Fun Cites

Sometimes it's fun to see where you're research is being cited.  Yes, it shows up in the usual traditional journals of my field.  that's boring.  A quick couple of minutes today found these places where my work was mentioned:

• Journal of Pragmatics (journal)
• New Political Science (journal)
• Information Technology & People (journal)
• New Directions in Media and Politics (book)
• The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior (book)
• Journal of Radio and Audio Media (journal)
• Parliamentary Affairs (journal)

Congress vs Cockroaches

This PPP poll is getting lots of attention online, so it seems only fair I join in. Congress, it don't compare all that well with lots of stuff.  With almost anything, actually.  Even cockroaches.

You can read the results here.  Lemme also just copy the two main graphs:

When asked if they have a higher opinion of either Congress or a series of unpleasant or disliked things, voters said they had a higher opinion of root canals (32 for Congress and 56 for the dental procedure), NFL replacement refs (29-56), head lice (19-67), the rock band Nickelback (32-39), colonoscopies (31-58), Washington DC political pundits (34-37), carnies (31-39), traffic jams (34-56), cockroaches (43-45), Donald Trump (42-44), France (37-46), Genghis Khan (37-41), used-car salesmen (32-57), and Brussels sprouts (23-69) than Congress.

Congress did manage to beat out telemarketers (45-35), John Edwards (45-29), the Kardashians (49-36), lobbyists (48-30), North Korea (61-26), the ebola virus (53-25), Lindsay Lohan (45-41), Fidel Castro (54-32), playground bullies (43-38), meth labs (60-21), communism (57-23), and gonorrhea (53-28).  

In fairness, if you take into account the survey's margin of error (3.4 percent), then Congress actually is in a statistical tie with cockroaches.

I suppose that's something.

Online Comments Matter

I hate anonymous online comments.  As a guy who's used the Net since 1987, anonymity seemed at first a good idea, a way of leveling the playing field.  Over the years, though, as more and more people found their way to the Internet in the mid-1990s, I've changed my mind.

People suck.

Okay, not everyone sucks, but a lot of them suck.  Nutjobs, wingnuts, partisan hacks, they've filled the Net with vitriol, idiotic commentary, and just plain nastiness.

They also apparently affect how we read a news story.

Take, for example, this story about a soon-to-be-published study that finds people "may be influenced as much by the comments at the end of the story as they are by the report itself." 

The study is based on a story about nanotechnology.  People were randomly assigned to either a story with civil comments or one, ahem, without much civility.  In other words, the usual crap you see on most news sites.  The tone of the comments, the authors found, can influence people's attitudes about the science.  And how much subjects knew in advance about science, often considered a mediating factor, did little to offset this unfortunately effect.

Religiosity and Knowledge about Religion

People who are the most religious also are the most knowledgeable about religion.

I know, it's a "duh" statement.  Lemme explain.

There are two sources of data I'm using here.  One is the infamous Pew religious knowledge survey, the other is a recent Gallup poll that asked respondents how important religion is in their daily life and how often they attend services.  Two different surveys, two different methodologies, but still it's fun to compare them.  Each breaks down respondents into their religious affiliation (scroll down a bit to find this).

The winner in both knowledge and religiosity?  Mormons.  They finish a close third on knowledge to atheists (yes, irony alert, and I've written about this before) and Jews.  Mormons easily win the importance/attendance contest.

Some of the categories don't easily compare.  The Pew study, for example, breaks Protestants down into various categories.  Gallup does not.  If we collapse these into simpler categories for an equal comparison, though, you get the following:

Knowledge

1. Jews
2. Mormons
3. Unaffiliated
4. Protestants
5. Catholics

Religiosity (importance)

1. Mormons
2. Protestants
3. Muslims
4. Catholics
5. Jews

You may notice something odd in the lists above -- how Muslims did.  They appear high on religiosity by Gallup but don't appear at all on the knowledge list by Pew.  Why?  The Gallup survey is a rolling sample with a total of 326,271 respondents.  The Pew survey is only 3,214.  That's an impressive number, but still it's hard to generate enough Muslims to be statistically measurable.

Also, some of the differences above are modest.  For example, on knowledge, the difference between Jews and Mormons is not statistically significant, so take the rankings with a grain of salt.

But the results do suggest the obvious -- that for people who see religion as important in their daily lives, they tend to do better on questions about religion.  Yes, a "duh" moment, but it tells us something about the nature of knowledge and how there are pools of people out there who are knowledgeable about the stuff that matters to them rather than what matters to political scientists.

The Power of Math

A column in today's The Wall Street Journal demonstrates the power of math.  Or, to put it bluntly, how to baffle people with mathematical bullshit.

Carl Bialik recounts a study in which people with graduate degrees were randomly assigned to read versions of a scientific abstract in which one version ended with an irrelevant mathematical formula. Read the column.  Very interesting.

As you might expect, folks who got the "mathy abstract" judged it to be of higher quality.

The biggest suckers? Those with degrees in "Other," which included education.  The next biggest suckers were those from the humanities (who probably don't know math) and social scientists (who often think they know math).  The least impressed came out of the math, science, and technology fields.

We've known this for some time, the importance of baffling people with bullshit.  Math, strong visuals, vivid anecdotes, all of these act as heuristics or mental shortcuts to help us make a quick -- though not necessarily accurate -- judgments. Politcians, talking TV heads, salesmen, pretty much everyone knows this.  You'd be hard pressed to find a professional communicator who is not only aware of this shared perceptual bias but who also takes advantage of it.

For myself, from now on I will insert irrelevant mathematical formulas in all my conversations and writings because, dammit, I need all the help I can get.

Oh, by the way:  Tpp = To-fTod2-fTpdf.

Blog Stats for 2012

Normally by now I would have published the blog's stats for the year (number of pageviews, number of countries represented, etc.).  For some reason, Google Analytics has crapped out on me and the usual Google Stats that come with the blog will not break it down by specific dates, such as Jan. 1 to Dec. 31.  In other words, I'm screwed.

But, it was a busy year.  How can I tell?  Because if I look at the blog's stats since it begain in May 2008, the top five posts of all time were in 2012, at least in terms of pageviews.  They were:

1. 8/16 post about The Red & Black protest by student editors, 4,456 pageviews.
2. 8/17 post about The Red & Black, 2,640 pageviews.
3. 8/17 yet another post about, yes, the R&B, with 1,557 pageviews.
4. Getting a trend here?  Next is an 8/18 post about, yes, that topic, with 657 pageviews.
5. And finally, on 8/21, a wrap-up about the R&B with 616 pageviews.

Too bad I don't make money off my blog.  Woulda been a good year.  

Journalism is Not Narcissism

I old school.  To me, journalism is about others, not about yourself.  Plus I'm just not that damn interesting.

So this Gawker piece caught my eye.  The headline?  Journalism is Not Narcissism (in full disclosure, I got there via this blog, also worth a read).

I'm not going to repeat the arguments above.  Read the Gawker piece and some of the comments.  As a journalism professor who faces yet another semester come Monday, I've long seen this desire among students to write about themselves or significant others.  There's nothing wrong with that, and indeed a lot of great long-form narrative writing weaves the self throughout the story in a magical fashion.    New and emerging writers, unfortunately, tend to not have the skills to pull off the "I" story, to make it something other people want to read.

In part, many journalism students seem to fear putting themselves in challenging situations.  Understandable, but journalism is all about putting yourself in challenging situations and coming away with meaningful stories that not only are true, but also ring true to the reader (or viewer).

The personal essay can be damned revealing, and it's a vital part of most magazine writing classes. 

It's also a crutch. 

The challenge with journalism students?  Convincing them that other people are a hell of a lot more interesting than they are, and then getting them out the door to find those people and to tell those stories.

(fyi, I've been sick for a couple of weeks, still sick, so all typos above I blame on some crud that has invaded my system and refuses, despite all antibiotics and pills and potions and home remedies, to go the hell elsewhere)