Sociology

Thu, Jan 19, 2017

Rank Error in Your Favor

Update: Since writing this post, I’ve repeatedly tried to delete the offending review from my profile, but Google Scholar keeps re-inserting it as part of its automated trawl through its corpus of articles. So it seems that the robots are determined to grant me these citations whether I want them or not. Google Scholar is one of the most visible and widely-used examples of the rise of “impact measurement” in academia.

Mon, Nov 28, 2016

Flipped Counties in the 2016 Election

I was playing with some county-level data from the U.S. general election, partly out of a spirit of honest inquiry and partly out of a feeling of morbid curiosity. Because I had some county-level census data to hand, I took a look at the results using some extremely basic demographic information—the two variables that structure America’s ur-choropleths, namely population density and percent black. I focused on the counties that flipped from their vote in the 2012 general election.

Thu, Sep 29, 2016

Opiate-Related Deaths in the US, 1999-2014

Yesterday I had a conversation on Twitter with Josh Zumbrun that followed on from this tweet: This is one of the most horrifying graphics I've ever seen:https://t.co/wM0VJZn0Wg pic.twitter.com/qaUaNFtRPl — Josh Zumbrun (@JoshZumbrun) September 28, 2016 The striking maps he linked to tracked the rise in deaths due to drug-related overdoses over the past 15 years, caused in large part to the surge in use of heroin and synthetic opiates. The details are in the WSJ report on the problem.

Mon, Sep 12, 2016

Vaccination Beeplot

Last year I wrote about vaccination exemptions in California kindergartens, drawing on school-level data provided by the state of California about the number of kindergarteners with “personal belief exemptions” (or PBEs) that allow them not to be vaccinated. Today I came across a ggplot package called ggbeeswarm that’s designed to create a “beeswarm plot”, or a 1-D scatterplot with a bit of information about the density of the distribution. I had used geom_jitter to do something like this for one of my plots last year, but the geoms in ggbeeswarm are better.

Sat, Jul 16, 2016

Facetiming the Coup

The apparently failed coup against President Erdoğan of Turkey continues to unfold this morning, in what remains a very uncertain and fluid situation. Last night, during the most chaotic sequence of events, Erdoğan gave an interview via a video chat service on his iPhone, where he asserted the legitimacy of his government’s authority and called on the Turkish people to take to the streets against the coup. The picture of him talking via Facetime is already one of the iconic images of the night.

Tue, Jun 28, 2016

SASE Panel on The Moral Economy of Technology

Note: This is the text of my contribution to a panel at the SASE meetings, UC Berkeley last Sunday. My role was to tee up the discussion. The other panelists were Maciej Cegłowski, Stuart Russell, and AnnaLee Saxenian. My remarks draw on work that Marion Fourcade and I have been doing on information technology and markets, but she should not be held responsible for anything here, especially the bits about 18th century French intellectuals.

Thu, Mar 10, 2016

The Protracted Game

You may have heard the news that Lee Sedol, a Go Master, has been defeated by a computer program created by a group of Google engineers. A second match is underway today. The Google/DeepMind team has a technical paper in Nature describing AlphaGo, the program they wrote. Various commentators have remarked on the sometimes surprising but extremely effective moves that AlphaGo made. And of course there’s the usual half-serious musings about the inevitable robot uprising that this victory portends.

Wed, Mar 9, 2016

Plain Text and Pictures

Here are two small sites I made recently, and which I may continue to tweak and expand. The first, plain-text.co, presents “The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain-Text Social Science”. It is designed to address some questions about managing research and writing projects in the social sciences using plain-text and free or mostly-free tools like Emacs (or other text editors), R, pandoc, and make. The second, vissoc.co which I’ve mentioned before, compiles notes from a short course in data visualization I taught last semester.

Mon, Feb 15, 2016

Two Revolutions

In the next week or two I’ll be talking to some social science students about tools for doing research and writing up results. Over the years I’ve accumulated various things on the topic, ranging from bits of advice to templates or things I use myself. My focus is on managing the various pieces of the work process in plain-text, especially when it comes to writing code you can read later, and keeping track of the work you’ve done.

Wed, Feb 10, 2016

Data Visualization Course Notes

ASA Section Membership and Revenues. I taught a half-sized introductory seminar on data visualization last semester. It’s an introduction to some principles of data visualization for working social scientists, and is focused mostly on teaching people how to use ggplot effectively. I’ve made the (slightly rough-and-ready) course notes available as a website. The notes include numerous code samples, .Rmd files for every week, and there’s a GitHub repository containing all the material to build the site, including the datasets used to make the plots.