Kurt, you will be missed.

Kurt Vonnegut, may you and Billy Pilgrim rest in peace.

A terrible, horrible, awful, very bad fortnight

In a 13 day span the following things happened:

• My car broke down on my way to an important meeting concerning a grant proposal to my State.
  
• My grant proposal to the State was well off the mark of what the funders were/are looking for, so I need to redo it.
  
• It cost me $500 to get my car repaired (an electronic control module) [the car was worth about $1500.]
  
• After paying $500 to get my car repaired, I drove to Michigan to spend some time with the family. I brought my daughter back with me. All was well on the trip; my daughter watched movies on a portable dvd player while I listened to the Mountaineers win the NIT. Then around 10:00 p.m., I noticed that dashboard lights seemed dim. A bit later, my radio shorted out. I figured that I blew a fuse... A bit later, I noticed that my headlights were getting dim. I was about 25 miles outside of Morgantown in the Boondocks of Southwestern Pennsylvania. I had two choices: (a) pull over and call AAA. I looked at my cell phone and noticed that the signal was going in and out; I put by hazards on and noticed that I could barely see a blinking shadow. So I opted for (b) put the pedal to the metal and try to get back to Morgantown before the car dies. I got behind a car with good headlights and I followed it all the way to Morgantown. Miraculously, the car made it all the way to my office building on campus. [I was going to try and make it all the way to my apt, but I hit a red light infront of my office and the car shut down]. So, I called a friend to come get us, then called AAA and had the car towed to the Kia dealer.
  
• The KIA dealer held the car for 3 days before calling me and telling me that it would cost $900 to fix all the damage (alternator, steering pump, various belts, and a partridge in a pear tree).
  
• So, I went out Monday night and bought a new car. I hate buying cars. I got a 2004 Certified Honda Civic. The negotiations were a pain in the neck; the salesman had the nerve to tell me that Honda never negotiates on certified used cars. I called shenanigans on that and told him what my price would be. I thought I was going to have to walk, when he finally said, "ok, we'll let you have it for that; but you're getting a hell of a deal." Note to car salesmen everywhere... never say that to someone who knows what I car is worth. I bought the damn car for what it was worth according to Edmunds.com. The dealership did let me take the car that night while the paperwork, titling, etc was taken care of. So that was nice. But, then they skimped on detailing and cleaning it the next day. Everyone I met at this place just seemed slimy. I'm not sure I'd buy another car from them. I miss Howard Cooper in Ann Arbor. Note, I do love the car.. so I suppose the irritation was worth it in the long run. I'm taking it back to Michigan this weekend to put it through its paces.
  
• Today, I discovered a charge to my checking account from an internet website design company. I don't buy web services; if I did, I wouldn't use my debit card to do it. I had to go to the bank, fill out an affidavit, get my debit card canceled, argue with the bank about their replacement card fee. I told them that if they are going to charge me for replacing their card that had been compromised, I'd take my business to another bank. They waived the fee.

So there it is... I'm ready for some good stuff to happen now.

The stupidity of marketing surveys

The New Yorker sent me a link to an important survey being conducted by some market research firm. Since I'm generally interested in how different outfits word survey questions, I figured I'd give them 10 minutes of my time and respond. I quit by the 10th item.

The survey asked me how familiar I am with a range of department stores, collecting an ordinal measurement

1. never heard of
2. heard of, but have not shopped there
3. have shopped there, but not in the last 6 months
4. shopped there in the last six months.

Among the stores on the list, other than Target(tm), I've not shopped at any of the department stores. [I'm probably not exactly the demographic that they think I am... I'm pathologically averse to spending money.] Yet, the survey gave me a screen with a bunch of check boxes asking me to check off all that apply: "When I think of Dillards, I think of..." None of the responses were appropriate; I don't even know what Dillards is, other than a store. In so far as I have a thought about the place, it's probably over-priced crap that no one needs. That, of course, is not an option. So I skipped the item. The survey responds with bold red letters... you must respond to this item. WTH?

I'd like to formally notify all those retail magnets that read this blog, don't believe anything you get from your market research surveys. If they're deployed as this survey was, the error term around any estimate they derive will be large. A much better way to measure this stuff, is give the respondent an out where they truly have no opinion. A null response is better than an invented response.

A Moment of Irony on a cold winter day

I sat at a table in the corner of the Philadelphia Center City Sheraton on Saturday working on my presentation for the Eastern Sociological Society. While working there Mitch Duneier sat down at the table next to me. He played with his blackberry for a few minutes, got up and left. Five minutes later, Eric Klinenberg sat down at the same table to eat a sandwich. What's ironic about this?

Well, in 2004 Duneier published a rather abrasive critique of Klinenberg's book Heat Wave. The substance of Duneier's critique is that Klinenberg over interprets his data and had he obtained more data (following a Symbolic Interactionst approach to theoretical sampling) he would avoid perpetuating an ethnic myth. Klinenberg responded by suggesting that Duneier's hatchet job was retaliation for a critical assessment of his own work by Loic Wacquant.

Anyway, these sorts of squabbles rise now and again with little fanfare. However, Duneier didn't let it drop. He went to Chicago (the site of Klinenberg's fieldwork) and retraced his steps. He then published a research note in the American Sociological Review summarizing his findings, that contradict Klinenberg's core argument. [We shall leave aside for the moment how Duneier was able to get a piece of work this weak published in the ASR]. Klinenberg respsonded again with a rejoinder that quite thoroughly dismantle's Duneier's argument and makes his use of data and informants look quite naive.

The tone of this latest exchange communicates pure hostility. I've read the corpus of exchanges in this squabble and though I share Duneier's commitment to Symbolic Interactionism and what Wacquant dismisses as "the modern fairytale of Grounded Theory." I think Klinenberg is in the right here.

But for all that hostility, the two can still share the same seat in the corner of the Philadelphia Sheraton... even if they do so a few minutes apart.

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.