My new job involves working with numbers. A lot. So, I started reading about using numbers, and I very much enjoyed ‘The Triumph of Numbers’ by I.B. Cohen (2005). This book gives an historical account not only of how numbers were used in different times, but also of ‘how counting shaped modern life’.
The books [...]
Posts Tagged ‘sociology’
The Triumph of Numbers – Cohen (2005)
What I Learned
Last Tuesday, I posted the preface of my Master’s Thesis on my blog. In an earlier draft, I wrote some thoughts about what I learned during my education in Sociology. In the end, I decided to delete that passage, but I saved it for publication on my blog.
So, below some thougths on what I learned [...]
The Sociologists: Field Trip to CERN
After his field trip to CERN, the sociologist envied the psysicists’ method …
Curving Normality Quantitative Social Science Carnival
You’re not a blogger if you don’t participate in Blog Carnival, so it seems. Blog carnival are a great way of finding new blogs, interesting posts, and creative bloggers all within a single topic of interest. The host of the carnival gathers a collection of posts, writes an editorial, and obviously links to the posts.
A vast number of carnivals already exist. Fascinating ones and content are found on The Giant’s Shoulders, on classic science papers, Carnival of the Mathematics (although I understand nearly half of it), Four Stone Hearth, on anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word, Cabinet of Curiosities, and The Skeptics Circle.
A longer list is found on Coturnix’s blog
Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find a blogging carnival on sociology or social sciences in general. Therefor, I now introduce the Curving Normality Blogging Carnival on Quantitative Social Sciences.
Sociology Today: June 10, 2008
The tuesday edition of the NRC-Handelsblad, my favorite newspaper, has a science page. So, it wasn’t difficult at all to find articles relating to the three main questions of sociology. But then again, it hasn’t been that difficult the last few days as well. Any suggestions for a more difficult source of news from one [...]
Sociology Today: June 06 2008
Just started today, I wrote another Sociology Today, trying to catch up on the news. I’m not sure whether or not this is going to be a daily section, but perhaps that would be a nice challenge, forming a nice way of selecting the news that is important to me and to structure it neatly.
Today’s [...]
Sociology Today: June 05, 2008
My recent talk to students gave me a new idea for my website ‘Curving Normality’. During that talk, I used a recent newspaper to show how the three main three questions of sociology are easily found in the news.
I write a lot for this website, often about peer-reviewed research, methodology, and other aspects of [...]
Six Blogs of Separation
As a social scientist I like to dream of my ideal data set. Every scientists does so once in a while, I imagine, for what questions could be answered if unlimited time, funds, and technological capacities were available! Wouldn’t a rocket scientist want to gather some of the soil on every known planet? I think [...]
Guest article on Woopra.com
`Six Blogs of Separation’, my guest article on Woopra.com, was published today. In it, I explore the utility of technological advances 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?
Influence.ME: an R package providing tools for detecting influential data in mixed models.