orgtheory.net

At the last meeting of my social theory class, two rather punky undergraduate students started an argument. It went just like this, except for the stuff I made up:

You totally misinterpreted Foucault’s power theory in an otherwise magisterial lecture on post-structuralism. You claimed that Foucault offers an implicit critique of Weberian accounts of authority. You claimed that Weber focused on the types of authority wielded by specific people, like rational-legal authority and charisma, and thus Foucault’s account of decentralized power runs counter to this.

With all due respect, we dispute this characterization. We believe that Foucault’s analysis of discourse is highly congruent with Weber’s view that power resided in legitimacy, itself a diffuse feature of society.

Our disagreement does not diminish our belief that you are the best social theory instructor at Indiana.

Do you side with the punky undergrads? Is Foucault’s power theory really an alternative to Weber or did I commit sociological malpractice?

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Here’s a very cool resource for anyone interested in organizational design – the Organizational Design Community.  Here are the founding members (the group includes Rich Burton and many other top org design folks).  There are some helpful resources on their web site – a community area, there’s a new Journal of Organization Design (first issue to be published early next year), there’s also a LinkedIn group.

Great to see this!  Enthusiasm for org design seems to have died down over the years (despite the obvious importance of this area) – so it is fantastic to see a group like this emerge.

From the last few issues of the Journal of Mathematical Sociology:

• Small Worlds and Cultural Polarization by Flasche and Macy: A computational model of how small worlds networks create clusters of stable views.
• A Choice Model of Occupational Status and Fertility by Hopcroft and Whitmeyer: Using evolutionary theory to predict why men and women are different when it comes to using status to find mates.
• When do Matthew Effects Occur? by Bothner, Haynes, Lee and Smith: Matthew effects don’t happen all the time.
• A Symmetric Adaptive Model of Combat by Buontempo, Potrykus, and Kaufman: Fighting is about feedback loops.

There’s also the standard research on network models (balance, p*) and statistical decision theory. Check it out.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

I have argued that we have too much college. I have also argued that it may not be wise for everyone to go to college considering the astronomical cost. These views have attraced much criticism on this blog.

So why do I stick to these views? As a blogger, I do enjoy the debate, but there’s a more important reason for supporting an unpopular view: I am a “college realist.” I do not take a religious stance toward education. Formal schooling is a tool to an end. If the tool fails to do its job, I can live without it.

What’s the alternative? I think there are three positions one can take toward education:

• College fundamentalism: College is always good for everyone. Everyone should have it no matter the cost or the measured effect. We should massively subsidize college for anyone who asks for it.
• College realism: College is good for some people, but maybe not for everyone. The benefits of college should be compared to the costs and liabilities.
• College skepticism: College is mainly a waste of time. It is not needed and we should dismantle higher education.

There are educational skeptics. Home schooling might be seen as K-12 skepticism. The writer Ivan Illich argued that we needed to “deschool” society. But there aren’t too many hard core skeptics. Rather, the big debate is between college fundamentalists and college realists.

There are many college fundamentalists. For example, policy makers in America often promote more student loans to increase enrollments. Education researchers spend more time, relatively speaking, on access (getting people into college) than impact (see how it matters). The knee jerk reaction to proposal to limit or shrink college education is a symptom.

I’m a realist because there’s too much evidence against a fundamentalist position. We know that many students fail out of college and those that remain fail to learn much. And it isn’t because of finances. Many students lack the ability or maturity to complete college.  Furthermore, there’s evidence that college is overpriced relative to future earnings. This all suggests to me that college education should be focused, not given to all who ask.

I think the right policy stance for a college realist is “targeted access.” Rather than try to get every kid into college regardless of academic skills, we should focus on people who have the ability and desire to succeed. The wealthy will take of themselves. We - the higher education community – should instead work on identifying promising young people from less wealthy families and building financial resources, like endowments and grants, that will make college affordable for these people. Our efforts should be on identification of merit, targetting people who need help, and price control, not merit-blind loans and other policies that bloat and distort higher education.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

As every sociology grad student knows, the famous thesis of Dukrheim and Mauss’ (1962: 11) essay on Primitive Classification is that “the classification of things reproduces…[the] classification of men [sic].”  This is a controversial argument that has served as one of the primary inspirations for contemporary work in the sociology of knowledge.  Durkheim and Mauss went on to argue for instance, that if persons divided themselves into two groups, then they divided the world of animals, plants, etc. into two kinds; if they divided themselves into four groups organized as hierarchies (with subgroups nested within larger groups), we would find an analogous classification system for nature (with sub-kinds nested within larger kinds), and so on.

I want to propose that a form of “Primitive Classification” is alive and well in contemporary social theory.  This argument holds with two minor elaborations:  first, we must allow for the corollary that if the classification of things reproduces the classification of persons, then the resistance to classify persons should result in a resistance to classify things.  Second, that the style of classification of persons should result in an analogous style of classifying things.  For instance, one thing that Durkheim and Mauss “primitives” had no trouble doing was classifying themselves in rigidly hierarchical terms.  From here Durkheim reasoned that an equally rigid classification of things should follow such that subsumptive relations between groups resulted in analogous part whole classifications at the level of natural phenomena.  From this it follows, that resistance to classify persons in a hierarchical manner should result in an equal resistance to classify things in a hierarchical way.

I think that these two principles can help to explain a lot of quirky features of contemporary social theory.  Consider for instance the knee-jerk presupposition that any form of dualistic distinction is somehow “wrong” (a priori) and therefore deserves to be “transcended” (the allergy against dual distinctions). Or consider for instance the related (equally knee jerk) propensity to think that when postulating the existence of two abstract substances and processes (let us say, structure and agency) the theorist makes a “mistake” if he or she “privileges” one over the other (theoretical egalitarianism).  Such that the best theory is the one that gives equal share of (causal?) power to both things (or if the theorist postulates “three” things, then all three).

I will submit that for the most part, the “hunch” that “dualisms” are wrong or that “privileging” some abstract thing over another puts us on the road towards the worst of analytical sins has nothing to do (in 99% of the cases) with the logical virtues of the argument.  Instead, I think that this hunch, is in effect a form of Primitive Classification unique to certain collectives in the social and human sciences (most other sciences and most other lay persons have no problem with dualisms and hierarchical privileging of one abstract thing over the other). I think that we (e.g. sociologists) want our classification of (abstract) things to reflect our (desired?) classification of persons, so that when there is a mismatch, we simply reject the theoretical strategy as wrong and in fact end up producing bland theoretical classifications (“equal interplay of structure and agency”) that in fact reflect our classification of persons.  So dualisms are (perceived as) “wrong,” not logically, but socio-logically (Martin 2000).  They are wrong because our desired classification of persons tends to reject dualisms (at least in the humanities and some social sciences).  And even when abstract dualisms are provisionally allowed (e.g. agency and structure), then we are forbidden from privileging one over the other (because such a privileging is a no no in our [ideal?] social world).

So, the next time somebody tells you that the very fact that you made an analytical distinction is somehow already a logical or theoretical “fallacy,” (see Vaisey and Frye 2011 for an entertaining dispatching of this ridiculous idea) or the very fact that you argued that something is substantively more important than something else somehow makes you unacquainted with the canons of theoretical logic or that your theory in fact requires that everything be at the same level as everything else in order to count as “sound” (see Archer 1982 for the classic demolition of this preposterous notion), turn the tables and point them back to Durkheim and Mauss’ classic essay.

I was recently asked about how graduate students should prioritize your work. Should dissertation writing come before or after article writing? It depends on a number of factors:

• Where are you in your program? Early in your graduate career, you’ll probably need to focus more on courses and tests. Later, all revolves on publications.
• Are you in a “short clock” or “long clock” program? If you are in a short clock, your only activity post-course work activity be your job market paper. Any spare time is a luxury. In long clock fields, you should switch to article writing.
• Are you in area that’s all about team work? If so, you might be expected to start at the bottom and work up. In “lone wolf” fields, you are free to do your own work.
• If you are post-job offer and pre-job, you should do nothing except write your dissertation. Starting a job without the degree can be the first step towards disaster.

Ultimately, to make the successful jump to the faculty, you will need to demonstrate independent work. Thus, you should prioritize projecs that will one or another show that you aren’t just a research assistant.

In a field like sociology and early in your graduate school career, you might agree to co-author an article with faculty as a training exercise. Get that done ASAP. If that isn’t a possibility, then you should immediately consider authoring your own work. This should take priority over dissertation writing.

Many advisors – the wise ones in my view – de-emphasize dissertations unless the genre requires a book. Even then, a book will have an article worthy chunk that you can publish before hand. Thus, the default position is: your articles > articles where you are clearly second banana > dissertation > other work.

PS. Buy the Grad Skool Rulz. It’s only $2 and it has a lot of great grad school advice. Forward the link to all your grad skool buddies.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

.

Spiegel im Spiegel… Previous Arvo Pärt posts on orgtheory.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Social theory guru Craig Calhoun has been appointed LSE director. From the Guardian:

Calhoun, who starts at LSE in September 2012, has been president of the Social Science Research Council in New York since 1999. He has a doctorate in history and sociology from Oxford and a master’s in social anthropology from Manchester University.

And

Calhoun warns of the compromising effect of private donations on academia in an essay on the clearance of protesters from parks and university campuses.

He writes: “University presidents are also tasked with raising money from wealthy donors. This isn’t optional, partly because politicians have slashed public funding for higher education. Yet relying on private donations to make up the differences changes the character of universities. Among other things, it makes it less and less possible for them to offer public spaces for protest against the control of society by financial interests.”

Congratulations!

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Perspectives on Psychological Science has a short piece on using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a subject pool: “Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A New Source for Inexpensive, Yet High-Quality, Data?”

As Google Scholar shows, Mechanical Turk is being used in lots of clever ways.

Mechanical Turk has been called a digital sweatshop.  Here are two perspectives – an Economic Letters piece: “The condition of the Turking class: Are online employers fair and honest?”   And, a piece calling for intervention: “Working the crowd: Employment and labor law in the crowdsourcing industry.”

Here’s the Mechanical Turk page.  Here are some research-related tasks that you can get paid for.

Update: Someone just helped out with a few sample chapters. Thanks!

The book forum on “Debt” will start on Dec 1. However, it seems that book distributors are out of copies and none will be ready by Dec 1. I have an order at Boxcar Books, Bloomington’s local non-profit bookstore co-op. Any chance someone can send me a PDF of the first few chapters or loan me a physical copy of the book to tide me over? I’d be in your debt. :)

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

From Turkeystampede.com

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

In the social sciences, there’s a big debate over schooling and income. One theory, human capital, says that school gives you specific skills. The major alternative is that school is a de facto IQ test. You don’t learn many job skills in college, but employers pay more for college graduates because they have shown a basic level of discipline and intelligence. This theory is called signalling. What do you think?

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

@viil linked to a Boston Herald article that talks about how crowdsourcing is changing science.  Lots of cool initiatives going on related to “citizen science” — for example, check out zooniverse.org and scistarter.com and projectnoah.org (very cool, including iPhone app to help catalogue species).

Here’s David Kirsch’s previous post on a citizen science for organization studies and other orgtheory crowdsourcing posts.

The King James version of the bible has its 400th anniversary this year.  Beyond religion, it has obviously also had a deep impact on language, the arts, culture etc.  Here are some links:

• University of Michigan’s online version of the King James Version (this, for some reason, seems to be the ‘official’ online version that everyone links to).
• David Daniell’s The bible in english: its history and influence , Yale University Press.
• Alister McGrath’s (University of Oxford) book In the beginning: the story of the king james bible and how it changes a nation, a language and a culture.  
• Marxist historian Christopher Hill’s The english bible and the seventeenth century revolution. Cambridge University Press.
• Some William Blake art inspired by the King James Bible.
• The legendary Donald Knuth’s book 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated (though, he appears to have used many different translations).  He talks more about this project in (pdf) Things a computer scientist rarely talks about.
• An essay by Eleanor Cook (University of Toronto) on Wallace Stevens and the King James Bible.
• An effort to crowdsource the reading of the full King James Bible on YouTube – here are the chapters that have been read so far.
• Movie – KJB: The Book That Changed That Changed The World.
• Compare the King James Version with over 50 different translations of the bible.
• Fires of faith: the coming forth of the king james bible — a three-part BYUtv documentary (featuring interviews with various biblical scholars).
• Authorized King James Version wiki entry.
• A ton of resources on the King James Bible Trust web site.

Today I woke up to the news that tragedy has struck Oklahoma State University again.  Las night a single engine plane carrying four people–including the coach and assistant coach of the women’s basketball team, Kurt Budke and Miranda Kerna–crashed in central Arkansas killing everybody on board.  This is of course the same OSU that lost 10 people in crash 10 years ago. Both the coach and the assistant coaches were seen as rising stars in women’s basketball (Kerna was only 36), making their tragic loss a bitter pill to swallow.

Details are still sketchy, and I’m sure lots of new information will emerge in the days to come.  There are two things that we should expect.  First, ex post facto analysis will tend to concentrate on micro-decisions that on hindsight will seem very bad and short-sighted.  Some plausible candidates are the age (probably too old) and make (single-engine) of the plane, flying conditions, and possibly the age of the pilot (an octogenerian ex-state senator who had his wife–in her seventies–as a co-pilot).  There are already some early reports that indicate that the “strict” university policies that were instituted after the 2001 crash were not followed here (although details as to whether this particular flight was “covered” by these rules are not clear).  Second, post-tragedy analysis will obscure a key component of the (possibly) bad decision-making that we are looking at here, which is the environment in which the organizational actors in question were operating.  This is particular important, since, if it is true that protocol wasn’t followed, we have a case not only of shoddy decision-making but also of an organization failing to follow its own (self-imposed) rules.

As Vaughan (1996) has argued, this sort of phenomenon (tragic decisions resulting from acting in violation of organizational safety rules) has to be put in the context in which the actors are operating, especially if this context serves to provide incentives (both of the “push” and “pull” variety) for actors to take risks and circumvent the rules and/or ignore obvious warnings.  Two things that I’m sure will get lost in the whole post-mortem are precisely that (1) this was a recruiting trip, and (2) that the pilot was not just somebody providing some sort of disinterested service, but that he was an OSU booster.  Thus, in terms of contextual factors we have a environment presenting scarcity and competitive pressures in which timing is of the essence (recruitment), coupled with a person who is supposed to be the expert at making the crucial decision (should we fly?) that is actually being affected by this process rather than being some sort of neutral, objective third party (as it would have been had the pilot simply been a commercial pilot for hire).

Thus, I think that ultimately this will prove to be a case that meets the conditions of a tragic decision as a result of lack of organizational self-regulation produced by the placement of certain organizational actors in a competitive environment that induced careless decision-making.

As some may already have seen, Google Scholar Citations is now open to all.  Basically you can put up your own google scholar page, edit it with various details (home page, co-authors, etc), compute various stats, etc.  I’m guessing the functionality will increase over time.

Here are some examples of people’s google scholar pages – James Heckman, Howard Aldrich, Stanley Ambrose, Paul Dirac.  And – orgtheory’s very own Omar Lizardo.

If you are interested, it just takes a second to set up (and make public, or not).

College teaching is often horrible because instructors teach obscure academic theories instead of using less rigorous tools that actually help learning. Example: statistics. I have found that students, including myself, are confused by statistics courses. People simply don’t absorb anything because they are unable to absorb proofs.

So here’s my suggestion: statistics instructors should create two tracks of courses – proofs and no-proofs. The proof track is aimed at majors in math and statistics. The no-proof track is for everyone else. These no-proof courses will be all hands on. No proofs of any type will be used and all work will be around number crunching. Students will be shown how to assess data, think about sample, and model estimation.

Of course, some departments already do this to some extent, but not enough. I have had too many students come to my classes unable to execute a t-test in Stata (or SPSS – yuck!) because the actual estimate was treated as an afterthought to the mathematical theory. That indicates that the instructor spent too much time at the chalk board and not enough at the computer.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Eighty percent of success is showing up. – Woody Allen

I have a hypothesis, shared by many social scientists, that life course outcomes are highly correlated with self-discipline. If you are the kind of person who can follow the rules, you’ll probably do well. This is an average statement, of course. In certain contexts, rule breaking is wonderful, but life usually requires rule following and a measure of self-discipline.

To test this hypothesis, I conducted a simple statistical test with data from my social theory class (N=73). I collected two behavioral/discipline variables: did the students show up to two randomly selected classes and did students use their “free pass,” which allows them to skip a daily writing assignment. I then merged attendance, assignment completion, and midterm performance data.

The results:

• Skipping the daily writing assignment is *not* correlated with midterm performance, except for “extreme skipping.” A handful of students skipped four or more daily write ups, thus wildly exceeding the “free pass” rule. They score 19% less than the rest of the class.
• Attendance is correlated with midterm performance. Class skipping is associated with a 10.1% grade drop.
• In the OLS model with dummies for attendance on either day and skipping 1, 2, 3 and 4 (or more), the results are the same.

The R-squared?  .27!!! Wow. Knowing nothing else about the students, like GPA, SAT, or SES, I can account for a lot of variance by just seeing if they show up and hand in assignments.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

The first picture is November 20, 1964, from the University of California archives. The second was taken last night by MSNBC - November 15, 2011.The first photo was taken around the corner from the second photo.

More photo feeds: Berkeley patch; KGO TV; a personal flickr; MSNBC; the Daily Cal coverage.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

A while ago, I wrote a post at Marginal Revolution called “Thoughts on a Berkeley Education.” Consider this a follow up – my thoughts on my doctoral education at Chicago.

First, some downsides. Chicago is not exactly a touchy feely place. The funding was horrible non-existent and the environment was in many ways unsupportive.  I’ve heard that they’ve reformed graduate student financial support, which is welcome. I also hope that the odd structurelessness of the place has changed.

Despite these issues, I don’t regret going there for a second. Chicago is a truly unique institution, but not because it is highy ranked in the academic world. There are lots of campuses with smart people. Rather, it’s a truly intellectual place. The place just exudes this atmosphere that is really hard to find at other schools, even other top notch universities.

The key to understanding the Chicago experience is that it is based on purely intellectual pursuits. Sports barely register. The undergraduate curriculum is based on a “core” that covers classic writings. Students are actually interested in the readings and aren’t just day dreaming about that sweet post-graduation finance job. The bathroom graffiti refers to Greek philosophy and post-colonial theory.  They once even had a protest in favor of a foreign language requirement. It’s that kind of place.

Sociology, I think, has a special place at Chicago. Yes, there are other prestigious departments, but Chicago’s program was one of the first, possibly the first, in the 1890s. At Chicago, it has the distinction of having been the birthplace of a discipline. And it’s maintained its position since then. So when you go the room with the dissertations, you are seeing a room with dissertation ranging from Erving Goffman to Andy Abbott. Some, like Nathan Hare and Gerald McWhorter, went on to found other disciplines like Ethnic Studies. Truly humbling.

The way it rubs off on graduate students, for better or worse, is that PhD students are allowed to think big, be ambitious. That can backfire, as some students need dissertation projects that are modest. But with the right person, it can be liberating. The Chicago attitude isn’t always “get published,” it’s “write something that’s really important.” And that’s a good thing.

Book adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

I was reading Louis Menand’s review of John Lewis Gaddis’ new book, George F. Kennan: An American Life. There’s a lot to be said about a new book on the architect of Cold War containment policy, but once sentence stuck out. The reviewer mentioned that Gaddis paid little attention to Kennan’s sex life (he had a number of affairs) becuase he thought it wasn’t important. Then Menand writes: “It would matter to a professional biographer.”

Hmm. That made me think. Would a “professional biographer” actually care if a diplomat had a lot of extramarital sex? Well, it depends on what you mean by “professional biographer.” For example, if you think that biographers are meant to catalog every detail of a persons life, then, yes, a professional biographer would have to know about extramarital affairs.

But there’s another approach. A biographer could be viewed as more of an editor. Rather than dump massive detail, as many biographers do, instead, a biographer’s job would be to distill the essence of the subject. Of course, some subjects probably need both treatments. A major historical figure, like a US president, needs a “dump” biography with everything because future readers will doubtless have questions about every little detail. But other figures like Kennan probably don’t need the dump and we don’t need baseless speculation about their private lives.

Book adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

I have played around a bit with Prezi, the whizbang presentation software that Tedsters, Hans Rosling (actually, here’s GapMinder) and other cool people use.

Some quick takes on Prezi.

The positives:

• visual focus
• nice macro layouts and views
• cloud-desktop interface very handy
• sure to impress some audiences
• quite easy to use
• big bonus: the company is very nice to educators – you can download a free desktop version (with 500MB of memory)
• relatively easy to “Prezify” old keynote or powerpoint slides – I converted some old slides and it was seamless (though, you have to go from pdf to Prezi – which creates within-slide limitations)
• some cool collaboration options (haven’t tried them though)
• handles images beautifully

Negatives:

I’ll probably be using Prezi in some settings (BTW: you can explore Prezi presentations here).  It has some nice features.

Though, in terms of teaching, I’ve tried to move away from more than one slide per each class (I’m a chalkboard kinda guy these days), so perhaps not for class.  I have a gazillion slides for any given class but I prefer to talk through the issues.  For academic presentations, I think simplicity is good.  Whizbang just distracts (though, the whizbang factor can also be dialed down in Prezi as well).  I’ll probably stick with good ol’ keynote, google and/or ppt – until further notice.

I’m still wondering - what makes for a good academic presentation?  For now, it seems that the research question, idea itself and you have to shine.  If the technology distracts, then that is a problem.

1. A news report indicates that poetry professor & Pulitzer prize winner Geoffrey O’Brien was beaten by police at Berkeley. The 70 year old (!) professor suffered broken ribs after being hit by police batons.

2. Celeste Langan has blogged about her arrest by the Berkeley police department:

As to why I was there: as a tenured professor (and tenure can be defined as a right granted to occupy a position on campus without threat of eviction for expressing dissent) I wanted to express my concern about the double threat posed to the ideal of liberal education by the rising cost of tuition and, more generally, the burden of debt. On the one hand, as many have pointed out, rising costs limit access. On the other hand, the debt students incur as they pursue a liberal arts education also poses a threat to free inquiry, that central value of democratic society.

I’m glad that Langan and other faculty are speaking about the intellectual consequences of college debt. Readers may think I’m anti-humanities. The opposite is true. I like “useless college majors,” but debt undermines the humanities and other fields (like sociology!). People will rightfully resent education and the labor market. That’s what I’m worried about. When we make education into a high priced job placement test, it undermines the liberal arts. We need to stop that from happening further.

 The police, who are given the impossible mission of using “minimal force”–a concept with similar conceptual ambiguity–in the pressure of the moment, also did not take time to think, to consider a response appropriate to the circumstances. But I noticed that after the arrest, they took sweet time—something like four hours—to write reports and “book” us, and then, after another four or five hours, to release us from jail. The delay was caused in part by the initial haste: the officers trying to write the reports had no idea who the arresting officers were, and therefore no idea of what we should be charged with. According to the ACLU, they then violated procedure by not releasing us immediately after issuing the misdemeanor citations.

Police are at great liberty in how they deal with protest. In seven years of field work watching protests, I’ve seen it all. In my experience, the normal situation is that police peacefully arrest protesters who want  to be arrested for symbolic purposes. They also do their best to arrest the small fraction of violent protesters. What Langan, and others, have experienced is neither normal or necessary.

Book adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Economists talk to him, just to learn about sociology.

His initials are A, G, I, and L.

The ASA has a crash pad for him at the K Street condo.

Gayatri Spivak once looked into having him father her child.

The IRB does not ever grant him ”exempt” status so they can read his research at a leisurely pace.

He’s the only AJS reader whose subscription comes in a hand stitched leather cover.

He once dated Judith Butler … and they still call each other just to catch up on things.

Book adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

A few days ago, participants in Occupy Berkeley were sturggling with the police when officers arrested a few people – after yanking them out of the crowd by their hair. One of them was English professor Celeste Langan. Not surprisingly, there’s been a huge outcry.

A few comments: This video, and others,  illustrates a new era in the policing of protest. Now, basically any protest of significant size will likely be recorded by bystanders with smartphones. For example, when a protester was injured by Oakland police a few weeks ago, there was a video showing that the guy was just standing around. The immediate question is how the administration will deal. So far, badly. The long term question is how police departments will change in an age where everything is filmed.

Book adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Ok, I promise this will be the last post for a while about college majors and income. There’s an old paper in the Journal of Cultural Economics on the careers of undergraduate dance majors. What Becomes of Undergraduate Dance Majors? was written by Sarah Montgomery and Michael Robinson. Some take home points:

1. Dance majors tend to give the career about 10 years before switching to non-dance.
2. Those still in dance do dance about 10-15 hours a week and often must supplement their income.
3. In the 1990s, dance performers (who majored in dance) made about $15k+ less than people who had switched to all non-dance employment
4. Graduate education in dance seems to follow employment in dance. My guess is that further training allows successful dance to become instructors because dance is hard to do at later ages.

With respect to the debate we had about useless college majors, the main point is that dance is probably like many fields in that it is very hard to continue after graduation. As long as dance education is inexpensive, that’s not such a big deal. If peopl want to pursue the dream, that’s great. But huge college debt makes that choice hard to sustain.

Book adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

The most recent issue of Nature has a piece on the stepwise evolution of stable sociality in primates.

Although much attention has been focused on explaining and describing the diversity of social grouping patterns among primates^{1, 2, 3}, less effort has been devoted to understanding the evolutionary history of social living⁴. This is partly because social behaviours do not fossilize, making it difficult to infer changes over evolutionary time. However, primate social behaviour shows strong evidence for phylogenetic inertia, permitting the use of Bayesian comparative methods to infer changes in social behaviour through time, thereby allowing us to evaluate alternative models of social evolution. Here we present a model of primate social evolution, whereby sociality progresses from solitary foraging individuals directly to large multi-male/multi-female aggregations (approximately 52 million years (Myr) ago), with pair-living (approximately 16 Myr ago) or single-male harem systems (approximately 16 Myr ago) derivative from this second stage. This model fits the data significantly better than the two widely accepted alternatives (an unstructured model implied by the socioecological hypothesis or a model that allows linear stepwise changes in social complexity through time). We also find strong support for the co-evolution of social living with a change from nocturnal to diurnal activity patterns, but not with sex-biased dispersal. This supports suggestions that social living may arise because of increased predation risk associated with diurnal activity. Sociality based on loose aggregation is followed by a second shift to stable or bonded groups. This structuring facilitates the evolution of cooperative behaviours⁵ and may provide the scaffold for other distinctive anthropoid traits including coalition formation, cooperative resource defence and large brains.

A few weeks ago, I saw the film “The People vs. George Lucas.” It’s not the only film about Star Wars nerds, but it’s probably one of the best accounts of how the SW subculture responded to the prequels. It’s also even handed, admitting that, in the end, Lucas provided some great entertainment and if he wants to alter the originals, so be it.

The film also helped me pin point what is so aggravating about Lucas’ and his relationship to fans. What was really annoying for nerds was Lucas’ weird desire to expunge the original series of films from the record. Unlike most directors who re-edit their films, Lucas has made it hard to fans to buy legit copies of the original films. He doesn’t loan original prints and has claimed that he altered the negatives so that the original theatrical release of 1977 doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s almost like he’s ashamed of having made one of the most successful films in Hollywood history and one that’s deeply affected his fan base.

Another point of contention is the relationship between the prequels and the originals. It’s not that The Phantom Menace and its siblings are bad. They are. They’re really bad. Rather, it’s the way that the new films rewrote much of the backstory in ways that made the original films embarrassing. Fans now have to reinterpret a fairly simple adventure tale into a broader mish-mash of domestic ennui, trade wars, and bacterial infections. It’s hard to find any sequel that was so conceptually misguided that it undermines the pleasure of the originals.

Book Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

I have heard that several schools have recently moved their tenure clocks back (from six to eight years).   Tenure clocks do vary significantly from university to university, from five-six years to ten or so years.

So, what is the “optimal” tenure clock?

A short clock seems to have some advantages.  Scholarly productivity can be evident early on, so a short clock perhaps makes sense. Perhaps a short clock instills an appropriate sense of urgency about publishing.   Though, I have seen several people not get tenure somewhere, move to a “higher-ranked” school and then get tenure shortly thereafter.  A longer clock gives scholars time to establish themselves further, to develop a reputation (citations are often used as a measure – and this takes time), etc. And, certain types of work (ethnographies) and certain types of publishing (books) can take quite long.

Of course, tenure clocks are used in different ways at different schools.  Some schools pride themselves on rejecting tenure candidates – so perhaps a short clock makes sense there.

Anyways – any thoughts, is there an optimal tenure clock?

Question for faculty: What is the range of GRE scores that is acceptable for your PhD program? Feel free to post anonymously, but indicate the type of program you work in (e.g., top 20, mainly qualitative).

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

I was recently thumbing through my heavily marked-up copy of Simmel’s On Individuality and Social Forms (ed. Levine) and I ran into this curious passage again:

Mankind has created association as its general form of life. This was not, so to speak, the only logical possibility. The human species could just as well have been unsocial; there are unsocial animal species as well as social ones. Because of the fact of human sociality, however, we are easily misled into thinking that categories which directly or indirectly are sociological ones are the only, and universally applicable, categories in terms of which we may contemplate the contents of human experience. This notion, however, is completely erroneous. That we are social beings subjects these contents to a certain point of view, but it is by no means the only possible one. To name a completely different contrasting point of view, one can observe, study, and systemize the contents which, to be sure, exist and are realized only within society purely in terms of their objective content. The inner validity, coherence, and objective significance of all sciences, technologies, and arts are completely independent of the fact that they are realized within and find their preconditions in a social life, just as independent as their objective sense is of the psychological processes through which their discoverers found them. They can naturally also be considered under the latter psychological or the former social point of view.

I’ve recently enjoyed Thought Catalog, a website that runs short pieces on various topics. Run by young Brooklynites, the focus is definitely sex and dating, but there’s lot of good stuff in other genres:

• A nice feature on digital artist Jon Rafman, who Teppo mentioned.
• Breaking up with your Blackberry.
• The Chuck Klosterman Fan Club.
• Classical music conundrum.
• Two North Korea documentaries.
• On being a trombone player: ” Pulling out a trombone at a social gathering generates zero enthusiasm.”

Pieces range from introverted to funny to angry to horny to clever. Recommended!

Book adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

Last week, I linked to data showing that the growth degrees awarded has often come from non-vocational areas (NVA), such as the humanities. This has lead some folks, like Arnold Kling, to conjecture that this is a result of anti-profit mentalities among students.

You can test that hypothesis. The charts are from a UCLA report called The American Freshman: Thirty Year Trends – 1966-1996. It shows, using a yearly survey of freshmen, that college students are becoming more interested in making money. In 1971, about 50% went to college to make money. In the 1990s, it’s about 70%. Similarly, modern college students are more interested in financial stability, not philosophical issues. I haven’t been able to find more recent data, but I’d be surprised if that trend reversed. Also, more recent UCLA data from the 2000s shows that around 60% to 70% of college students, depending on the question, want more job career advice from their college.

Colleges are filled with people who are there because they think it will lead to jobs. So, then, why are job hungry students flooding non-vocational areas? The explanation is fairly simple.”Good” jobs require college degrees as a test of ability and emotional maturity (being able to sit and do work), even if the job itself requires no college level skills. So people go to college to avoid service sector and manual work. But not everyone has the academic ability or desire for the professional tracks (business, education, health) or the sciences/engineering. So they need something, which turns out to be these other areas. Yes, some people love Milton, but most humanities majors are there because they mildly enjoy the topic and need to get a degree. We need a way for people to credential themselves without taking on the massive un-payable debt associated with the modern humanities degree.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

What happens when you fuse 725 different fonts into one?  You get the average font, Averia.  You can learn more about the creation of averia here (by the creator, Dan Sayers) or see the fastcodesign story.

And while we’re talking fonts, here are the eight worst fonts in the world.  And, one of the best books on typography – Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style.

Viewer mail! With her permission, Valerie from New Hampshire wrote the following:

I’m a reader of orgtheory and I enjoy the grad school rulz stuff from your blog (I love professional development type things). I have a question to pose for a next edition– how do you find and hire good research assistants? I’m particularly interested in non-PhD student RAs, but I assume there are similar principles. Basically, if you have a resume, writing sample, and time to interview, how would identify people who are bright, hard working, can finish tasks in a timely manner, have a good nose for research, etc? I’m finding myself at a loss, since you can’t exactly get much out of asking, “So… are you hard working?”

Good question. Here is what I wrote back:

For undergrads, I use the following rules:  They need to have taken a course from me and get a B or higher, or they need a reference from another prof and a 3.0 GPA or higher.

The thresholds vary.  Then, I usually assess the student. I give them some simple task to do. If they do it well, they move on to more ambitious things. Otherwise, I phase them out by giving them very easy tasks.

I find people by talking about RA’ships in my courses. I have lectures, so many potential recruits. The undergrad coordinator also knows I need people. That brings 2-4 people a semester.

Another tactic: I look for students who have done “nitty gritty” work of some type, like working in a biology lab. They know profs are looking for hard working people who need boring work done. If they are willing to do it again, they’re probably good workers.

Write your own tips in the comments and don’t forget to check out the Grad Skool Rulz book (it’s cheap).

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz