Month: January 2009

While all of you are busy celebrating the inauguration of our first black President, the boys and girls over at Conservapedia have a slightly different spin on the inauguration:
Continue reading “the bizarro-news”

http://www.isobamapresidentyet.com/

Recently, I have been receiving a lot of vacation mail notices.  Ordinarily, people say either they are going to be slow responding while they are away or that they won’t respond until they return.  But the two below two basically state that because the email was received while they are away, that they probably won’t respond at all!

(1) I will be out of the office until January 19 and often not reading email during that time.  So I may not respond to your message when I return.

(2) I will be away from the office from January 14, 2009 through January 20, 2009 with limited access to email.  If you need immediate assistance, please contact XXXXXX for assistance.  Otherwise, please resend your message after January 19th.

I think from now on, I will use this kind of message when I leave the office at 5:00.

Like many other academics I spend a certain amount of my time begging for a handout writing grant proposals. I have been successful with some, been rejected with others, and feel like I have at least a passing familiarity with how the game is played. That is, I thought I did until receiving my most recent grant decision:*

Proposal Title: Give me money so I can do research and finish grad school: A quantitative research study.

Evaluation Precise: This proposal is well-written, well-reasoned and presents a new research idea. The substance of the proposal fits with the grant program’s mission and has significant potential to advance knowledge. The primary problem with the proposal is that it is formatted with 1″ margins and is in Times New Roman font. While not mentioned in the grant program guidelines, 0.5″ margins with Courier font gives a more serious impression. This grant program is highly competitive and author(s) should make every effort to demonstrate the regard they have for it.

Decision: Reject.

Okay. Right. If anybody needs me, I’ll be in the corner whacking myself in the face with a hammer.

* Shortened and paraphrased to protect everyone's anonymity though, I concede, I have not exaggerated the absurdity in the slightest.

One of my sociology Facebook friends has posted an unflattering photo of him from his youth as his profile photo, and has announced that he will not change it until he finishes a paper. I think this is such a brilliant idea that I had to share it with y’all. I might dig out the photo from when my mom forced me to get a perm and do the same thing.

As I said, I am chairing graduate admissions here in Northwestern sociology. The committee consists of three faculty members and three graduate students. When I have mentioned this to other people in the discipline, reactions have ranged from “What the [bother]? Is that even legal?” to “Doesn’t every department have students on the committee?” So, now I’ve become curious about it. Does your department have graduate students on its graduate admissions committee? If so, is it just a matter of having one representative, or is the committee half faculty, half graduate students?

Maybe the Scatterlings can help. I’ve been using Stata’s spmap written by Maurizio Pisati, which is a cool tool for visually displaying differences between geographic units, US states in my case. The US map discussed on the Stata web site takes a long time to load due to coastline and river details which are irrelevant for my purposes; I found a cache of smaller  faster-loading map files for the first-level political units for all the world’s countries (including the US) on the CDC web site linked to by Friedrich Huebler’s page on Stata maps. But even the US map from the CDC site integrates Alaska and Hawaii into the common scale, so that there is a lot of ocean in the map. What I’d like is a shapefile that puts Alaska and Hawaii in not-to-scale insert boxes so I can show data for all 50 states in a more visually-appealing format.  I can find places on the web (mostly course sites) where instructions are given for creating such a map in ArchInfo, which I don’t have and don’t want to do anyway.  What I’m wondering is whether anyone has or knows how to find a nice shapefile that already does this?  Or is this actually not something that can be a shapefile, or not something spmap could handle anyway?  I did figure out how — using my graphics software ACDSee and Microsoft Publisher —  to chop up the spmap graphics file output and repackage it the way I want it to look.* But avoiding that step would be good. Of course, what I really need to do is to stop playing with maps and confront the fact that I’m not sure what my argument is any more. But I doubt you can help me with that.

*In case this is helpful, for the choropleth map I drew (color indicates value on dependent variable) the .wmf  (Windows Metafile) format did not show the coloring, but the .emf (Enhanced Windows Metafile) format did.  Graph export does not do .jpg files for some reason, and the .tif format had poor resolution.

The list of candidates for American Sociological Association offices is now out. I am running for the Committee for Publications. Vote for me and I will end (1) the requirement that you include the publisher’s city in citations and (2) waterboarding. I am also working on a revenue enhancement plan in which people who sign up new members to ASA will automatically be entered into a drawing for a free accepted manuscript at the American Sociological Review.

is it time for the government to come back now? Please?

Here’s a riddle: why is it that workshops to teach you how to manage your time always seem to tell you two hours worth of material in four hours?

And for bonus points: why haven’t I learned that the best use of my time is almost never to listen to someone tell me how to get the best use of my time?

I am on the graduate admissions committee. Somebody has a one-paragraph, poorly-written letter from a professor saying the student is the best undergraduate they have taught in two decades. I am so tempted to send the professor an e-mail asking whether he is lying (about the quality of the student) or whether is has committed gross malpractice (by writing such a halfbothered letter for the finest student he’s taught in a generation).