soclinks: March 2012

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism

http://www.ne.jp/asahi/moriyuki/abukuma/weber/world/sect/sect_frame.html

Sent from my iPad

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Why are kids the gender police?

Orenstein recounts a story about a kid, Jeremy, who wore his favorite barrettes to school and was taunted by another kid who said, “You’re a girl!”
Jeremy denied it, arguing that he had a penis and testicles. The classmate replied, “Everyone has a penis, only girls where barrettes.”

Fathers can be good at mothering, too - Page 2 - Philly.com

The result: The single fathers created tight relationships with their children that more resembled the kind women have with their kids than the kind married fathers have with theirs.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

How Many Households Are Like Yours? - Interactive - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/06/19/nyregion/how-many-households-are-like-yours.html

Sent from my iPad

Friday, March 16, 2012

The "Bullying Trial": The Unsettling Verdicts in the Tyler Clementi Case - Yahoo! News

Political Search Trends: The partisanship behind popular Web queries | The Signal - Yahoo! News

Linguistic researchers have gotten very good at teaching computers to recognize a person's political bent when he or she takes to Twitter to spout off about politics. Thanks to their algorithms, we can measure how positive or negative people are about candidates and topics on the microblogging platform without tasking some poor junior staffer with reading 100,000 tweets and categorizing them as mean or nice.
This method of "sentiment analysis" doesn't work for search engine queries, however, since people don't tend to show their cards when looking for information online—they just type in a few keywords about a subject without much clue as to what their opinion about it may be.

Monday, March 12, 2012

UMass prof. Amy Schalet offers sociological reasoning for sexual culture - The Next Great Generation - Boston.com

To illustrate this incongruity, Schalet described two contrasting scenes. While living in the Netherlands, she had a friend whose family could be deemed conservative -- "her parents were clearly Catholic, they ate dinner [as a family] at the exact same time every night, kept a clean house,” etc., Schalet said -- yet the parents never questioned her friend’s younger sister about having sleepovers with her then-boyfriend. Conversely, when she was living in the U.S., Schalet had a friend who grew up in a more progressive household (the parents were “ex-hippies,” she said) but was unable to engage her parents in conversations about contraception.