Well, it looks like I have some VIGRE-funded undergraduate research assistants for the semester; specifically, I have takers both for my idea about aggregated network data, and neutral cultural diffusion on assortative networks. The latter, however, leaves me with a puzzle.
The project makes sense (to the extent that it does) against a background assumption that culture is not neutral, but an adaptation to the physical or social environment. This is a pretty pervasive assumption on the part of social scientists, historians, ethnographers, cultural critics, etc., but I'm not sure that my students will have been exposed to this idea as such. So, I need background reading which will rapidly persuade a wholesome, technically-inclined Carnegie Mellon undergrad that a person's beliefs and values ought to be correlated with their status in society. "Rapidly" is important, because there is some technical research to get to, and recapitulating the whole history of the sociology of belief is not an option. Similarly, assigning The German Ideology and/or The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism seems like asking for trouble. (And, with Weber, I'd feel like I'd have to spend a lot of time unteaching the errors.) So, I invoke the collective wisdom of the Web for reading suggestions: please write me at cshalizi [at] cmu [dot] edu [dot] oryx, deleting the name of a genus of antelope.
Posted by crshalizi at September 20, 2006 16:20 | permanent link
Via Language Log, there comes this fun post on the distribution of the number of repetitions of "R" in strings of the form "AR+", as in, "Arrr, mateys!" These findings, like Mark Liberman's on "AW+", are in line with the results of the seminal paper in this area, Dennis Chao and Patrik D'haeseleer's "The Distribution of Variable-length Phatic Interjectives on the World Wide Web" (University of New Mexico Computer Science Department Tech Report TR-CS-2001-23). I eagerly await further results in this exciting pico-field.
Being what I am, however, I can't resist pointing out that looking for a straight line on a log-log plot, and even finding one with high r-squared, is simply not a reliable way of checking whether a distribution is a power-law. Please do not do this. (And yes, I should be finishing that paper on the right approach, rather than blogging.)
Posted by crshalizi at September 20, 2006 13:23 | permanent link