realsociology

Plenty of Fish is one of the world’s most popular dating sites. There’s an interesting thread of videos on youtube consisting of disgruntled guys who have used this site moaning about their lack of responses from girls.

One ex-user of the site (Steve Sanders) even conducted what can be termed a ‘layman’s field experiments’ to establish why he was getting zero response from POF women.

It struck me that this is a great way to introduce some of the limitations of the experimental method in the social sciences (it’s a pretty bad experiment!) Teachers can cut and paste the questions onto a worksheet if they have the time… 

Watch the details of the experiment below – Answers below… (NB – You only need watch up to about 4 minutes in, then you can skip to just before 6 mins to get the conclusions)

Q1 What hypothesis does he start off with?

• ‘Girls will only respond to hot guys’ on plenty of fish

Q2 What does  Steve do in order to test his hypothesis?

• He set up an alternative profile with the same details as his, but with a picture of a hot guy rather than a
• He then emailed 6 women from each account – from his own he sent a ‘well crafted email’ and from the fake ‘hot guy’ account, he sent a basic email saying only ‘hey girl, want to party’

Q3 In what ways did Steve stratify his sample?

• He split them into with and without children and then into three different age groups.
• In fairness to Steve, this is actually a good example of a ‘stratified sampling’ technique that enhances representativeness

Q4 What did all of the women in his sample have in common?

• They all stated in their profiles that they wanted a relationship

Q5 What were the results of Steve’s experiment? 

• The hot guy received 4/6 return emails, and dozens of unsolicited emails
• Steve using his original email received only 1 reply

Q6: What conclusion does Steve draw from the results of his experiment? (about 6 minutes in)

• Plenty of fish girls only look for hot guys

Q7: What further conclusions does he draw?

• Because all of the women in his sample say they are looking for a relationship yet respond to a guy who says he only wants to party he concludes that ‘women are idiots’
• He goes on to say that if you’re a hot guy, you should go on Plenty of Fish because you can get laid every night because ‘women are fucking idiots’, although this is somewhat contradiced by his opening frame (1 second in) which claims that ‘Plenty of Fish Girls are whores’.

Q8: In the light of this experiment are Steve’s conclusions valid?

There are a few limitations of Steve’s field experiment

Oh and one final thing, Steve, I’m sorry to tell you that not all women on POF are ‘fucking idiots’. I met* a fearsomely attractive, intelligent woman through POF just this week in fact, so maybe there are some ‘whores’ on the site, but there’s some precious gems too.

(*Mind you, I am pretty hot, so maybe that’s to be expected!)

My top four video ‘hub sites’ – These sites are what I believe to be the best for finding up-to-date information about contemporary sociological video resources.

1 - Top Documentary Films

An excellent site for documentaries relevant to Sociology as well as just for general interest too. The site features mainly American and British documentaries, but there are also plenty from around the world too, all organised into useful categories such as ‘society’ and ‘economics’, with short summaries and embedded links to the videos if they are available online, which most are, although some have been removed due to copy right reasons, which can be frustrating. There are thousands of documentaries, all of which are hosted on other sites such as YouTube or Google video, but what makes this site so useful is the categorisation system – you can browse very easily by category

2 - The Sociological Cinema – Teaching and Learning Sociology through Video

This site is designed to help sociology instructors incorporate videos into their classes. I t does have a somewhat American focus, but it is still very useable for many topics in Britain, most obviously if you teach global development

Each post consists of a brief summary of the relevant film or documentary and, if available a link to the film or short excerpt. Many of the entries are, in fact, short excerpts, which are fine for teaching many issues.

To give you an example of how up to date and potentially useful the site is – check out their globalisation category: there are about a dozen entries from 2012 alone.

3 - TED Talks

TED stands for Technology, Education and Design, and some of these talks are ‘jaw dropping’ – which is actually one of the categories you can search via. Although the subject material ranges far beyond the scope of Sociology, there is much of Sociological relevance here – to find talks on specific topics use this tag page. They also have playlists – but many of these are just celebrities pointing to their ‘favourite talks’ so these lists probably won’t be that useful to most people.

4. - RSA Videos (Royal Sociological Association Videos)

Videos here are organised into three basic categories – Lectures/ discussions, RSA shorts (although these are a bit thin) and the excellent RSA animate videos which introduce fairly complex topics in 10 minute animations.

I really like the simplicity of the mission of the RSA – Which is to continually reinvent the Enlightenment project for the 21^st century through developing and promoting new ways of thinking about human fulfilment and social progress. OK the site isn’t really for your average A level student, but the RSA is ‘real sociology’ as far as I’m concerned – It cuts across disciplines – looking at politics, society, economics and psychology, and if you ever need an example of a reflexive organisation – look no further than the RSA! Oh, it’s also British, so this biases the RSA up the rankings too. The RSA also has a YouTube channel where you can access the videos

1. Be mindful

2. Be compassionate

3. If you fail at either of these, just try again

(Not necessarily in that order, and with thanks to The Buddha etc.)

It annoyed me that I got to the end of term this year and struggled to think of relevant Sociology films I could show. Hence this end of year list – All packed full of Sociological relevance (well, mostly)…

In no particular order…. (And links to analysis to follow)

1. Fight Club – The most obvious reading is of this as a classic critique of the false consciousness and alienation the working classes suffer under consumer capitalism, but no doubt there are other interpretations out there.  
2. A Bug’s Life –  Useful for illustrating basic Marxist concepts.
3. Black Mirror: The National Anthem – Charlie Brooker’s short film – The Prime Minister has to have sex with a pig live on T.V. to save the life of the nation’s princess whose been kidnapped. This is the best film, hands down, to convey the meaning of ‘hyperreality’.
4. Catfish – About a guy that meets a girl on Facebook, and on taking a trip across the States to meets her realises she’s not as good looking as her photos suggested. Most people who’ve gone on a date can relate to this, just maybe not to this extreme. (P.S. I’m calling it fiction, I simply don’t believe it wasn’t set up, just don’t tell the kids before you show it them.)  
5. Lord of War – A nice introduction to the module on Global Development – Set over a ten year period from the mid ‘80s to the mid ‘90s Nicholas Cage plays an arms dealer who comes into own selling ex-Soviet military hard-ware to African Dictators and rebels. Quite a nice introduction to the history of international conflict post Cold-War
6. Hotel Rwanda – A bit slow, and a not so nice introduction to Global Development – set around the Rwandan Genocide – Especially useful if you are going to teach conflict as an aspect of development given the ongoing concerns in neighbouring DRC in 2012-13
7. The Freedom Writers – Based on a true story a teacher encourages her marginalised, mostly ethnic minority students to get into literature by telling their stories in diaries. It may be based in ‘90’s America, but you find another film that’s about education and research methods and I’ll eat my diary.
8. Visitor Q – O.K. It’s an 18, so I’m not recommending you show this to your teenage students in class – but let’s just say if you thought gay marriage was contentious or divorce-extended families somewhat unusual, by the standards of the family in this little gem, the rest of us are all pretty much singing from the same song sheet.
9. Threads – Really not that much to do with anything I teach, but this is simply the most harrowing movie I’ve ever seen. The fact that it’s set in the in Sheffield in the 1980s is scary enough for starters, and it gets worse as it imagines what a real life nuclear holocaust would actually be like. Unlike most other films there is no happy ending, so if you have a burning hatred for a particular class or have just had a stressful year and want to end the term by putting the students on a downer – this is the video to choose.  
10. Kung fu Panda – Simply the best film ever made period. Richly layered with many levels of meaning, and deeply, deeply moving.  

I don’t celebrate Christmas because I don’t have anyone to celebrate it with. Instead I meditate a lot and do my annual spring clean. If you’re also alone this Christmas, I recommend this as a coping strategy. It’s still pretty bleak, but waking up on 27th having had no Christmas with a clean flat is definitely better than waking up on the 27th with a not-so-clean flat.

This year I’ve decided to really go to town and literally clean EVERYTHING. Although I’m starting to wonder whether moving the fridge and physically washing the walls down with soapy water is maybe a bit excessive. Even though I’ve been in my flat three years, the walls behind the fridge don’t look dirty to me, so my present dilemma this Christmas Eve is should I wash them or not?

I think I will, because I have committed to washing everything, but I got to wondering, is this excessive, how often do people wash the walls behind their fridges?

Anyway, I created this survey to find out, so please if you’ve found this site, humor me and complete it, thanks and for what it’s worth, Merry Christmas.

 
NB: The survey refers to whether you wash the walls behind your fridges at any time of year, not just at Christmas time. 

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This is also my first embedded survey, something of a practice run… So apologies if you can’t see the results, I will update later as I’m sure they’ll be a lot of interest in this….

Also if the survey just doesn’t work for some reason, do let me know, as I say, this is a trial.

Actually just in case the embed doesn’t work – here – Click here to take survey

The Young Apprentice is one of the very few programmes I make a point of watching. What’s odd is that I enjoy it even though it spreads three messages that I have a real problem with -

• Firslty, it gives the impression that there is opportunity out there if ‘you only work hard enough’, when in reality the current crisis means it’s actually very tough to start up a small business or find employment, especially for young people.
• Secondly, the show spreads the myth of meritocracy – We are typically presented with a range of candidates from all manner of social classes, gender and ethnic backgrounds suggesting equal opps, but in real life class privilege etc. still conspire to subvert genuine talent’s rise to the top.
• Thirdly the show suggests that making a profit is more important than doing something socially useful, an idea I find odious,

To explore these message one  at a time…

Problematic Message One – Even though we’re in ‘tough economic times’ there’s still opportunity if you work hard enough.

OK Maybe this will come across as a little sad that I’ve done this, but if you calculate the profit per head per task and then divide by 2, you get the ‘day rate’ per candidate. The figures look something like this…

Approximate earnings per day for five tasks in the young apprentice

*This of course assumes that all books are sold and that candidates receive £1 per book, which I think is a realistic estimate as to royalties on the type of books they produced.

* and ** These two ‘big profit tasks’ of course don’t actually take into account the costs of hiring the following

• Half a day with the chefs to make the recipes/ half a day with the publishers
• Half a day with the experts to help with the ideas generation of the kids club, or the costs of the materials for the demonstrations

Also neither of these projects are actually realistic in terms of your average teenager being able to start up such business because of the quality of the ‘laid on contacts’ with industry insiders, and the social desirability of purchasing a young apprentice product of course.

Given the above it might actually make more sense to look at the three ‘realistic’ business a teenager might set up – and for these the results are much worse.

If this is what the eleven brightest young people in the country can do (plus one hot-housed posh kid with inflated GCSEs) then Socialism help the rest of them is all I can say

Max – Defo the right candidate to go in week 1

Misleading Message Two - In the world of business it doesn’t matter what your class or ethnic background or your gender identity there’s a level playing field. OK I accept that in the apprentice the working classes seem to come good – In fact if anything Lord Sugar seems to have a deep suspicion of the posh – very probably because he’s ended up working with a lot of talent-less individuals who have risen up the ranks because of contacts rather than well, err talent.

In the real world of business what happens is that you need a leg up to be able to get yourself established – this will either mean money from your parents or an internship – often networked into, and in which you work for nothing for some months or even years. For evidence see below…

• A nice article by Will Hutton on why class still matters
• Research on ‘unfair access to the professions‘
• The Guardian – The Social Class bias in internships

In addition to this if you’re a female looking to break into business, OK things are changing – but check out these stats from a previous blog of mine

All of this doesn’t stop me finding the apprentice hugely entertaining, I just hope a few people read this and think again about some of the potentially misleading messages it puts out….

Problem Message Three – Profit is more important than social utility

The contestants really have been asked to produce crap this year haven’t they?

Basically just crap – The Wetsuit Kimono

In episode 1, the task was to resell old clothes, which otherwise would have probably gone towards making money for  charity but instead ends up with either the BBC or Alan Sugar or the candidates (Actually I’ve no idea where the money ends up TBH!).  You could in fact argue that taking from charity results in negative social utility.

Episode two saw the candidates producing cook books – With one team producing a student cook book and the other a book which, in a total throwback to the 1980s, ended up with the title ‘the professional woman’. Whatever spin you put on a new cook book – the fact that there are are over 60 000 cookery books currently available on Amazon does suggest we don’t really need any more.

Episode three was all about sourcing a list of ten items for the very inclusive (NOT) Royal Opera House – Sugar putting the youth to work for the benefit of elite (kind of like apprenticeships and workfare).

Episode four revolved around the teams putting on a themed afternoon tea experience and sell them at a Stately Home – resulting in a ’1940s’ theme and a ‘Mad Hatter’s’ theme – both of which I think we can agree are frankly pretty naff.

In episode five the candidates were required to develop a new kids club in order to attract investors who would potentially buy licenses. I will at this point concede that this venture does, finally, have some kind of genuine social utility – for parents at least.

The product of the most creative young business minds in the UK

Episode six saw the teams developing a new brand of hair spray and hair gel – Possibly the very epitome of products that lack any genuine social use value

In the penultimate episode candidates disturbed the ‘peace and love’ of the Womad festival to sell a combination of a cardboard box toilet and an umbrella seat on the one hand and onesies and camping washing machines on the other. Actually maybe these are even more useless than the hair products?

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The Young Apprentice – Find out More

The BBC – The Young Apprentice 2012

Digital Spy has quite a nice overview of what’s been going on

Sabotage Times – Is Lord Sugar really looking for a new carer?

Unreality TV – Has several posts on the Young Apprentice

Here is a nice illustration of the resource curse from relatively recent history- taken from the UN

The pink line shows Uganda’s gold production

The blue line shows Uganda’s gold exports

Uganda – A Nation of Alchemists?

Note the way in which gold exports, but not gold production, suddenly increases immediately following the entry of  Ugandan troops into the Congo War in 1994.

Some observers might suggest this offers support for the view that Uganda’s military involvement in that war was merely a cynical attempt to extract a few tonnes of gold – 40 tonnes over the period shown.

Of course it wasn’t only Uganda – Rwanda, Burundi, Namibia, Angola and Zimbabwe were all extracting DRCs resources during this period too!

Find Out More -

The Curse of Gold – The Democratic Republic of Congo

Great new web site – ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene‘ – charting the human impact on the planet.

This post really just pilfers a couple of videos from the site to make it easier for anyone who teaches this kind of thing – The two videos chart the impact of humanity on the planet – starting 200 years ago in Britain with the Industrial Revolution.

Personally I think it’s worth showing the first 2 mins or so of this video (without the narration) first – because it’s so nice, maybe just mentioning what’s above

‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ Earth Animation from Globaïa on Vimeo.

Then showing the narrated version…. which explains things in a bit more depth

Temporarily disabled because it kept starting up automatically – see the web site above

Should be easy enough to fit this in somewhere on a lesson on climate change or population growth.

OK So accuse me of selection bias… but here are 10 indicators of inequality in the UK by gender… Mainly focusing on work, politics and the media 

Looking at ‘positions of privilege’ women account for…

1. 26% of News Journalists (2011) (3% of sports journalists!)
2. 22% of Members of Parliament. Although admittedly numbers have more than doubled in the last 20 years.
3. 23% of judges
4. 16% of members of the cabinet
5. 4.9% of directors of the FTSE 250 companies

Looking at ‘indicators of disadvantage’…

1. 65% of the Tory Cuts to the public sector will be born by women
2. 70% of people on the minimum wage are women
3. 75% part-time workers are women
4. 90% of Single Parents are women
5. On top of all this, women earn only 85% of men (more usually expressed as a  gender pay gap of 14.9%)

Find out More

• The Fawcett Society – Statistics on and Reasons for the Gender Pay Gap
• Huffington post article on gender inequality

Work owes me an hour in lieu (and a tenner for the monthly subscription).

(Update – NB – If you cut and paste this link http://www.mindmeister.com/238612049/modernity-and-postmodernity It’s actually more functional than the embed below)

I’ve just spent an hour (yes on Saturday morning!) playing around with Mindmeister and ended up with this mind map on modernity and Postmodernity -

Create your own mind maps at MindMeister

In case the embed code doesn’t work – here’s a picture

Also here’s a link to the shared version – http://www.mindmeister.com/238612049/modernity-and-postmodernity

Meindmeister’s mainly cloud based, but it integrates with free mind and apps for both the iphone and android. There is also the possibility for multiple users to use it, and they offer ‘deep discounts’ for educational institutions, making it relatively cheap.

This is draft One, really just a test to see if the embed code works and what one can actually do with a cloud based map. The software has the potential to embed links and pictures too.