I've created a new key memo in our Obsidian vault. It synthesises many existing notes and describes how our studied data centre site in Germany is related to production networks in Asia-Pacific. In fact, the network view helped me explore and theorize relations.
But it's a real danger that such a view indicates finished research or fixed notions. It's worth reflecting on the performativity of such a tool. Reminds me of Gephi issues. @sociology@sts
Do you manage expected #student work load, care for their #workload, rely on #students to self-manage their #work#load? Or, how do you relate otherwise in your #teaching to the hours students are to engage in studying?
@i_ngli@sociology@sts@anthropology one small thing I began to do about 8 years ago was include an estimate - in brackets - of the time I thought each assignment might take. Students with anxiety esp mentioned how it helped ease worry and their tendency to make projects bigger than was necessary. It was much better, they said, than simply posting a word-count.
A comparison of refugee attitudes 2015 and today, just published in Nature:
Bansak, Hainmueller & Hangartner: Europeans’ support for #refugees of varying background is stable over time
"support for asylum seekers today is, if anything, slightly higher than six years ago at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis"
which is
"a consequence of the socio-demographic composition ... of Ukrainian refugees"
It continues: "The findings strongly contradict the idea that the increase in general support is limited to Ukrainian refugees. Indeed, in most countries there is a statistically significant increase in the percentage of accepted non-Ukrainian asylum seeker profiles in 2022 versus 2016... the increased support for refugees extends to other, non-Ukrainian groups of asylum seekers and that there is no evidence of substitution effects"
And "In stark contrast to the prediction that other refugee groups would face decreased support, we find that the percentage of accepted Muslim profiles has significantly increased in the majority of countries"
I keep trying them bc they really feel like they ought to be useful, but I'm reminded of a lot of graphical HTML tools which end up requiring so many tweaks that it can be easier to hand code.
The only bit that might be missing from this is the issue of private or proprietary info possibly flowing back into the LLMs? That concerns me with the cloud-based ones.
Data leakage/exfiltration is one, then there's the significant environmental footprint, such as through water usage: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271.pdf
LLMs also pose a cyber security risk, since one can "poison" the model during fine-tuning, esp. if you use user input for training: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/the-poisoning-of-chatgpt/ Internet-enabled LLMs have additional vulnerabilities.
"Fieldnotes on FlyingLess Conferencing:" Our reflection on European #STS conferencing via #train is published in the EASST review. This is an intervention to think about less energy-intensive #mobility forms for conferences. #transition#flyingless
#Sociology has a pain "problem." We use concepts like (collective or cultural)#trauma draw allusions to pain, but do not ground them in the fundamental experience of rejection, exclusion, isolation, etc. This paper does this while theorizing SOCIAL trauma. When we understand the science behind social pain, or the neg. affectual response to rejection and exclusion, we can collapse the distinctions btw cultural and collective trauma.
Consequently, we can conceptualize a more generic process by which groups or classes of ppl exp social pain. It can become a part of their collective identity, collective memory even. Most imp, by using neuroscience, we can draw strong claims about the cognitive and behavioral consequences collectivized social trauma produces, as well as the pathological outcomes for mental health
Dear #sociology community: I was foolhardy enough to announce an MA seminar on "Social #transformation" for the summer semester. We start with the idea that every change has to go through a complex society, so there are no automatisms. I'm not without any plan, but I would be interested to know what reading you would recommend - thanks!
Via another channel yesterday came more references from @immersender#organization / #fieldtheory :
SAFs (Fligstein & McAdam); reflexive innovation (Windeler); issue fields (Hoffman).
And as an evergreen: Eisenstadt.
From Hobbes to Bauman, a dive into the liquefied society and the 'interregnum' of anomie. Could a fluid state be a solution? Further insights will follow in another article.
CBI image of the day is of women working on binding wires together, following a schematic on paper pinned to the work surface as part of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) air defense system. The processing power for SAGE was driven by the IBM AN/FSQ-7. #IBM@histodons@sociology@anthroplogy
In keeping with our back-to-school theme this week, here we have an 8th-grade classroom at St. Veronica's school with 40 students seated at tables or desks, each equipped with a Burroughs calculating machine as a math tool, 1955.
My new article Researching Lay Perceptions of Inequality through Images of Society: Compliance, Inversion and Subversion of Power Hierarchies is now out in Sociology https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385231194867
The article explores #inequality and #class through the lens of affective, imaginative, moral, symbolic and sensual dimensions in the example of Russian society.
It develops an arts-based method ‘drawing of society’, applied to a multi-sited ethnography.
@GhileneH@sociology bien curieux aussi oui, je sens bien la phrase mal compris ou détournée encore, ça ne serait pas la première fois de la part de lahire.
Bourdieu était le premier à déplorer de fausses divisions (issues de l'histoire des disciplines) entre disciplines. J'aurai tendance à penser que bourdieu parlait ici d'autres enjeux (la légitimes des sciences sociales).
Je rajoute ici deux extraits qui me semble pertinents des méditations pascaliennes (Bourdieu n'ignorait pas le biologique) et, plus vieux, des héritiers (sur le fait d'expliquer par le social ce qui peut être expliquer par le social, c'est un peu les enjeux de la socio, et les enjeux à l'époque).
Par ailleurs le livre a l'air intéressant si il tient ses promesses.