Peter Levin’s Rethinking Markets

June 3, 2008

Lurk much?

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 12:36 pm

If you do, and you live in NYC, you might be interested in joining me and a couple other sociology blogger types for lunch on Thursday. Email me for the details - plevin {at} barnard {dot} edu. Might be fun.

May 14, 2008

Giving good presentations, addition one

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 5:00 pm

There’s been some more discussion around giving a good presentation. I find myself disagree with some points. First, of course, there are a series of guidelines that make presentations better: more practice, more confidence, attentiveness to one’s audience, etc. But second, individual mileage will vary considerably. For some people, 5-7 words per slide works great. For others, disaster. Likewise having fun, being ‘into’ your presentation, and things like that. I think some folks have been hooked by Tufte’s elegance, Atkinson’s storyboarding, and Hans Rosling’s enthusiasm. It’s the 2.0 aesthetic, to be sure.

But I kind of like literature reviews. Not in the sense that I like a litany of work that’s gone before. But to situate what you are going to talk about. For example, in a recent talk, I used the following slide:

This slide is meant to capture two different approaches in economic sociology. I can talk about this slide for 20 minutes, or for 5, giving specific examples and research to add meat if I have the time or at least flavor if not. But there are more than 6 words, and I still find it useful. Especially when followed by a slide that uses the same form, but adds substance from the current talk:

So now, you have the same slide, but progressively (there were interim discussion and slides) more content built onto the generic form. I guess I don’t see what the problem is here, or why I need to dumb down my slides to make my work more bite-sized. The audience was cultural sociologists, not economic sociologists, so it’s not as if this was a crowd who benefited greatly from shorthand. And yet.

May 11, 2008

UCSD culture conference

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 9:57 am

Back from a lovely weekend in San Diego, where I was a participant in their 4th annual Culture Conference: Crisis, Emergency, Global Processes. Aside from being a sort of former Northwestern love-fest (Amy Binder and David Pellow are from there, Ann was visiting there when I met her), it was a good mix of synthetic thinking about emergency and humanitarianism (Calhoun), genocide and institutional processes (Hironaka), market crisis (me), social movements and environmental justice responses (Pellow), and a kicker about how some solutions become viable while others fall off the table (Swidler).

The department itself, and its environs, I would highly recommend. The department hits kind of the sweet spot of being central/high-productivity enough that people are within the main circles of sociology without being too caught up in the ‘never-ending quest for becoming elite’ as to sacrifice comity for status. Being dependent on the state of California kind of stinks, per budgets and other craziness; but I think people underestimate how frickin’ wonderful that SD weather is.

I plan to post some thoughts on my own presentation, with maybe some slides, soon. In the meantime, Ann Swidler and her colleagues make a lot of sense.

May 7, 2008

Dits and Dashes

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 7:31 am

Reading Maureen Dowd’s column today, which I do sometimes but not terribly frequently nowadays (NYT opinion page = yawn), I don’t even get it. There are so many mixed metaphors - Blanche DuBois, Tara, hippies, matter/anti-matter, butterflies, scorpions, prom queen. It’s like she’s somehow channeling the aliens from Mars Attacks!: ack! ack ack! ack! Nonsensical rambling, I would be embarrassed if I wrote that way - leaving aside the point of the column even.

Wow.

April 22, 2008

New template

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 8:03 pm

there’s going to be some ugliness as I work out the kinks in this new template of mine, but it’s pretty much designed as a combination of existing pastiche and original sentiment, so be nice.

Priorities

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 8:15 am

April 16, 2008

Feeling mediocre

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 11:24 am

Workin on some sociological goodness and a site redesign. In the meantime, I give you the always wonderful xkcd:

April 2, 2008

Failure of Journalism

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 11:37 am

Lisa DePaulo, writing in the GQ blog (ht political wire) demonstrates how to do bad work. I realize this is not the NYT, but I don’t care. You interview politicians, you are doing politics. From an interview with Karl Rove:

I get the sense you respect Hillary more than you respect Obama.
Off the record?

Please don’t go off the record.
Off the record… [Yeah, it's good. Sorry.]

Damn! Now say that on the record.
No. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Let’s try again, then: on the record. I get the sense you respect her more than him.
Uh, I know her better than I know him. And I just, uh—she has been around public life a lot longer and has demonstrated, you know, more involvement than he has.

This is different from confidentiality in social sciences, which affords us no protections under the law and is not, you know, an important institution of a free society. What a good, non-hack journalist would say is, if you can’t tell me on the record, don’t tell me. Otherwise, stick it back in your pocket. Again, I don’t care if it’s a style magazine, in some ways it is even worse since it has the style of journalism without any of the standards.

More generally, and this is not limited to DePaula, is the insider nature of the press compared with the outsiders they consider their readers - i.e., us. What makes these kinds of things so galling is that people in the press either fail to see how they are being used (which makes them idiots), or else know they are being used and use that to advance their careers without actually doing their jobs (which makes them craven - lacking even the rudiments of courage).

April 1, 2008

Don’t know what to make of it, so not makin’ anything

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 5:26 pm

I’ve kind of been in a funk about posting, though the shennanegins of investment banks are interesting. But the massive multi-billion dollar write-downs is depressing me, and I just don’t know what to say about them. Plus, I’ve been and will be out of town for weddings and other family stuff. Will return with verve soon.

March 18, 2008

Not about markets - photos!

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 4:19 pm

In Central Park, not far from where I live, I shot this photo - if it looks familiar, it’s because it’s been shot about a gazillion times by people looking over the West Side from the West 70s:

I ran across a lovely tutorial, which allowed me to transform that photo into this:

I’m proud of it, it’s possibly the coolest photo I’ve taken myself. That’s right - sociological, socially awkward, and on the rarest of occasions, artistic (but no whimpster, thank you very much).

Photo credits? Me. Me. Me.

March 11, 2008

It doesn’t have to be a motto

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 7:53 am

From Making Light:

Act now! Act without thinking! WORK LIKE YOU WERE LIVING IN THE EARLY DAYS OF A BETTER NATION.

This is good advice.

March 7, 2008

Moderation

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 6:40 pm

For me, moderating this blog is not a problem. There’s something like a dozen people who have commented, most of whom I knew or know, not a really wide readership, certainly not a wide commentariat. But at BoingBoing, one of the larger readerships on the net (at least blog-wise), the hijacking of comments by morons, wackos, and trolls eventually resulted in their disappearance.

Enter Teresa Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor and co-curator of the magnificent Making Light. She took on the job of community moderator for boingboing some months ago.

As a result, you get aggressive disemvowelling (pllng th vwls frm nnyng cmmntrs) and, every once in a while, a gorgeous anti- or at least skeptico-authoritarian smackdown. It’s long, about the TSA, and worth seeing how it’s done.

March 6, 2008

Shirttails flapping in the breeze behind them, like unambitious dragons

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 12:52 pm

Now that’s pizza.

February 25, 2008

not market related, but…

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 1:14 pm

Once was my favorite movie of 2007 (perhaps not the best, but my favorite), and if you can’t be happy for Hansard and Irglova for winning best song, I don’t even want to know you.

And on an unrelated shmoopy note, my darlin’ re-arrived from HI yesterday, and for a small window of time I’ll share an appropriately sweet non-Once, hard-to-track-down, India.Arie song (warning, it’s an mp3).

February 15, 2008

I’m torn between…

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 4:17 pm

this: “[Michelle Obama] talks on the campaign trail about high school advisers who tried to dissuade her from applying to Princeton because they thought her scores were not good enough. (She graduated with honors in sociology in 1985.)”

and this: “The man who opened fire on students in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University was described by police on Friday as a 27-year-old former sociology student there who had been highly regarded, but who had begun to act erratic after he stopped taking medication….When Mr. Kazmierczak was a graduate student in sociology at the university, he appeared to be a model student, earning a Dean’s award in 2006.”

The repetition of high school and college shootings over a number of years has failed to make them any less gut-wrenching for me.

February 4, 2008

I have seen the future…

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 7:18 pm

…and it is the blissful taste of the Cara Cara Navel Orange. Also, there is a blog by Steven Jenkins, Fairway’s buyer. For all my complaining, there is quite a bit to say for living in Manhattan.

January 31, 2008

Two dumb articles…

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 2:41 pm

I’m trying to decide which one is dumber, this article by Anne Applebaum on why there are only beautiful women in Russia post-Soviet Union, or this rock-stupid article in the NYT Times about how economists understand repugnance. While we can attribute the dumb in the former to a single person, the valuelessness in the latter comes in multiples - so it may be the author’s synthesis and story line more than those discussed therein.

January 7, 2008

Falsefiability

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 3:50 pm

This is a bit far afield of my own expertise, but I’m curious: if I predict that an event in the future is a causal outcome, but it was an event that has already occurred that was causal, how can I be proven correct or wrong? I’m thinking about Obama and the Democratic primary, Iowa/NH, and the Feb. 5 2008 primary. Fabio has made the case that Super Tuesday is the crux of the primary, though he’s certainly not alone. And the specific question is more interesting as a broader question of history, evidence, and causation.

Now, if someone else (Clinton or Edwards) wins on Feb. 5 and goes on to win the primary, it seems pretty clear that Feb. 5 would be at least more decisive than Iowa/NH if not completely decisive. But if Obama wins on Feb. 5 and goes on to win the nomination, does that mean that he won because of Feb. 5? Or because of his wins in Iowa/NH?

In other words, if I bet that Obama wins not because of Feb 5. but because of Iowa, and Bowers/Rojas bet that Obama wins because of Feb. 5, what would it take to win or lose my money? Obviously Iowa affects Feb. 5, so they are conjunctive determinants, but is there an actual methodological answer to this question? How do we know decisive, causal, historical events?

January 5, 2008

Could everyone stop using Google Analytics, please!

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 3:36 pm

I’ve noticed that whenever a site fails to load, it’s almost invariably because it’s hung trying to connect to Google analytics. I know there’s blog visitor-porn, but it is seriously obnoxious. Does it really matter how many people are visiting your site? Really? Really really?

December 31, 2007

Resolved

Filed under: Ramble — Peter @ 2:23 pm

For what it’s worth, one of my resolutions for 2008 is to be a nicer person. To those who I was a total jerk to over this past year, I guess I still own that. But I’m going to try to be more gracious in the coming year.