by jon on
Jun 10, 2008 at 7:41 am
The Contexts Crawler offers catchy & concise snapshots of what sociology is and what sociologists are doing. Now you can put a piece of the Crawler on your website or blog with a Crawler badge that scrolls through our most recent headlines. Here’s what it looks like:
This badge was created for sociologists with their own personal websites, sociology departments who want an easy way to show off the exciting work being done in their discipline, or anyone else that likes what we’re doing here at the Crawler and Contexts.
To put this on your site, copy and paste the following code wherever you want it to appear on your site:
<div id="feed-control"><span style="height: 5.7em;color:#676767;font-size:11px;margin:10px;padding:4px;font-family: Verdana, sans-serif">Loading...</span></div>
<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=notsupplied-wizard" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/dynamicfeed/gfdynamicfeedcontrol.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://contexts.org/badges/crawler/embed-v1.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://contexts.org/badges/crawler/embed-v1.js"></script>
If you want to add a light border around it, you can wrap it in a div, by putting this before the code:
<div style="border: solid 1px #ccc;padding: 6px">
and then, of course, add a closing </div> at the end of the above code block.
If you want to read more about customizing the badge or creating your own, read on.
Read More »
by jon on
Apr 01, 2008 at 11:21 am
Sports journalist Dave Zirin has a weekly radio show on XM Channel 167 every Saturday at noon (Eastern time). Zirin has started a regular segment called “Ask A Sports Sociologist.” So far he’s had two sociologists as guests:
You can hear Zirin’s show online here.
Note for Non-Windows users: the files are in WMA format. If you’re on a Mac, just download and install either Perian or Flip4Mac (both are free) and you’ll be able to use QuickTime to hear them. If you’re on Linux, you’ll have to install your distribution’s restricted format packages. For example, instructions for Ubuntu users.
by jon on
Mar 17, 2008 at 8:10 am
Sudhir Venkatesh talks research methods with Stephen Colbert:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/video_player/view/default/player.swf?videoId=156631" width="332" height="316" wmode="transparent" /]
by jon on
Feb 16, 2008 at 9:43 am
Discussions about inequality and access to the internet are one thing, but if you look only at people who already have access, are there differences in online behavior? Eszter Hargittai found that race, ethnicity and education level predict whether young people are more likely to use the social networking site MySpace or its competitor Facebook.
TechCrunch points to a study by Hitwise (a marketing company that tracks internet usage) that suggests class, geography and other factors shape whether people use Google or Yahoo! as their search engine of choice:
They include “lifestyle” indicators like “Urban Essence,” “American Diversity” and “Small-town Contentment” that I’m not sure how to react to, and of course, as a private consulting company, it’s not like they’re giving their data away here for social scientists to scrutinize. (Though I admittedly have no idea what it would take to get the data…I got impatient with their website very quickly!) Nonetheless, pretty interesting.
by jon on
Feb 12, 2008 at 10:22 am
At Racism Review, Jessie describes a fascinating study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:
The findings reveal that whites subconsciously associate blacks with apes and are more likely to condone violence against black criminal suspects as a result of their broader inability to accept blacks as ‘fully human.’…And, in what I can only call a genius research design, they combine the lab studies of implicit bias with archival content-analysis research of the language used in newspaper accounts from criminal cases
To read more about the study’s nice mixed method design, see Jessie’s post, the original article and the authors’ lab website. Personally, I’ve been interested in the potential of briding sociological research and cognitive psychology for some time, and a 2005 article by Jennifer Eberhardt, one of the authors of this current study, called “Imaging Race” was key in piquing my interest. It’s about using new tools from neuroscience like fMRI to gain insight into how people think & feel about race. A fascinating read.
by jon on
Feb 02, 2008 at 1:39 pm
There’s an interesting discussion going on at scatterplot about racial & ethnic names: first a post about “black” vs. “African American,” and then another post about “caucasian” and “European American.” In the comments on the first post, a reader pointed out an article from Public Opinion Quarterly reporting survey results on the preference of “black” vs. “African Americans” for, well, blacks/African Americans. The article summary:
Our respondents are nearly equally divided in their preference for the label “black” versus “African-American.” Significant correlates or predictors of terminological preference include the racial composition of the grammar school that respondents attended, respondents’ degree of racial group consciousness, and age, region, and size of city of residence.
by jon on
Jan 31, 2008 at 10:43 am
Sociologist Duncan Watts is getting some press for his challenge to science journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s famous “Tipping Point” argument, in particular Gladwell’s “Law of the Few”: the idea that a few well-connected people, dubbed “Influentials,” make or break trends.
Fast Company’s Clive Thompson describes Watts’ work:
[Watts] has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.
Ars Technica’s Julian Sanchez recounts an interview with Watts from 2004:
“We knew 50 years ago that this model was wrong. After the fact, and this is why Gladwell’s book is so beguiling, you see that crime rates dropped or Hush Puppies took off and then you can always find the people with whom it started,” he told me. “But if it’s something about them, why aren’t they driving all the other trends? What turns out to be the deciding factor is not the ‘influentials’ but the people who are easily influenced. You might have someone who influences five times as many people as the average, but the total numbers relative to a population are still very small. Almost all of the action is away from the center.”
by jon on
Jan 30, 2008 at 11:18 am
Obama is trying to be proactive about the email chain letters containing falsehoods about his religious background:
The Obama campaign announced the debunking effort with an e-mail barrage from John Kerry of Massachusetts, in which the former presidential candidate urges supporters to “e-mail the truth” to everyone on their address books, to print out the facts about Obama’s background and post them at work, and to call local radio stations and talk to neighbors.
Wired talked to Gary Alan Fine about whether this strategy would work and Fine was skeptical. “It underlines the attack,” Fine says. “Sometimes defenses against rumors work; sometimes they backfire…What you want to do, when you deny the rumor, you only want to deny it to the people who originally heard it.”
by jon on
Jan 03, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Jerry Burger, psychologist at Santa Clara University, redid the famous Milgram experiments. Here is an ABC Primetime video of the results.