Lisa recently posted about a woman who was denied health insurance due to having a C-section in the past; the health care plan would cover her only if she agreed to be sterilized. Mackenzie I.-T. sent in this clip from Anderson Cooper 360 about a woman who was dropped by her insurance company after she was raped, due to her doctors putting her on antibiotics […]
The Houston Chronicle recenly reported on the efforts of social scientists to understand whether the death penalty deters potential murderers. According to the article, research on the issue has historically produced mixed results: In 1967, sociologist Thorsten Sellin found no significant impact when he studied murder rates in adjacent states with differing […]
Questions about Meb Keflezighi's 'American' identity after winning the New York City Marathon is the latest example of anti-immigrant and anti-minority backlash among many White Americans.
Questions about Meb Keflezighi's 'American' identity after winning the New York City Marathon is the latest example of anti-immigrant and anti-minority backlash among many White Americans.
Peter Hessler, at the New Yorker, discusses the practice of outsourcing art to China. According to Hessler, Chinese people, mostly from the countryside, are trained to paint copies of photographs or paintings en masse and those paintings are sold to tourists elsewhere in the world. Painters pose in their workspace: Paintings to be sold as souvenirs somewhere […]
Welcome back guest blogger, Adina Nack. Adina is an associate professor of Sociology at California Lutheran University specializing in medical sociology, gender inequality and sexual health. You can visit her online here. We are pleased to feature a post she wrote for us reflecting on recent FDA decisions and a video released by the Oral Cancer Foundation. […]
Notes from North of 49ºN Toronto Mayor David Miller recently unveiled the opening of city datasets on the OpenTO website, ushering in the city’s new era of Gov 2.0. In less than an hour, the above map of the city’s wards was generated from the shapefiles. According to Now Magazine:: “Basically, OpenTO amounts to the city offering [...] […]
Cate M. emailed us about the promo for the movie “The Killer Inside Me,” saying, The level of violence is at NSFW levels and quite possibly one of the most ‘trigger warning’ vids I’ve ever seen used to promote a non-horror film. We get a lot of submissions about sexualized violence toward women, so I thought, “well, ok, we […]
The D.C. Council’s Committee on Health released a report after surveying D.C. high school students about sex education (discovered via Feministing). One of their questions was about the source of sexual health information. The pie chart below shows that students name, in order, their parents or guardians, health workers, teachers, friends, and boyfriends o […]
Kay, a student at a University in Munich, sent along an invitation for a Corps Isaria fraternity, or or “Burschenschafts,” party. The cover for the invitation reads “Isarias Gute Kinderstube” which, she explains, “translates literally to good nursery and means something like being well raised, knowing how to behave.” When […]
Janks Morton shows the power of data both to present a false picture and to correct it.
Here is the News Release when the original report was released; you’ll find the information about black men in prison vs college in the summary.
This short film uses irony* and images from two very different settings to provide a comparative perspective.
*Definition of irony: 2 a: the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaningb: a usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by ironyc: an ironic expression or utterance
On the first day of class, we talked about the difference between individual stories as explanations and large scale patterns. You may be surprised to find that even the name you carry may be part of a bigger pattern. Check out the Name Voyager to look at the popularity of names over time. If you want to look at it some more, click on the link.
Keeping track of all of it can be hard. The following slideshow offers a few techniques for organizing information in your notes. Using these techniques makes it easier to learn and remember the information you read.