Appunti di Sociologia

When we consider how well we are doing financially, we must choose a referent.  That is, when we ask the question (”How well am I doing?”), we are also, simultaneously choosing a comparison group (e.g., people in our profession, people of our same sex, people our age, etc).

Most of us probably also restrict our considerations to people in the same country.  We usually don’t think about how well we are doing compared to all human beings in the world, but this website allows us to do just that.  If you put in your yearly income, it will show you where you rank on a global scale (Yen, Canadian dollars, U.S. dollars, Euros, and Pounds only, unfortunately).

I put in the median yearly income for a full time worker in the U.S. and this was the calculation:

This, of course, doesn’t consider the cost of living differences, but it still offers an interesting perspective.

Da provare e diffondere ...

Social Data Analysis is a style of analysis in which people work in a social, collaborative context to make sense of data.

... and what about the analysis of data related to social phenomena?

Flowchart of Beatles song 'Hey Jude' created by dannygarcia inspired by jeannr

What Works

I love it when I find evidence that someone has taken something not at all visual or even all that hierarchical and turned it into an information graphic. It can be difficult to convince people (and here I mostly mean academic sociologists) that developing information graphics is a critical part of communicating research findings or teaching concepts. Coming across examples like this helps – then again, it’s pretty easy to dismiss this as a silly exercise unrelated to the important work sociologists are doing.

I love the loop on ‘na’ at the end.

Good use of gray scale, too.

What needs work

I am now curious about developing a way to understand how to choose a path. When should Jude ‘make it better’ vs. ‘let her into your heart’?

References

dannygarcia at the blog Danny Garcia.

An Italian court has cut the sentence given to a convicted murderer by a year because he has genes linked to violent behaviour — the first time that behavioural genetics has affected a sentence passed by a European court. But researchers contacted by Nature have questioned whether the decision was based on sound science. [...]

"We don't know how the whole genome functions and the [possible] protective effects of other genes," says Giuseppe Novelli, a forensic scientist and geneticist at the University Tor Vergata in Rome. Tests for single genes such as MAOA are "useless and expensive", he adds.

One problem is that the effects of the MAOA gene are known to vary between different ethnic groups, Moffit says. A 2006 study in the United States found that former victims of child abuse with high levels of MAOA were less likely to commit violent crimes — but only if they were white. The effect was not evident in non-white children.

Genes and ethnicity to "explain" criminal behavior?

The nature/nurture debate that posits a competition between biological and social/cultural influences on human behavior  is alive and well in the mass media.  But scholars largely agree that culture and biology interact; biological realities shape our social world, but our social world also shapes our biologies.

One strain of research demonstrating this has shown that men’s testosterone levels (associated with feelings of well-being) rise and drop in response to social (and socially constructed) cues.  For example, the testosterone levels of the winner of a tennis match will rise after his win, while his opponent will see his levels go down.  Similarly, measuring men’s testosterone levels won’t tell you which men walking down the sidewalk will enter a strip club, but the men leaving the strip club will have higher testosterone levels than the men who passed it by.

Matt C. alerted me to a test of this phenomenon using the Presidential election.  There was a slight drop in testosterone levels for men who voted for Obama (normal because men’s testosterone levels tend to drop at night), but a dramatic drop for men who voted for McCain or the Libertarian candidate, Barr.

So, there you have it, biological responses to social cues.

Another (strange) effect recently ascribed to testosterone is the financial crisis; see: Il mondo potrebbe essere migliore

The Immanent Frame » Sacramental poetics via kwout

A newly launched website is attempting to being bring university research directly to a public audience without the journalist as middle man. Futurity is a joint project of American and Canadian universities, who, concerned with the growing number of media outlets who no longer carried science and technology research sections, created the website as a way to connect with interested readers who wished to stay up to date on current research.

For those of us not actively toiling in a university, most modern writing in the social sciences can be placed into one of three categories. The first category, which is vast, consists of the arcane and the incremental — those studies so obscure, or which advance scholarship so infinitesimally, that they can be safely ignored by the general reader. (Not that this work isn’t important; it keeps academic publishing in business, and significant knowledge accretes in tiny drips on the way to tenure.) The second category consists of statistical proof of the obvious. (Some actual study findings published recently: “the parent-child relationship . . . commonly includes feelings of irritation, tension and ambivalence”; women are more likely to engage in casual sex with “an exceptionally attractive man”; and driving while text-messaging leads to “a substantial increase in the risk of being involved in a safety-critical event such as a crash.” Thank you, social science!) And in the third category, which is surely the smallest, are works of brilliant originality that stimulate and enlighten and can sometimes even change the way we under­stand the world.