From Panorama photography (seriously, click on the link): “In late 2008 British artist Roger Hiorns created an artwork out of an entire apartment in South London by filling it to the ceiling with a strong copper sulphate solution, waiting for crystals to form, then pumping the solution out again. The result, called ‘Seizure’, was stunning and alien, and because of it the artist has been nominated for the Turner Prize 2009.

Sadly, it is no longer accessible to the public and the buildings will eventually be demolished, but in late April 2009 it was photographed by special arrangement.”

Here is a tour of the room on youtube. More photos here.

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These corporate collapses have gathered pace in recent years, especially in the western world, and have culminated in the Global Financial Crisis that we are now in. In watching these events unfold it often appears that the senior directors involved walk away with a clean conscience and huge amounts of money. Further, they seem to be unaffected by the corporate collapses they have created. They present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings, and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done. They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events are very persuasive in blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own continued worth and value. They are happy to walk away from the economic disaster that they have managed to bring about, with huge payoffs and with new roles advising governments how to prevent such economic disasters.

Many of these people display several of the characteristics of psychopaths and some of them are undoubtedly true psychopaths. Psychopaths are the 1% of people who have no conscience or empathy and who do not care for anyone other than themselves. Some psychopaths are violent and end up in jail, others forge careers in corporations. The latter group who forge successful corporate careers is called Corporate  Psychopaths.

I have a complaint to make to the editors of the Journal of Business Ethics. Why is the term “Corporate Psychopaths” capitalized every time it appears in the paper? As if that’s not enough, why do we need the to capitalize “Global Financial Crisis” every time it appears in the paper? This combination leads to unattractive sentences like this:

The knowledge that Corporate Psychopaths are to be found at the top of organisations and seem to favour working with other people’s money in large financial organisations has in turn, led to the development of the Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis. The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis is that Corporate Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations…..

Why not just capitalize and put in bold every letter and add blinking animation for emphasis?

1. Shamus on book contracts.
2. Olderwoman on ASA submission.
3. Jeremy on the oddly intrusive IRB policies at Northwestern.
4. Andrew on IRB mission creep.

Recommended.

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One of the biggest questions for Mr. Romney has been the impact of his Mormon faith in a heavily evangelical state like South Carolina.

Voters were not asked about that explicitly in exit polls, but among those who came to vote looking for someone who shared their religious beliefs, Mr. Romney did not do well.

This raised a question. Why do evangelicals not accept Mormons? Mormons  believe in Christ. It’s even in the official name of the main religious organization – The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Furthermore, most Mormons adopt the Christian label.

To resolve this puzzle, I asked three sociologists of religion if the Mormon faith is really that different what has traditionally been called Christianity. Surprisingly, I got a strong and uniform answer – yes. What I gathered from these conversations is that comparative religion scholars employ a definition that suggests that evangelical Christians and Mormons are very distinct.

How do the experts go about this question? The focus is on social practice. If group X and Y do the same things, then they are the same religion. In the study of religion, X and Y are similar if the employ the same ideas (religious beliefs) and texts. Also, religion scholars emphasize the role of spiritual mediation, ritual, and social practice. For example, Catholicism is considered different than Protestantism because the latter permits individuals a direct relation to god.

On these counts, Mormonism and Protestantism are considered quite different. Ideologically, Mormons have different beliefs about the after life, the nature of the soul, and other issues. Textually, they do not adhere to Biblical literalism and they have added a new primary text, the Book of Mormon. They are schismatic as well, in the sense that they do not accept the authority of earlier Christian or Catholic organizations. Finally, they have their own social organization (e.g., they are endogamous and have their own social groups).

Let me end with a note about self-identification. Why do members of the LDS use the term Christianity? The answer is simple – they are Christians. This is a truthful and accurate use of the term “Christian” because Mormons believe in Christ and still read the Bible.

Why the difference between the congregation and the experts? I think that’s simple as well. When Mormons say, “I am Christian,” they are saying that they share some of the same theology as Protestants, Catholics, and other groups that trace their lineage through Jesus Christ. The experts would also recognize that, but they have a different term for that. They would say Mormonism is “Abrahamic,” a term denoting monotheistic religions that have evolved from Abraham.

Sociologically, the emergence of a religion, like Mormonism, indicates social differentation. A group breaks off and establishes a new identity. Since the new group has retained traits from the old group, it’s fair to point to similarities. Also, there will be important differences which form the foundation of the new group, so it is fair to say that their different. Same branch, different leaves.

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Philosopher Michael Huemer’s TEDx talk on figuring out if you are biased in your political thinking.

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Check out the complete series at Hey, Michel Foucault.

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As usual, the story is complex. A lot of early primary states, like Michigan, have lost the moderate and wealthy Republicans that Romney relies on. Republicans from liberal states are decidedly unpopular for the Tea Party base. Evangelicals probably don’t tolerate Mormons.

But there is one factor that has yet to be mentioned – maybe Romney is just really bad at being a conservative politician. Until 2012, he’s never been forced to actually talk the talk in any serious way. During his 1994 battle against Ted Kennedy, he talked non-stop about how he wasn’t conservative, a theme he picked up as her ran for governor. In 2008, Romney won 11 states, but he only appeared conservative when compared to John McCain – the guy who thumbed his nose at the GOP base. In other words, a competent flip-flopper like Romney only appears conservative when standing next to someone who actively makes fun of the base.

2012 is the first time that Romney has had to run against other national politicians who are consistently to the right of him. Even though they are waging an uphill battle, they do have compensating factors. Santorum has always been hyper-conservative on social issues, Paul has the libertarian wing, and Gingrich … well … he’s special. Anyway, 2012 is the first time that Romney has had to fight for conservative votes with competitors who are, well, actually conservative. And the lack of experience shows.

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Penn sociologist Tukufu Zuberi discusses the importance of DuBois’ seminal book, The Philadelphia Negro.

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First, as with most Stata software, mi impute is rather impressive. When you type “mi impute,” you enable a whole package of tools for doing multiple imputation analysis. It’s much like “svy,” “st” and other commands that allow you to do do all kinds of operations that are needed for specific types of analyses (Cox models, time series, etc). The documentation is extensive and the options available would help most run of the mill social scientists, like me.

Second, there are some serious drawbacks. Let’s start with speed. Mi impute is very expensive in terms of time. A student of mine recently worked with a very well known data set with 10,000 cases. The UNIX machines took hours to impute. My desktop will come a halt for a few minutes doing 5 imputations for N=690.

Another drawback is that mi impute is very fussy. Once you deviate from linear variables, mi impute produces a multitude of errors and warnings. It is not entirely obvious that using the various fixes is the correct and proper way to do things.

Finally, as with many multiple imputation methods, you are fairly constrained with what you can do with the final model. Because mi requires you to combine data sets, there is often no confidence interval for the coefficients, which very much limits post-estimation commands.

Overall, I admire mi impute and I’m glad it’s part of Stata 11. But at the same time, the cost-benefit ratio is out of whack. I can get similar and valid answers by using much simpler imputation methods without crashing my machine or making lots of dubious choices with the options.

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1. What is the standard citation that addresses the difficulty in identifying when business cycles begin or end?

2. Is there a literature that describes when people think there are in a recession/recovery? For example, does public opinion follow technical definitions of how economists measure the health of the economy?

Bonus: Before we had Federal statistics on employment, did average people sit around and say “we’re in a recession?”

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If you don’t follow sports, here’s the news: bench warmer Jeremy Lin has electrified pro-basketball by walking off the bench and scoring huge points and demolishing the competition. The story is remarkable because he was consistently ignored by college scouts, pro scouts, and when he finally got recruited by the pros, he was benched and sent to the minor leagues. He was only allowed to play when other players were injured and pulled away by family illness.

He was short changed by the pros despite the fact that he had crushed the competition consistently at *every* stage in his career. High school champion, he lead Harvard to an Ivy League championship, and was way above everyone else in the minor league. This is the sports equivalent of getting perfect SAT scores and GPA but only getting into the local state college. As Gregg Doyel wrote at CBS news, it makes you ask: what did people see when they saw Lin play?

There are two comments that I want to make. First, as Doyel points out, the NBA isn’t exactly racist. NBA scouts will go to Africa and China to find players. The real problem is that NBA scouts rely on stereotypes of Asian men. If you’ve read Moneyball, you know the story. Sports team scouts aren’t very good at identifying people based on performance. They often rely on a “gut” that yields recruiting strategies like “he’s got the body for the sport,” even if there is no testing of that hypothesis. Obviously, a lot of people were relying on the heuristic “skinny Asian guys from academic high schools aren’t very good at sports.” Lesson? As with most organizations, there’s lots of bias in selection and promotion of personnel.

Second, if Lin continues to dominate on the court, he’ll have a big impact on the self-perception of Asian American men. When I was younger, the few Asian American kids in my area complained that the stereotype was that they all knew karate. Later, by the 1980s, the stereotype was that Asians are good at math. Bruce Lee turned into model minority. As Lin settles in and builds a Hall of Fame career, he’ll add a new dimension to popular views of Asian American men – they can be good at sports. Not any sport, but a sport dominated by urban blacks. This is the real challenge to the stereotype. Excellence in a “street” sport like basketball is at odds with the exoticism of the martial arts stereotype and the submissiveness of the model minority. Hopefully, Lin’s career will shatter these perceptions and encourage  people in sports, and other fields, to seriously drop “gut” feelings and go with demonstrated excellence.

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On FB, Dan H posted this nice image of the lineage of sociology depicted as a family tree. The image was created by the staff at Norton.

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This is the conclusion that Peter should have drawn from the essay: “[L]ike it or not, human creativity has increasingly become a group process.”  Lehrer goes on to cite research by my colleagues at Northwestern, Ben Jones and Brian Uzzi, which shows that both scientists and Broadway teams are more successful and creative when bringing together teams made up of diverse individuals. From an article in Science by Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi:

By analyzing 19.9 million peer-reviewed academic papers and 2.1 million patents from the past fifty years, [Jones] has shown that levels of teamwork have increased in more than ninety-five per cent of scientific subfields; the size of the average team has increased by about twenty per cent each decade. The most frequently cited studies in a field used to be the product of a lone genius, like Einstein or Darwin. Today, regardless of whether researchers are studying particle physics or human genetics, science papers by multiple authors receive more than twice as many citations as those by individuals. This trend was even more apparent when it came to so-called “home-run papers”—publications with at least a hundred citations. These were more than six times as likely to come from a team of scientists.

And summarizing Uzzi’s and Spiro’s AJS paper on Broadway shows:

Uzzi devised a way to quantify the density of these connections, a figure he called Q. If musicals were being developed by teams of artists that had worked together several times before—a common practice, because Broadway producers see “incumbent teams” as less risky—those musicals would have an extremely high Q. A musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q…..When the Q was low—less than 1.7 on Uzzi’s five-point scale—the musicals were likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. “This wasn’t so surprising,” Uzzi says. “It takes time to develop a successful collaboration.” But, when the Q was too high (above 3.2), the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation. According to Uzzi, this is what happened on Broadway during the nineteen-twenties, which he made the focus of a separate study. The decade is remembered for its glittering array of talent—Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, and so on—but Uzzi’s data reveals that ninety per cent of musicals produced during the decade were flops, far above the historical norm. “Broadway had some of the biggest names ever,” Uzzi explains. “But the shows were too full of repeat relationships, and that stifled creativity.”

It’s not that groups aren’t effective generators of creativity. As these studies show, innovation tends to be produced via group processes. Knowledge production is increasingly a collective outcome. Rather than assume that people work best alone, we should think more carefully about what kinds of groups are optimally designed for producing creativity.  Diverse groups will be more creative than homogeneous groups. Groups that embrace conflict and critical thought will be less susceptible to groupthink than groups that avoid such conflict.  Groups made up of members who have little experience with outsiders will be less creative.  I agree with Peter that brainstorming is ineffectively taught in many classrooms, but rather than throw out the idea altogether, we should try to teach people how to design groups that are good at generating new ideas.

“The bonding between two people is a truly special moment. It is a time when two people testify to each other, and to their family, and to their friends, that they are committed to one another. That commitment is beautiful and profound. For that reason, I am lucky to be here.

Michael asked me to give advice on marriage. Here are a few thoughts on love and marriage.

Marriages should grow from love, but we often misunderstand what love is because there are many different faces of love. We may think love is passion. And it is true, love contains passion. Love holds within it the most intense desires. But marriage is not only about passion. Marriage is more than that.

Marriage expresses a love that cares for another person. Marriage is an act of support, of cultivation of another human being. The real purpose of marriage is helping someone be the best person that they can be. The love that marriage needs is ultimately selfless.

Love is an ethic of care. It is a moral commitment. Love is the stuff that you do that helps another person travel down the path of life. Celebrate their victories. Appreciate your spouse. Admire them. Hold them when they suffer the inevitable crises of life, whether job loss or terminal illness.

You will need this type of love when you start a family and I hope you do because children are the best thing in life. Your children will need guidance and nurturing. Do not treat them as soft clay upon which you imprint your desires. Rather, treat them as independent spirits who are growing and seeking their own destiny, just as you would treat your spouse. And remember that the love that you have for your spouse will be transferred to your children. Treat your spouse badly, and your children will suffer.

Finally, let me offer some concrete ideas for making your marriage happy on a daily basis. First, experiences matter more than material possessions. Spend time with each other, no matter how busy your personal or professional lives may be. Do things together. Second, treat yourselves well. If you can do something to make yourself happy in some small way, it is easier to care for another person. Third, many problems are short term. They will pass and you should be grateful for what you have. Fourth, talk less, listen more. Don’t be overly critical. Conversations should open a channel between two people, not win an argument. Fifth, don’t try to change your spouse. Love them for who they are and who they can become.

Once again, thank you for making me a part of this special day. It is a moment that I will treasure for the rest of my life.”

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The degree of meritocracy in a field is defined by the correlation between rewards and what participants believe to be observable measures of performance or quality. We say that fields with a stronger (or weaker) association of performance measures and rewards is strongly (or weakly) meritocratic.

Thus, meritocracy is when people who achieve more at work get more stuff. Of course, this definition is itself open to criticism. There may be fields where there is no consensus over what counts as good. Another problem is that many fields are opaque and it is hard to measure quality. E.g., did your lawyer really do well on your case? In practice, it is often hard to tell.

An issue that I avoid is that the ability to do well may not depend on how hard an individual works or the talent they have. A child who goes to a school in a poor neighborhood may not even have the chance to take an advanced math class., and thus may not be competitive for a selective college. And it’s really out of their hands. That is why you have to distinguish between meritocratic decisions and the justice of resource allocation before the decision. One can be fair, while the other is not. They are related, but distinct issues.

Now, let’s get back to academia. Is academia meritocratic? Let me focus on job market and simply admit that there are pre-job market inequalities that deserve a separate discussion. Well, it turns out that there is a literature on academic job market performance and it shows that academia has both meritocratic and un-meritocratic components. Let’s start with the meritocratic parts:

• For example, a literature going back to the 1970s shows that academic jobs and promotion are significantly correlated with observable measures of success like # of publications and status of the journals.
• As we discussed before, GREs and GPA correlate well with admissions and future graduate school performance. This is a very strong finding from the higher education literature.

There is evidence of un-meritocratic components of the academic labor market:

• In many studies, there is a correlation of labor market outcomes and gender, even when controlling for # of articles and other relevant performance measures. It may be the case that there is outright prejudice. It may also be the case that gender is correlated with other behaviors that are judged differently by the labor market. Erin Leahey has a series of papers, for example, arguing that gender is correlated with specialization in research, which is correlated with labor market outcomes. Meritocratic? It’s up for debate.
• Studies like Burris (2004) that show that elite programs dominate the market and people are often judged by status of the PhD program, even when there is evidence of publication.

As an issue of social science, I think it’s fair to say that academia is somewhere in the middle in terms of how meritocratic it is. At the top of the hierarchy, it’s clear that there is a lot of hard work and halo effects at the same time. Faculty at top programs are constantly fighting for space in top journals. It’s nearly impossible to get tenure at a research university without good publications. But still, many hiring decisions rely on prestige, image, who your adviser is, and so forth. At the macro level, as these studies show, there is a persistent correlation between GPA, GRE, and publications and labor market outcomes.

At the level of advising  people, I’d say the following: academia is meritocratic enough. Not perfect by a long shot, but there is enough openness so that working hard is a rational strategy and you aren’t wasting your time. Academia is a great example of where acting as if everyone is virtuous is probably the smart thing to do.

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A few readers have expressed frustration with the Smashwords website. Well, it turns out that you have multiple options for buying the book  that are really easy. If you have a Nook, you can search for it directly (see above). You can get it directly from the Barnes and Noble web site. It’s on the iPad, simply search the iBook store. If you have a Kindle, you have to go Smashwords, buy the Kindle version and download it. Then click and drag.

The reason I stay with Smashwords is that they are extremely generous with royalties and the let authors retain power over the marketing of the book. Outstanding resource for indie authors.

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“There is already a whole cohort of us for whom Scott was an essential part of our graduate educations,” says Pierre Azoulay, an associate professor at Sloan, who as an MIT doctoral student had Stern as one of his advisers.

The write up has some nice summaries of Stern’s research, in which he examines the trade offs that scientists make, such as taking a pay cut in private firm jobs in exchange for more control over how the science is spread.

The one thing that left me scratching my head are quotes like this: “From this research, Stern synthesized an insight that remains with him today. “Scientists don’t only care about money,” he says. “They care about discovery, and control. Those are just first-order facts about the scientific enterprise.”

The Stern quote hits on a theme that has been old hat in the social analysis of science since the day of Merton, if not earlier. Why are economists constantly surprised by these findings? Isn’t variance in human motivation the plausible prior hypothesis? Don’t economists believe in differences in personality and socialization? Isn’t the real question the degree to which specific activities are governed by financial considerations, not  treating non-financial considerations as anomalies?

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University of Chicago Urban Network are sponsoring a conference, “Causal Thinking and Ethnographic Research,” devoted to understanding the contributions of ethnographic research to contemporary causal thinking and scientific inference.  Is counterfactual thinking useful to ethnographers?  Does ethnographic research help identify its flaws?  Are the deductive methods underlying QCA appropriate to a research endeavor primarily driven by induction and abduction?  Do mechanism-based explanations simply push the difficulties of causal inference deeper?  What approaches to inference in ethnographic research would constitute a better alternative?  Many of the most interesting and promising ethnographers in sociology will be addressing these and other questions.

Here’s the conference website. Check it out.

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The real test for libertarianism will be when it gets a champion equipped to stand up for the ideology’s social views as well its economic and international ones.

Actually, there was one politician who might be considered a test of Beauchamp’s hypothesis – former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson. He’s pretty much a hard core libertarian who is both an economic and social liberal. He’s anti-tax, pro-gay rights, drug decriminalization, and has never dabbled in the race mongering that tainted Paul. The result? Johnson did worse than Huntsman. Barely topping 2% on polls, Johnson dropped out in November and bought a ticket to Irrelevant Land by running for the Libertarian Party nomination.

This evening, Santorum is enjoying a second surge, upsetting Romney in Minnesota and possibly Colorado. Paul’s best showing is second place in Minnesota, but still not winning a single state. Paul barely broke single digits in the other states. The message is loud and clear from the GOP primary electorate. The Wall Street republican, the anti-abortion crusader, and the hot head all get a thumbs up. Libertarians need not apply.

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The oikos UNDP Young Scholars Development Academy 2012 provides PhD students and young scholars working on poverty, sustainable development, and the informal economy from an Organisation and Management Theory perspective a platform to present and discuss their on-going research projects with fellow students and senior faculty.

Research on inclusive business models, market development and sustainability between the informal and formal economy is a promising and challenging field for young researchers and PhD students. It calls for a multitude of methods, combination of disciplines in strategy, organisation studies, sociology, anthropology and economics, and new research designs, e.g. market ethnography in organisation studies.

Great opportunity for orgtheory PhD students and tenure track/post docs. Check it out.

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Here’s the bad news for Paul. The 2012 campaign has shown that when given three distinct choices, libertarians are still wildly unpopular among Republicans. The way I see it, the GOP had three streams of competition: establishment/big business Republicans (Romney, Hunstman, Cain), social conservative (Bachmann, Santorum, Perry), and libertarian (Paul, Johnson). Gingrich is sui generis, but has recently attached himself to the social conservatives.

The result of the match up so far? Every social conservative has enjoyed a surge over Romney and two states went to social conservatives (SC, IA). The business Republican, Romney, has enjoyed a first or second place position in polls throughout the cycle. He actually did well in 2008, winning 11 states against McCain. He’ll win the nomination. The libertarians? Paul had a surge in Iowa in December, but dropped to third on election day behind one of the most understaffed and underfunded campaigners, Rick Santorum. Paul has yet to win a state and he is now polling behind Gingrich. Gary Johnson, the hard core libertarian governor of New Mexico? No one cared.

Even though Paul shows that major party strategies yield better results than third parties, there is a limit. The GOP doesn’t have much of a libertarian streak. One might argue that the libertarian may have a bright future within the GOP, but it is hard for me to believe that the young libertarians who are fueling the Paul campaign today can outnumber the social conservatives of tomorrow.

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The first half of my college career was atrocious and my GPA suffered tremendously, which led to being put on academic dismissal. After three years I came back to school and I have been doing well, even making the Dean’s List last semester. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be able to raise my GPA up to 3.0 by the time I graduate, even if I continue to have 4.0 semesters. Is there any hope for me to get into a Grad program?

The analogous question for faculty and graduate students is “how do I move up even though I am at a low status place?”

Overcompensate. If you had an atrocious year as an undergraduate and you have a bad GPA, then work double hard to maximize your GRE.  Get into an MA program and write a really innovative MA paper – and get it published. If you are in a low-status PhD program, then get published in a well known journal. The same advice goes for faculty.

Of course, this isn’t easy. That is why so few people pursue this strategy. But it does increase your chance of success. If you look at most (but not all) top 20 programs, you will see some faculty with PhDs from non-top 20 programs. If you look at graduate students at top programs, many come from not so fancy undergraduate institutions. What these people have in common is that, at some level, they moved on from the fact that there was something “imperfect” about their academic record and focused on being excellent.

Let me finish with an observation about academia. It’s a system that combines inertia and prestige chasing. That’s why being at the bottom of the pecking order can be frustrating. At the same time, the farther you get into your career, oddly, the less status matters. The rewards go to those who publish.

The truth is that very few people are consistently publishing quality material and few are consistently good teachers.  While I have personally known a few good publishers who had tenure problems, most people with good records get promoted. Graduate students with publications do better on the job market than those who have none. Consistent publishers have an easier time moving to desirable jobs. Easy? Not at all. But excellence is the solution most likely to solve your career problems.

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On the faculty side, you have a cluster of high caliber profs who focus on this topic (DiMaggio, Zelizer, Reuf, and, for a while, Lamont). They aren’t playing the same game, but they are in the same sport. Starting in the late 1990s, there’s been a steady march of graduate students who focus on the mutual relationship between culture/meaning and organizations/fields. Our own Kieran Healey is a great example (organ donation institutions). There’s Bethany Bryson (multiculturalism as meaning in higher ed), guest blogger Fred Wherry (the meaning of craft  markets), Cristina Mora (the institutionalization of Latino ethnicity), Abigail Saguy (cultural analysis of harassment policies), guest blogger Gabriel Rossman (cultural industries). Very different people, but they share common threads of culture, institutions, and markets.

I’d be interested to know if there is a write up of this school. At best, it’s probably to be found in the Annual Review articles written the PSoS faculty and graduate students. I’d also be interested in personal recollections of either faculty or students, if any exist.

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From the Department of Cartography and Geography at East Central University.

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I might reasonably also be asked why no use is made here of the work of Garfinkel (e.g., 2002), which had many of the same influences and made many of the same critiques of conventional sociological explanation. The answer is simple: Garfinkel chose to write in gobbledy-gook, and although I do not begrudge him the enjoyment he so obviously received from this activity, I also see no reason to wade through the results to extract arguments that were made previously and more clearly by others. Finally, rather than indicate to his sociological readers that there was a wide range of inspiring and dissenting traditions from which they could draw (the approach of the current work), Garfinkel instead attempted to put his own formalizations in between his students and the phenomenological tradition, acting more like a cult leader than a scholar. Even did I not find this somewhat disappointing on a human level, it would make little scientific sense to reward such behavior.

This gives you a taste for the kind of book he has written. You may not agree with everything John writes in this book, but he certainly knows how to make punchy points.

• Intro soc
• Research methods
• Social theory
• Basic stats (hypothesis testing) + applied regression analysis
• Microeconomics
• Demography
• Social Network Analysis
• Mathematical Sociology/computational models
• Intro game theory
• Breadth: a few courses in qualitative topics; three courses of topics in sociology (like race, gender, education, etc.); a capstone course

The background that a student would need is about 1 year of calculus and some computer literacy. The only course that soc depts don’t already offer is math soc. But I think that could be offered, or made an elective. At a competitive R1 school, I’d imagine that you could get 3-4 majors per year. A minor could probably bag you 5-8 students per year. I bet a few hard science types would be happy to tack it on as a double major. And the cost would be zero.

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1. If you are applying to IU, I am quite sorry. We probably won’t be offering you admissions. It’s just a fact. We reject the overwhelming majority of applicants, including many who will go on and have great careers in sociology.

2. The rest of my comments are directed at faculty who are serving on admissions committees. First, departments vary in their strategies and procedures. Here are IU, we read through every single application. Of course, some folders get more attention than others. The folks with rock bottom GRE’s and a 2.9 GPA won’t get more than a quick glance, if that.

We do read a lot of folders in detail because IU employs a sort of “Moneyball” strategy. We look for diamonds in the rough. A lot of our star students, who go on to dominate the job market, were high performers at relatively low status schools. So we don’t rely on a steady feed of polished applicants from the West Coast and Ivy League. We find the gems from the liberal arts and public schools of the Midwest and South. It’s a strategy that requires reading folders closely, but it pays off in spades. IU has great students.

3. It is hard to develop meaningful distinctions with a certain class of students. You might call them the stereotype sociology undergrads. The profile is that they major in sociology and have a decent GPA. They also have decent verbal scores, but bad to miserable math scores. Unless they can make the case that their math score is an aberration (e.g., they did well in freshman calculus), it’s hard for them to move to the top of the pile.

4. Admissions committees often have trouble interpreting applications from foreign countries. Sometimes it’s language, sometimes it’s simply a different grading system. Also, you have to work extra hard to distinguish between students who are more interested in migration than the academic career. Some regions have a reputation for less than trustworthy credentials. That’s why it’s good to consult with colleagues from those nations  if there’s a candidate who might be a good fit. If I were to advise foreign applicants, I’d insist that they show that they “get it” (i.e., understand academia) and have a credible signal of commitment to academia.

5. Letters of recommendation: My opinion of letters continues to slide over time. The more I do admissions, they more flaws I see. First, there is little variance among letter writers. Second, there is a double selection effect. Students only approach profs who like them and who have given them good grades. Third, a lot of letters are obviously lame. For example, I have read many letters that insisted the student was top notch (top 1% or 5%), yet the GRE’s and GPA were clearly atrocious. Fourth, a lot of students, especially those in low status schools or who have non-academic employment, have letter writers who are not in a position to write honest and thoughtful evaluations. I’ve seen a lot of letters by bosses, academic advisers, project supervisors, and so forth. I don’t count it against students, but it doesn’t help.

6. The 1% of letters:  Still, every once in a while, there’s a letter that makes a clear and compelling case for a student. The profile of the letter writer is that they are an active teacher and researcher. They provide some concrete evidence that the student is actually exceptional, or that they are better than the transcript. They often have extensive experience with the applicant, or they can explain why the performance in one course is remarkable. Sadly, I’ve read only four or five letters that fit this mold, out of hundreds. The rest are generic and uninformative.

7. Random thoughts: Statements are good for sorting students, but only broadly. If the applicant is interested in social work or activism, academic sociology isn’t a good fit. I read transcripts carefully to spot praiseworthy or suspicious behavior (e.g., lots of withdrawals, hard courses, upward trajectories). Writing samples are good measures on general writing, but still, I am reluctant to make a decision on a product that was often not originally intended to be research sociology (e.g., a term paper in history or a policy report).

Add your admissions questions and remarks in the comments.

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The incentives do not encourage strong teaching in the sciences. While people don’t intentionally teach bad, they do in practice because there is no reason to do otherwise. Consider the typical experience of a freshman in a big science department:

• They are a decent student in an American high school.
• They are thrown into a large lecture class with little supervision, except maybe the once a week lab or discussion section.
• The TA’s have no teaching experience. They often have bad language skills.
• Grading is often punitive – curves are often used. Students can still get crummy grades even if they learn a fair amount of material.

Adding insult to injury,  a lot of fields, like physics, have poor job prospects, especially for people with only a BA. Furthermore, graduate schools in law and medicine don’t give you credit for a low GPA just because it was in a hard major. STEM is a raw deal for marginal students. Why bother with this insanely hard major that is badly taught and will punish you with low grades? Switch to a different field, get decent grades, and have a real career.

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So who is ahead in endorsements? Check out the web site 2012 National Endorsements at p2012.org. The endorsement winner, by a wide, wide margin is Mitt Romney. No Senator has endorsed Gingrich  – not a single one. Only the Texas and Georgia governors have endorsed Gingrich, and Romney is 54-12 in Representative endorsements.

So why is Romney tanking? First of all, he’s not. He won New Hampshire and came in second in two other states. Second, he’s got the backing of the party, which translates into money and other support. Third, he’s still in either first or second place national polls.

It bears noting that Romney is now battling in his weakest region – the South. If any region has Republican voters who insist on traditional Christianity from leaders, it’s the South. After Florida, you have a lot of Romney friendly states. In February, we have Nevada, Maine, Colorado, Arizona, and Washington. In theory, Michigan should be Romney central, but the Midwest can be tough to predict (see Iowa). On Super Tuesday in March, we have Alaska, Idaho, and North Dakota.

Romney is the only guy with the cash to go national. If he can just stop the bleeding in the South, he’ll get the nomination by cobbling together the Northeast, the West and some of the Midwest. I can’t see any other candidate with the strategy, money, discipline, and “appeal” to simultaneously fight across the country.

My one caveat is that I might be underestimating the role of religion. I don’t buy the stories that voters turned off to Romney because of his wealth. Lots of wealth people have won nominations and the presidency, even those with slimy backgrounds. South Carolina Republicans just voted for a guy who took a million dollars in consulting fees from lending institutions. However, it is very easy for me to see how conservative Christian voters simply can’t stand to vote for a Mormon.

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First, you need a decent plan if you want to succeed at self-publishing. Any decent editor will tell you that your book depends on getting the message out to the right people. So, when I decided to make the jump and self-publish, I only did so after realizing that the blog provided a great advertising for the book. The Grad Skool Rulz had a consistent following and three of them have been reprinted on the website “Inside  Higher Ed.” I had an audience and a product that people liked. As long as I gently reminded people about where to find the book, I knew I could get people to consider getting the book.

Second, if you are used to executing your own self-managed projects, self-publishing isn’t so bad. To publish the Rulz, I had to do the following: produce a text, edit it, format it, create a cover and open an account. This, it turns out, is a fair amount of work, but still way, way easier than getting tenure, writing my dissertation, or dealing with the crises that pop up in my life. In other words, if you can actually write and you have self-direction, it isn’t that bad. There are even books and websites that tell you how to do it. And of course, I had lots of help. A friend designed the cover, orgtheory fans helped me edit the text, and so forth.

Third, self-publishing can be profitable. Once I realized that the Rulz had a notable audience, then all I needed to be profitable was for a small handful of people to shell out $2 a pop. Orgtheory links really help there. It adds up.

Fourth, self-publishing can be more successful than regular publishing. At the current rate, which is much lower than the weeks after initial release, my self-published e-book will likely sell more copies in one year than my physical book has in almost five years. Some of it is due to content. An academic monograph has a much more limited audience than an advice manual, but it shows that with the right product and strategy I can get a better outcome from self-publishing than traditional publishing.

Five, this is a format for retaining control over the content. The Grad Skool Rulz are opinionated and not suitable for peer review, but I knew from reader response that the Rulz were valuable, Thus, self-publishing is a good choice.

I don’t recommend it for everyone and it isn’t suitable for all texts, but I can say from personal experience that self-publishing works.

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• Death of a Promise Keeper by Charlie Bertsch- a tasteful reflection on having a neighbor who is very different than you.
• Withering Away of the State(s) by Mitchell Plitnick – what happened to the two state solution?
• The Supreme Leader’s Muzak by Cameron McDonald – what tyrants listen to.

Check it out – I know you’ll find something that you like.

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If you look at the range of penalties, most of the black-white gaps in criminal sentences disappear when you include initial charges. Source: Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Charging and Its Sentencing Consequences by Rehavi and Starr.

It’s long been known by researchers that American blacks are more likely to spend time in jail than whites and they serve longer prison sentences. However, it’s not known exactly why that is. Do blacks commit more serious crimes? Are courts handing out tougher sentences to black defendants? Are different laws applied to them? Since a lot of evidence in this areas focuses on the terminal stages of prosecution (e.g., pleas bargaining), it’s hard to to tell.

A new paper by Marit Rehavi (UBC econ) and Sonja Starr (Michigan Law) uses some excellent new data on Federal sentencing behavior to come up with a striking and simple answer. Blacks receive longer sentences because prosecutors are more likely to charge them with crimes that require minimum sentences. From the paper:

This study provides robust evidence that black arrestees in the federal system—particularly black men—experience moderately but significantly worse case outcomes than do white defendants arrested for the same crimes and with the same criminal history.  Most of that disparity appears to be introduced at the initial charging stage, which has previously been overlooked by the literature on racial disparity in criminal justice.  Other factors equal, we estimate conservatively[1] that, compared to white men, black men face charges that are on average about seven to ten percent more severe on various severity scales, and are more than twice as likely to face charges carrying mandatory minimum sentences.  These disparities persist after charge bargaining and, ultimately, are a major contributor to the large black-white disparities in prison sentence length.   Indeed, sentence disparities (at the mean and at almost all deciles in the sentence-length distribution) can be almost completely explained by three factors: the original arrest offense, the defendant’s criminal history, and the prosecutor’s initial choice of charges.

In other words, in the modern system, prosecutors often have the option of charging you  with crimes that require that you serve some minimal amount of time. Blacks are more likely to be charged with violations carrying minimal sentences and this accounts for most of the black-white gap in sentencing. According to some estimates, like Table 1 (p. 22), the odds double that a prosecutor will charge a black male with a minimum sentence offense. Depending on who you measure it, this results in a punishment that’s about 7-10% more severe.

The strength of the paper is that the authors have access to Federal data bases that provide data from arrest to conviction. That way, the authors can account for issues like prior criminal record and the severity of the offense, as recorded by law enforcement at the time of the arrest. There are some limits to the analysis. Certain types of crimes are excluded because relevant data doesn’t exist. For example, one important class of crimes, drug offenses, are excluded because amount of drugs is not reported in the data base. Regardless, it’s a massive data set that covers an important portion of the legal system. Bottom line: no matter how you look at it, prosecutors are being more harsh on black defendants.

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• The group has big plans for 2012, here’s the announcement (watch the video).
• You can follow Anonymous on twitter, @Anon_Central.
• There’s a new documentary, We are legion: the story of hacktivists (it’s now playing at Slamdance Film Festival, the alternative to Sundance).

Also, Anonymous has recently retaliated against the shutdown of the filesharing site Megaupload (wiki site here) and the arrest of its Finnish-German hacker-founder Kim DotCom.  Here’s the NYT story about the arrest.  This fella is a piece of work: he was arrested at his $30 million dollar mansion in New Zealand (yes, with Finnish flag flying), and apparently about $6 million worth of vehicles were also confiscated.  Yes, he made his money via illegal filesharing (of music, movies etc) – about 50 million people visited the site daily.  Anonymous retaliated by hacking various sites, including the DOJ, MPAA, Universal. Interesting issue: free filesharing, important to the Anonymous ethos, has now created the type of concentration of wealth that the movement is fighting against.  Robin Hood got rich.

Kim Dotcom managed, just last month, to get some music celebs (Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, etc) to endorse Megaupload:

Needless to say, Universal did not like the song or video.

Our good friend Jenn Lena has a new book called “Banding Together.” It’s about rise of music scenes and the creation of culture. In the youtube clip, she is interviewed by Eric Schwartz, editor at the Princeton University Press. Spring book forum, anyone?

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