The Circle of Academic Blog Life

So I'm waiting for a student to show for a meeting and I'm skimming the new issue of the Journal of Media and Religion. There's an article about religious responses to The Big Bang Theory, so I start reading the first graph and this appears in the third sentence:

Based on statistical analysis, Hollander (2013) suggests a more moderate perspective. He indicates that many people with differing perspectives about belief in the Bible still watch the highly popular television show, now in its eight season on the CBS network. He compares perspectives about this show with those who claim religious affinity and those who do not see religion as important. Biblical literalists, in Hollander's study, report that 28% of them watch the show; for those who see religion (and the Bible) as unimportant, the percentage of viewership was 31%. There is a slight difference in this report, but it is not significantly definitive (Hollander, 2013).

"Whoa," I think. "Another Hollander? Because I've never done research specifically about the TV show. Then I check out the references:

Hollander, B. (2013, October). What people know: B ig Bang Theory. Retrieved from http://whatpeopleknow.blogspot.com/2013/10/big-bang-theory.html.

In other words, they cite my blog. This very blog. Cool. And a first. Here's the link to that post and here's a related post even more to point, if you've nothing better to do. What it boils down to is I have tons of data and came across some questions that ask how often respondents watch various television programs. I saw Big Bang and then quickly analyzed it in terms of other questions available in the data. I even mulled over a bigger piece, but got busy elsewhere.

And thus we have the circle of life, the circle of academic/blogging life. I blogged about it, my blog post gets cited, and thus I must blog about the citation.

Oh, an abstract of the Media and Religion article is here, but I can neither point to nor see myself online the full article -- and I'm on the journal's friggin editorial board.

Titular Colonicity Revisited -- Kinda

I've blogged before about titular colonicity, the use of colons in titles of academic work. It's how you know an academic field has "matured," its greater reliance on colons to sound, well, more academic. Apparently people pay attention not only to colons, but also question marks. This study looks at the use of question marks in journal article titles. They found "significant increase" in the use of question marks in studies of physics, life sciences, and medicine.

Okay, so they've looked at colons and question marks. Periods don't make much sense, so that leaves me an intimate study of the semicolon in titles of academic studies.

Hey, you gotta publish, or perish, even if it's dumb publishing.

Odds and Ends

Favorite odds and ends from today's news:

Passalong PR

A NYT story on passalong pr (my term). It goes like this. Coal producers and power companies have a trade group that hires a lobbying firm that hires a different lobbying firm that has a brainiac staffer who sends fake letters to lawmakers pretending that they're from nonprofit groups opposed to climate change laws. The brainiac gets fired, we're told, thus absolving anyone else of responsibility. So you pr guys out there, remember to hire someone to hire someone who then gets some low-level schmuck to fake stuff and then fall on his or her sword. Plausible deniability is a wonderful thing, especially when you make stuff up in order to persuade people.

More PR -- Kinda

PR, or lobbying, or trying to influence opinion, whatever it's called there's also a good story about pharmaceutical company hiring ghostwriters to gin up fake research reviews to say good things about their hormone replacement therapy. This is about as bad as it gets in academe, faking research or at least faking a review of the research. It came out as part of a lawsuit.

Third Person Effect and Driving While Yakking

Summit coming soon on driving while distracted, the new phrase to describe talking or texting on that annoying cell phone while trying not to kill someone while driving.

So how the heck do I work the third-person effect in all this? First, a brief definition: The third-person effect means we think media content doesn't affect us, but it does affect others. In a way this is reported in a story today about the potential of new laws aimed to stopping people from driving while, yup, distracted. Deep in the story, a survey by AAA that found "58 percent of drivers consider other motorists talking on a cellphone to be a very serious threat" and 87 percent think texting is dangerous. But ... and here's the third-person ... 67 percent said they had yakked on a phone while driving, and 21 percent had texted. Sheesh. To summarize, do as I say, not as I do.

A Story NOT from the NYTimes

Okay, the stuff above was drawn from today's NYTimes so I feel obligated to draw something from another source just so I can pretend I'm a balanced, reasoned, Renaissance kind of guy. In this one, it kinda sums up the military's relationship with social networking. This piece here says that while the Marines have banned Twitter and Facebook and other sites for one year, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs will continue to Tweet, thank you very much. Wall Street Journal version here. Below, a video version of the story: