull everything together. They say that we learn from our mistakes. If that's true, I'm well on my way to be a real estate genius.

Media Monkey and Me

I downloaded a new music jukebox and mp3 tagging program called Media Monkey the other day. Though I don't consider myself to be an audiophile or a music junkie, I have an impressive collection of mp3, wma, and aac files on my various computers. I downloaded Media Monkey as a tool for cleaning up the id3 tags (artist, album title, track #, etc) and organizing the physical files on my hard disk.

An added bonus is that Media Monkey spins together some interesting playlists. Right now I'm listening to all the tracks where the title begins with a "G". Currently playing... "Garden" by Pearl Jam from the album Ten.

Operationalizing evangelicals

I offered most of the following as a comment to Brad Wright's thoughts on the negative stereotypes of evangelicals. I'm posting it here too expand a bit and solicit opinions. I still toy with the idea of resurrecting my research program on understanding the evangelical identity movement.

Brad came across a video titled "why evangelicals are scary," that portrays all evangelicals as narrow dogmatic creationists. He wonders why it is acceptable to paint evangelicals with a broad brush when it is obviously not socially acceptable to do the same to other identity groups:

Imagine the response if other groups were similarly denounced. How about:
"Why Muslims are Scary"
"Why Jews are Scary"
"Why African-Americans are Scary"
"Why Asians are Scary"
"Why Disabled People are Scary"
"Why Gays are Scary"
"Why (fill in the blank) are Scary"

I offered the following in the comments:

The scariness of evangelicals is rooted in a complex social alchemy.

(1) No one really knows what evangelical means. Sure, there are theologians like Carl F. Henry who define evangelical as a theological orientation that is distinct from fundamentalism. There are others who frame evangelical more as a social identity only loosely based on theology. This later group participates in identity politics... one is an evangelical if...

• he or she attends a certain kind of church (the people they hang out with)
  
• engages in certain kinds of behavior (voting, small group, whatever)
  
• refrains from certain behaviors (drinking, smoking)
  
• and the the list could go on.

In this case evangelicals span all kinds of finer distinctions. Political leaders like Falwell, Dobson, and the icon formerly known as Ted Haggard cynically exploit this identity movement for political power. And lets not kid ourselves about those leaders and their role. No matter what they call themselves, they are not ministers. They are political hacks. They have done a great disservice to people of faith and drive a wedge between the community of believers and those of us looking in from the outside.

(2) The entire debate in what James Davidson Hunter once called Culture Wars pits true believers of mutually antagonistic worldviews in a debate that is doomed to escalate. What is ironic is that both of these sides gain strength through their perception of persecution. That the implications of this battle are for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything (hat tip to Douglas Adams) only intensifies their resolve. Just to take one example, evangelicals (as an identity movement) are threatened by same-sex unions. This undermines a core principle of their identity construct. At the same time, gays and lesbians see this reaction as a threat to their existence. Both sides feed on the persecution of the other as well as feel persecuted by their opposite. And the cycle continues on and on. Hunter was examining these dynamics two decades ago, Christian Smith studied this in the mid 90s, and little if anything has changed today.

So to come back to Brad's original point. The left's (for lack of a better term... Hunter used the term progressive to describe this constellation) singling out of evangelicals (defined loosely) is anchored to an institutionalized squabble that appears not to be leaving anytime soon. The other groups you mention are not as tightly connected to this construct. Now, if and when any of those groups gain marketshare in the identity politics arena, I suppose they will join the fray.

Backhanded compliments?

I just got my transcription of the open-ended student evaluations. Generally they are flattering. But I'm not sure what to make of the following:

Can’t say anything bad about Colyer. Anyone who fails this class is ignorant.

Hmmmm. Given that one of my anonymous raters on ratemyprofessor.com opined "His objective is not to fail anyone..." I wonder if its time to ratchet up the intensity

Of course that was followed by

I think he should make it slightly easier to get an A.

*shrug*.

Through a scanner darkly.. .WVU style.

Jim Nolan continues to play with his camera... To the left, Brian Gerber. In the middle, Melissa Latimer. And our hero, yours truly is on the right.

How we spend our Saturdays in West Virginia

My division had an all day retreat last Saturday to work through the undergraduate curriculum in Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology. My colleague Jim got a new digital camera for Christmas, so we have photos. In all, I work with a good bunch of folks.

The day begins with a greasy breakfast at the Pokydot followed by several snack breaks. You will note from the photos that playdough and silly putty are an important part of our pedagogical practice.

When in Capernaum

So as not to be shown up by other (higher profile and arguably smarter sociological bloggers), I took the online Ultimate Bible Quiz.

You know the Bible 95%!

 

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

I feel quite pleased myself to have scored higher than Kieran Healy and Jeremy Freese. I suppose those 4 years at a Christian Liberal Arts College weren't a total loss.

Brad... I expect to see your score soon. The gauntlet doth been thrown... or something.

Real Estate sucks

Well, I still have not sold my house in Michigan. It has been on the market for 1.5 years now and the price has been dropped several times. It's currently priced at a point that gives me next to no wiggle room.

Since dropping to the current price X (which is about 5,000 below what we paid for the house a few years ago) we have received two offers. Both offers were substantially below the asking price (which is to be expected in a down market). We countered on the first offer to to a figure that I could almost afford. The buyer gave a verbal agreement, but then disappeared without returning the written agreement.

This past week I called my agent to discuss the problem in selling my house. She suggested that we drop the price another 5k to put it into a different price point. I told her doing so would give almost no negotiating room on any offer that comes in. Then I told her I was not planning on renewing my contract with her on February 1st.

Now, with 3 days to go on the contract, I suddenly have another offer. It's a terrible offer... Much below the list price (and on top of it, the buyer is asking for cash at close). Obviously, I can't afford afford it, so I countered. I don't know if the buyer will come back.

I've been cynically wondering about the timing of all this. In my brief adult life, I've not had much experience with real estate. We bought this house and now are trying to sell it, but have encountered less than scrupulous people in the process.

I hope beyond all hope that this buyer is serious and responds to our counter realistically.. [Well, since I countered with my final offer, the buyer will need to accept it or find a different house]. If not, I suppose I continue to feed the money pit that is my empty house.

Tagged: Five things about me

Brad Wright tagged me to give five odd facts about myself that most people would not know.

5) I got into my college by virtue of an athletic admission slot. My high school grades were not particularly good and my SAT scores were pathetic. But I was pretty good at running into other human beings as hard as I could (who said football has no academic value?).

4) I was once an elementary education major. I dropped out of the program because: a) my grades weren't good enough to be certified by the school, and b) I couldn't figure out how to do a bulletin board.

3) Despite my training as an ethnographer, my first real job was as a Research Associate at ICPSR where I played with statistical software all day long (all hail Stata). [For the record, as some of my old co-workers will tell you, I wasn't terribly good at that job.]

2) In college, I spent 3 summers working at camps for people with physical and mental disabilities. Two summers in Ohio and another in California.

1) I failed my first Sociology class.

Janet, you're next.

Interactive Fiction Lives

In the summer of 1983 I discovered the ibm personal computer. I had (well still have, actually) a friend whose father worked as an inventor for Corning Glass and was an early adopter of technology. The computer, with its dual disk drive and monochrome monitor sat on a large worktable in the den, a space that easily accommodated Brian (it was his house), Dave (another friend) and me. Brian worked the keyboard while Dave and I watched and made suggestions. (It really was much more fun than it sounds).

At the time, Dungeons and Dragons was all the rage. We used to play D&D on Dave's back porch for hours on end. As 12-year olds, we didn't really understand all of the nuances in the game, but it really sparked our imaginations. The action in D&D takes place in your head. A Dungeon Master spins a story (in our case, he read from a guide-book that we couldn't see) and the players envision it unfolding in their mind's eye. The problem with D&D was that we needed other people to play. When Brian's dad got that computer, we discovered a whole new way of playing imagination games which did not require a human dungeon master.

The game was called Zork. One day after school we sat in Brian's den drinking strawberry kool-aide and he pulled out a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk labeled "Zork: An Infocom Adventure". Brian inserted this disk to the left disk-drive of his dad's computer and typed:

>a:Zork.exe

The screen printed the following:

You are in an open field west of a big
white house with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

We typed:

open mailbox

The game replied:

Opening the mailbox reveals:
A leaflet.

We typed:

get leaflet

The computer replied:

Taken.

We typed:

read leaflet

The Computer replied:

Welcome to Zork (originally Dungeon)!

Dungeon is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning.
In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory
ever seen by mortal man. Hardened adventurers have run
screaming from the terrors contained within.

In Dungeon, the intrepid explorer delves into the
forgotten secrets of a lost labyrinth deep in the
bowels of the earth, searching for vast treasures
long hidden from prying eyes, treasures guarded by
fearsome monsters and diabolical traps!

No DECsystem should be without one!

Dungeon was created at the Programming Technology
Division of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels,
and Dave Lebling. It was inspired by the Adventure
game of Crowther and Woods, and the Dungeons and
Dragons game of Gygax and Arneson. The original
version was written in MDL (alias MUDDLE). The
current version was translated from MDL into
FORTRAN IV by a somewhat paranoid DEC engineer
who prefers to remain anonymous,and was later
translated to C.

On-line information may be obtained with
the commands HELP and INFO.

Have fun.
>

We were hooked!

Over the next several years, we played many different infocom text adventure games. When I was in graduate school, I worked with a guy who purchased The Lost Treasures of Infocom which included all the titles. I spent several Saturday's in front of my computer, avoiding my thesis and exploring these textual worlds.

Lately, I've been feeling nostalgic for those halcyon days of yesteryear. Googling infocom led me to discover the Interactive Fiction Archive with literally thousands of free text-based games to download and enjoy. All you need is a Z-machine interpreter¹ and game files. The Archive divides games into genres, you can play science fiction titles, mysteries, historical thrillers, and more.

I downloaded the WinFrotz Z-machine interpreter along with 20 or so games this past weekend and plan to reward myself for finishing a manuscript this week with several hours of sedentary adventuring. Life is truly good.

===
1. Actually, the Z-machine is only one of several interactive-adventure game engines. The z-machine is a reverse engineered open-source implementation of Infocom's original game engine. It looks like there are more games for the Z-machine than other interpreters. I've tried using TADS and ADRIFT which are similar to Z-machine, but I prefer the former.

My least favorite time of the year.

Oh, the joy of teaching in a large State University! I teach in the fastest growing major in my college. Student demand for classes outstrips the supply by a relatively large multiple. Today I spent over an hour talking with two separate students who didn't register for courses when then should and consequently are finding themselves blocked from courses they need to graduate. Last night more than 20 students contacted me, asking to be signed into my Criminal Justice course. I'd let them in if I could, but I only have so many seats in the room. So they storm off, angry at me for not letting them in. If I had a dollar for every student who told me that they need this particular class, right now, I wouldn't need to apply for a research grant this year.

Looking for love in all the ninja places

Institutionalization and the wire

HBO broadcast the season 4 finale of The Wire last night. You can't come away from watching this series without a profound appreciation for the power of institutions and institutionalization. Without going into too much detail (inorder to avoid spoilers), the Wire develops several intertwined plot-lines. Beginning with the West Baltimore Maryland drug trade, we meet several players (ranging from school kids who are just starting to sort themselves into the corner-boy network, to soldiers who are active in the trade, the middle managers who run a crew and are responsible for a package, to the upper managers who battle for marketshare and turf.

We also see agents embedded in the agencies and institutions that interact with these people. The foil to the drug enterprise is the Baltimore Police department generally, and the Homicide, Narcotics, and Major Crimes units within it particularly, as well as several characters who are line agents in the Western District. The show introduces characters at every level of the bureaucracy. One of the most effective things about this show is that the respective bureaucracies also function as characters. For instance, the major crimes unit is up on a wire tap on a drug crew, but are forced to end their investigation because of an administratively defined deadline and changing priorities from the top. We see homicide detectives knowingly accept a questionable confession because they need the clearance for their monthly stats.

This season the show also introduced the Baltimore Public School system as an institutional actor, where two former police officers have become teachers. This dimension of the plot development shows us how one institution is really embedded in a network of others. The teachers are forced to adjust their lesson plans to teach a standardized test that appears to bear little relevance in their students' lives. But without the test scores, the district loses state funding.

The finale powerfully illustrated the limitations of human agency in an institutional world by focusing on 4 kids from the school. We see a detective frantically trying to prevent a 13 year-old boy, who is labeled a snitch by his peers, from being placed in a group home (where he likely to be beaten or worse); three others are drawn to the streets (for different reasons) despite aptitude and the best efforts of adults seeking to make a difference in their lives. Perhaps the most heartbreaking of the three is a boy who was socially promoted to the 9th grade and decides to work on a corner crew than leave his friends (and protectors) in the 8th.

Mary Douglas wrote some twenty years ago about "how institutions think." The Wire may be one of the clearest examples of this principle on display in contemporary entertainment. The writers finished this season with a clear open plotline to the next and I look forward to seeing where they go with this in a year's time.

Hidden blessings in the academic labor market

3 years ago I eagerly waited by the phone to hear from potential employers. I had just returned from my 3rd campus interview and the working conditions at my current job were rapidly deteriorating. A good friend (who reads the blog) called me into her office one morning to tell me that I wouldn't be offered the job I was expecting. A friend of hers had already been hired. [This department never extended the common courtesy of a letter indicating that the position had been filled].

Well, it now appears that I am quite lucky not to be at that institution. As I sit in a spacious office and interact with friendly colleagues whose company I genuinely enjoy, I offer a word of thanks to the job-market gods. I didn't interview at WVU until April (after losing out on four jobs, and turning down two other offers). Had an offer come from that first institution, I would have accepted it only to later find myself at in institution that's imploding. Though I was disappointed and worried through that long period, things have worked out for the best.

Timidity and the text message

On the first day of the semester, I notify students that I'm generally tolerant of classroom behavior. I don't take it personally when someone falls asleep (I teach at 8:30 a.m., and 4:00 p.m.; often in inadequately lit rooms), when someone needs to leave early, or even if they need to whisper to a neighbor to catch something they just missed. I will publicly embarrass students for two classroom behaviors:

(1) Reading the newspaper during my class

(2) Sending Text Messages¹

The WVU student newspaper is distributed across campus before the first class. At the end of the day, you can find these papers strewn all over campus (which also is an irritant to me). I'd like to believe that what I have to say in a lecture, of what the class has to do in an activity, is more valuable (at least for the student's grade in my class) than what the entertainment editor thinks of Borat.

Generally, my pet peeves are well known. I tell the students on the first day of class that this is an ego thing for me [might as well be upfront about it]. I don't require attendance. If you're reading the paper, symbolically you are telling me that I'm wasting your time. This leads me into a cycle of self-loathing and despair. Frankly, I'd rather you just not come to class. By and large my students are fairly respectful of me. I rarely see paper reading.

Last year, I noticed several students (always students in the back) fiddling with their phone through an entire class. I realized that they're text-messaging. This pushes all the same buttons for me.

Today, I embarrassed a student for texting. But I did so timidly. Looking at the board, I said: "I hope people aren't writing text-messages in my class." In hindsight, I wish I would have walked back to where this scholar was sitting and asked him to stop directly. Oh well, it its not texting, I'm sure it will be something else.


=====
1. I would add "talking on the phone" to this list but as yet nobody has had the audacity to try that. I'm sure that will change sometime soon. Last month at the Criminology meetings, during a plenary session, two prominent criminologists answered their phones during the talk. One guy talked for a few minutes leading the guy next to him to start swearing... The crim meetings are a freaking hoot.

Could blogs replace the primary function of journals?

Yeah a naive question... but that's what I do.

Brad Wright is writing a series of posts on statistics and Christianity. He's currently focusing on variation in divorce rates across types of religious adherents. In the first data post (linked above) he uses General Social Survey data to show that folks who are actively religious are less likely to have ever been divorced than those whom have never been religious, or have stopped. His data are below:

Divorce rates by religious affiliation & attendance. General Social Survey, 2000, 2002, 2004 (N= 5,963)

58% Non-active Black Protestants
54% Non-active Evangelicals
51% No religious beliefs (e.g., atheists, agnostics)
48% Non-active other religions
47% Active Black Protestants
43% Average for all sample members
42% Non-active Mainline Protestants
41% Non-active Catholics
39% Jewish
38% Active other religions
34% Active Evangelicals
32% Active Mainline Protestants
23% Active Catholics

There's a causal time-order nit to pick with this analysis in that the GSS does not allow us to determine when a divorce occurred in the respondent's life course (e.g., before or after a religious conversion)... but the results are compelling none-the-less. These percentages diverge from the received wisdom that Evangelical Christians divorce at the same rate as everyone else (a received wisdom that I've cited in a Soc of Religion paper that was rejected 6 years ago and still sits in my file drawer begging for revision).

Now obviously this analysis is preliminary and tentative. But by posting this on his blog along with references to how he coded the data, Brad has invited folks to examine and comment. I believe that this is essentially what journals were designed to do before the days of publish or perish. They provided a forum for a scholar to work out an idea and let others comment (as they are). This is the way science should operate.

I have sinned and fallen short of the glory of my heros

This is my public apology for a momentary lapse of judgment leading to my unwitting support of an evil empire.

All is back to normal now... as you were.

that is all.

The utility of the ASR

The small sociological blogosophere has been stirred up lately over the Journal impact factors.¹ [I can hear the collective yawn of those readers who are not sociologists; I'm afraid to say this will not get any more interesting to you]. Within Sociology, three journals have historically been considered the big three.

1. The American Sociological Review.
2. The American Journal of Sociology.
3. Social Forces.

Jeremy kicked off a bruhaha by calling attention to the relatively low factor assigned to Social Forces. Now I could care less about these impact factors; generally these journals don't publish the kinds of work that I do. But in the the long thread of comments to these posts several people put forth assertions concerning what constitutes "good sociology" that has me thinking. The ideas to follow are provisional and incomplete, but I think there is something important to be said about methodological discourse within Sociology. I'm starting to write a working-paper on this, so I welcome constructive comments.²

In this post, I wish to focus on one key question:
Does ASR truly reflect the cutting edge of sociology?

Several comments in Jeremy's thread got me thinking about the value of ASR. First, the infamous assertion made by anonymous at 2:37 a.m.

they like to publish boring articles that only other sociologists care about ...public has no use for most of the rubbish printed in "the big three", but every once in a while a study relevant to public will be printed.... Minimal publication of qualitative findings and impression management that sociology is a "hard science" by printing numerous formulas that researcher got from the latest (spss, stata, sas) manual.

This commenter (correctly in my view) was taken to task for sweeping generalizations. However nestled inside the invective is a point worth considering... is the ASR relevant? A subsequent comment on thread suggests it is ignorant to even ask such a question. Well, in my view, the best way to pierce ignorance is through empirical investigation... so let the examination begin.

I have to admit, my knee jerk reaction to that question is no, the ASR has not been relevant (to general public OR general sociology) for a long time. I polled my colleagues and found only one reads the ASR with any regularity and that person said that s/he doesn't find much of practical use for his/her own work.³ A senior colleague told me that s/he toys with the idea of running a call for papers on "When did the ASR become unreadable and what should we do about it".

However, I had to acknowledge that my knee-jerk reaction is also anchored in ignorance. As a tenure-track person, my reading time is spent on stuff directly related to my research program. And though I work in a mainstream area of Sociology (Criminology and Social Control) this area of work is not proportionally represented in ASR (or so I assumed).⁴ I started going through this calendar year's issues of ASR. I brought two with me (the top two on my stack): (vol 71, Number 5, October 2006 & vol 71, Number 1, February 2006).
Here are the titles from Feburary's issue {71(1)}

1. Comparative Perspectives and Competing Explanations: Taking on the Newly Configured Reductionist Challenge to Society, by Troy Duster, NYU (2005 Presidential Address)
   
2. Widowhood and Race by Felix Elwert & Nicholas A. Christakis, Harvard
   
3. Networks, Race, and Hiring by Roberto M. Fernandez (MIT Sloan School of Management) & Isabel Fernandez-Mateo (London Business School)
   
4. Wealth, Race, and Inter-Neighborhod Migration by Kyle Crowder (Western Washington University), Scott J. South (SUNY Albany), & Erick Chavez (SUNY Albany).
   
5. Deterring Delinquents: A Rational Choice Model of Theft and Violence By Ross L. Matsueda (University of Washington), Derek A. Kreager (University of Washington) and David Huizinga (University of Colorado)
   
6. liBlack and White Control of Numbers Gambling: A Cultural Assets-Social Capital View, by Darrell Steffensmeir & Jeffery T. Ulmer, Penn State. ** Followed by a comment and reply which I don't address here.

So among the empirical papers in the first issue of 2006 (not counting Duster) we see two papers addressing demographic concerns (Elwert & Christakis; Crowder et al), two papers on networks and opportunity structures (Fernandez & Fernandez-Mateo; Steffensmeier & Ulmter) and a paper addressing rational-choice behavior (Matsueda et al).

Are these papers important and relevant?

Having only read the papers superficially, I answer in the affirmative.

Elwert & Christakis explore the widowhood effect (that one's probability of death increases significantly upon the death of one's spouse). Using an enormous dataset (n=410,272) they demonstrate that the bereavement effect varies by race.

"Whites married to whites suffer a large and enduring widowhood effect. By Contrast, blacks married to blacks do not suffer a detectable widowhood effect, possibly because they manage to extend the survival advantage of marriage into widowhood (pg 16)."

This on its face strikes me as incredibly useful and relevant. Unfortunately, as I read the article, I'm lost on the take-home point. (e.g., what would make this paper relevant for non-sociologists). The bulk of the article focuses on measurement and modeling. They offer a useful conjectures in the discussion that the lack of a bereavement effect among b/b couples:

On one hand, blacks may not experience a widowhood effect because, unlike whites, they never gained survival advantages from marriage in the first place. On the other hand, blacks may have gained survival advantages from marriage, but unlike whites, manage to extend this marital survival advantage into widowhood (pg 36)."

They lack the data to directly determine which alternative is correct, but deduce the latter. In this regard, the paper is limited by logico-deductive model. That is, while they make a compelling argument through reason and deduction, at the end of the day their conclusion is essentially an educated guess (conjecture) which requires further refutation and testing (falsification). [Which is not to say its wrong... but the problem could be approached inductively, to paraphrase Mitch Dunier...to use shoe leather... to go and talk to people who have lost their spouses and see what the common (or uncommon) coping mechanisms are (not that I want to get into the Dunier can of worms right now, I'll post on that squabble later)].

Crowder et al analyze Panel Study of Income Dynamics data merged with census track data to estimate "modest effects of wealth on these patterns of inter-neighborhood migration (pg 72)." The topic in and of itself is interesting and relevant (what factors perpetuate segregation or facilitate migration). But unlike the previous article, I don't find this paper terribly interesting or useful.... Whereas Elwert & Christakis got me thinking about their conclusions, after skimming this paper, my reaction was... that's it? I'm not sure what's really new here. [The authors would say that they've uncovered some nuances in the effects of wealth by race....great, I'm just not convinced that this is something that I should encourage my students to read. Having just criticized it, I do think this paper is refreshing for an ASR empirical piece in that its methods are generally comprehendable to anyone with a basic grasp of regression analysis (OLS and Logistic models). In contrast Elwert & Christakis develop a statistical argument that is much harder to follow.

I'm going to close out this post for now without really answering my own question. The short answer is that yes, the ASR has utility. But the new question is: utility for what? Provisionally, I think the ASR is useful in that it brings together papers from across the discipline that (are supposed to) say something we all (sociologists) need to think about. In the two paper that I reviewed in this post (not that I read either really carefully... apologies in advance if one of the authors stumbles by) one got me thinking while the other didn't. Thus, I need to revise my kneejerk reaction to the ASR. But these thoughts are still forming.

Perhaps I'll start a series of posts on ASR articles, if nothing else to think about the arguments and evidence more carefully.

===
1. The impact factor is a proprietary measure from ISI web of science. It is designed to measure how much influence (through citation networks) a particular journal has. For the interested, see Dan Myers' comment on a long (and somewhat contentious) on Jeremy's initial thread.

2. Not that I get the kind of traffic that Jeremy gets, but to anyone who finds me through his sidebar, I'd really like to keep the commentary constructive on this topic. If you think my argument is off, tell me so! But please explain why and share an alternative.

3. Sorry for the clunky his/her anonymity. Since I publicly identify who I am and where I work and haven't asked these people if they want their views known, I am covering their identities.

4. I believe this claim can be empirically validated. However, given that two papers in the first ASR I canvass below are related to Criminology, I will reserve the right to correct myself at a later date.