I’m nowhere near finished, but I think it is already looking good. I would love to receive some feedback from regular readers. What do you think: is this going in the right direction, or was the previous layout of Curving Normality better?

The body of literature on this subject is vast and has interesting titles as ‘Culture Wars’, and ‘Before the Shooting Begins’. The Culture Wars hypothesis, proffered by Hunter, basically states that Americans’ attitudes have increasingly been formed by two diverging fundaments. One important aspect of the Culture Wars is the (strong) impact of religious doctrine on many Americans’ life.

To get a good feeling of what is going on in these ‘Culture Wars’, I try to read more than just academic literature. Besides newspapers and, of course, what the U.S. Presidential candidates state about abortion, I recently discovered a blog named ‘Dispatches from the Culture Wars’.

Some interesting posts (or would Ed Brayton (the author) refer to them as ‘dispatches’) are to be found there. For instance, Brayton mentions a school that is . I find it interesting to read what people have to say about that, and this blog quotes quite a few. Also, do read the comments: it’s Culture Wars all over again (especially pay attention to the comment of ‘mroberts’ and the reactions to that).

Other contributions are evenly interesting: Apparently, in America you can get forced to go to rehab that works on religious principles, even when you’re not religious. Texas schools are encouraged to use aunconstitutional religious curriculum, for which some schools already have been sued. On this blog, I found a link to an organisation called Americans for Truth”. And there is much more to be found.

Sure, the author of ‘Dispatcher from the Culture Wars’ has taken his own stand in the debate, and for academic purposes it will not make sense to accept all for truth. But that’s not the point: this blog is a very interesting read if you’re interested in the formation of Americans’ opinions and the impact that religion has on that.

UPDATE:
Just hours after writing this blog, Ed Brayton updated his blog with a short article on Sarah Palin not being able to state Supreme Court rulings on induced abortion, other than Row vs. Wade I’ve added the movie here as well, so please let me know what you think about it.

I’d say: give it a spin and let me know what you think of it!

Today I signed up for Scoutle. Scoutle is a new take at social networking for bloggers. But, the cool aspect of it is that as a blogger I don’t have to do much while still attracting new visitors to my blog. Scoutle presents me with a ‘scout’ who visits other sites for me, and reports back potentially interesting sites. It’s like have my personal web-crawler. Other people’s scouts can meet my scout all over the web and report to their respective owners about my own nice weblog. This ‘meeting and greeting’ does happen without any activity from my side, hopefully attracting new visitors and perhaps even some subscribers. Did I hear anyone say ”rich while sleeping?”

It all works in a very straightforward manner. I signed up, designed my ‘scout’, downloaded a WordPress plugin and after filling in the right code (indicating my scout) to that plugin, I was ready to go. The plugin shows a `stage’ on the right sidebar of this blog (look to your right, it is active right now). These stages are the places were Scouts meet. As you can see on your right, scouts constantly meet each other. Sometimes you’ll see my own scout, most of the times other people’s scouts. But don’t worry, my scout also appears on other people’s blogs.

But it is their scoring mechanism that I found really interesting and will be the foundation of their success. My scouts gain points for every visit my blog registers. Additionally, points can be gained by connecting my scout to other people’s scout. Both bloggers have to agree with the connection, but clearly it is in both their interest, for points are to be gained. However, as is indicated on their site, the algorithm calculating the rating for my scout compare the number of connections I have with other sites with approximately the same number of page-views. If the number of connections falls short to the number of pageviews, my rating will drop significantly.

Why is this interesting to write about on my science-oriented blog? Because it reminds me of the zero-sum games described by famous sociologist and economist Thomas Schelling, in his seminal book ‘Micro-motives and macro-behavior‘. He illustrates his argument with a game of musical chairs: no matter how well each participant plays the game, the aggregate outcome of the game will be identical: only one participant will have the final seat when music stops for the last time. The same goes for a poker-game: no matter how each participant plays the game, the eventual outcome of the game is that one of the players goes home with all of the fiches or money involved.

And so it is for the users of Scoutle. Since the rating is a relative measure, the mean rating per scout will remain the same. It will only decrease or increase when the number of page-views increases, which it will probably do if Scoutle becomes a success. However, the number of connections that will be made will probably be much more important for the distribution of the rating over the scouts, which results in a fascinating paradox: if I have a blog with a low number of visitors and a high number of connections, my rating will be very high. This results in more visitors, thereby decreasing my rating if I don’t get more connections. So, the outcome should be a winning situation for especially Scoutle: most participants will desire a high rating, but since this is relative to the rating of other blogs, every participant will have to actively search for connections. This is of course only beneficial for Scoutle, for it will attract high number of visitors to its own site.

But then again, their success will only attract more visitors to my blogs. So you see, we’re all depending upon each other.

I’ve just started on my sociology today ‘project’ and already I’m running late. At least one week of daily posts should be do-able, wouldn’t you think?

Well, today for the blogs. I often read some blogs on planeetgroenlinks.nl, so today a selection of what I read on June 11.

Today’s Source: Planeet Groenlinks”

Rationalization: How do we educate?

How do we prepare our children for our increasingly complex society? We send them to school. And when society changes, we change our educational system. That this has not always went very well, is widely known and part of public debate in the Netherlands. That the change is often pushed through too fast, is once again illustrated by Gerben Kappert.

Inequality: Double lucky?

Inequality is often thought of as an unequal distribution of opportunities. And, of course, many things can be interpreted from that perspective. But today I read the blog of Han van Schendel: she writes on winning prizes two times in a row (congratulations!!), once for herself, once for her mother. She described how her mother checked whether her price was accessible for people in a wheelchair. It was, so Han could come along.

This made absolutely clear to me, that people with a disadvantage on some account have to be double lucky to arrive at the same level that people all to often arrive at after being lucky just once. In other words, we often need resources to be able to enjoy the opportunities we perceive.

Cohesion: Who helps whom?

Within the groenlinks political party is discussion is going on between people who generally focus on their own individuality, and people who focus on solidarity. Often, these are seen as clear and mutual exclusive opposites of each other. That this is not necessarily so, is made clear by a post written by Simon Otjes. Solidarity can mean to focus on the individuality people are able to express.

`Six Blogs of Separation‘, my guest article on Woopra.com, was published today. In it, I explore the utility of recent technological innovations to answer existing sociological research questions. The internet is still a relatively new medium and with the rise of blogging, it becomes really interesting to investigate the social consequences of this new way of connecting to other people. Will social cleavages diminish, or will existing social cleavages remain in the blogosphere? But, how to accurately combine information on both internet behavior with background- and other characteristics of interest to the social scientist?

Woopra is a cool new web-analytics software package, enabling web-masters to gain enormously detailed information on the visitors of their site. The information is so detailed, I argue, that it can be used in scientific research, especially when combined with data collected on a large number of other websites and blogs. Using the web to survey some of the participants allows for answering very detailed questions in a new and exciting way.

The full article can be found on the Woopra forum. In a while, it will be published on my own site as well, for reference sake.