Leahgates

An invasive fungus has led to one of the greatest documented losses of vertebrate biodiversity, according to a new global analysis.

In the 1970s, frogs in remote regions of Australia and Central America began to suddenly disappear.

Researchers investigated whether climate change, UV radiation, or pollution caused the disappearance, but they didn’t find a clear explanation until a small team in northern Queensland realized the population declines resembled the pattern of an extraordinary disease outbreak.

In 1998, after combining disease outbreak approaches from human medical science with ecology and veterinary medicine, Lee Berger discovered chytridiomycosis, a previously unknown disease parasitic fungi cause that invades the skin of amphibians.

‘Enormous loss’ of diversity

The new study, which appears in Science, shows chytridiomycosis is responsible for the dramatic population declines in 501 species of amphibians, including 90 extinctions—mostly frogs, but also toads and salamanders. In Australia, 40 species have declined and seven have become extinct.

This represents “the greatest recorded loss of biodiversity attributable to a disease,” says lead author Ben Scheele, postdoctoral fellow at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at Australian National University.

“This also places Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (B. dendrobatidis), the fungus that is the most common cause of chytridiomycosis, among the most destructive invasive species we have ever seen,” Scheele says. “In terms of impact, it is comparable to rodents and cats, which threaten 420 and 430 species with extinction, respectively.”

Among the 501 amphibian species which have suffered declines, 90 are confirmed or presumed extinct in the wild and a further 124 have lost more than 90 percent of their population, disappearing from many environments where they were abundant.

“That is an enormous loss of biodiversity, but these are only the species that have been confirmed to be affected—it’s very likely there are others that have suffered loss or become extinct, including species that we never had the opportunity to see,” Scheele says.

Skin invasion

Two parasitic chytrid fungi cause chytridiomycosis, most commonly B. dendrobatidis, with B. salamandrivorans affecting fire salamanders in Europe. B. dendrobatidis is likely native to East Asia, but is now present in more than 60 countries.

When chytridiomycosis shows up in a susceptible amphibian population, its effects are sudden and devastating, says study coauthor Berger, principal research fellow in wildlife health and conservation at the University of Melbourne.

“The fungus invades the skin of adult amphibians, living inside epidermal cells and disrupting skin function,” she says.

“Unlike mammals, amphibians absorb water and electrolytes through their thin, permeable skin, but chytridiomycosis inhibits that process. Frogs lose potassium and sodium until their blood levels are too low and their hearts begin to malfunction. They become lethargic and die.”

Mixed results

Infected frog populations can crash within months of the fungus arriving. Some species may have a genetic resistance to chytrid fungi, but that can present its own problems.

“Frog species that tolerate infection can become ‘reservoirs’ for the fungus, allowing it to persist and spread to new areas,” Berger says.

“For many species, chytridiomycosis is the principal driver of decline, exemplified by rapid mass mortalities in undisturbed environments. In other species, chytridiomycosis acts in concert with habitat loss, altered climatic conditions, and invasive species to exacerbate declines.”

While declines and extinctions of amphibians peaked in the 1980s, chytridiomycosis still threatens new populations and stifles the recovery of those it has affected. Of the 501 species the researchers examined, there are 292 surviving species for which population trends are known; 232 of these have shown no signs of recovery.

Beyond recovery?

There are signs of recovery in 60 of the species Scheele studied, but this generally reflects localized increases in number rather than a return to pre-outbreak abundance, he says.

“We analyzed the data to determine the probability of species returning to previous numbers and found species that experienced more recent or more severe declines, lived at higher elevations, were large or nocturnal. These are less likely to recover.

“Taking those factors into account, we found that if a species had lost more than 90 percent of its previous numbers, the chance of it recovering was less than one in 10.”

To give these frogs, toads, and salamanders the best possible chance of survival and recovery we must limit the further spread of chytridiomycosis and do better to manage other threats, says coauthor Lee Skerratt, associate professor and principal research fellow in wildlife biosecurity at the Melbourne Veterinary School.

“Amphibians are one of the most threatened groups of animals, with 32 percent of all species at risk of extinction,” he says. “Chytridiomycosis is the major threat and many species will disappear unless we develop a targeted sustainable solution. Although other factors could help push them over the edge, chytridiomycosis is the main driver and needs to addressed urgently.”

Unrecognized pathogens

The catastrophic damage chytridiomycosis has done to Earth’s biodiversity illustrates the importance of biosecurity, underpinned by good wildlife health surveillance; outbreak response; and research, he says.

It took more than 15 years for Australia to cobble together enough funds to have Berger, then a PhD student, look at mass amphibian decline and extinction. Skerratt says she made one of Australia’s major discoveries.

“Imagine if we did more than just pass the hat around once a decade. Imagine if Australia had a National Wildlife Health Centre dealing with wildlife disease outbreaks like comparable countries. Maybe we would have saved hundreds of species from decline and extinction,” Skerratt says.

“Unlike other invasive species, diseases of wildlife are insidious and do not tend to garner political attention and support. Hence, there is a dire need for a call to arms and sustained funding to maintain capacity and progress on finding a solution to this biodiversity crisis,” he says.

The unprecedented lethality of a single disease affecting almost an entire vertebrate class highlights the threat from the spread of previously unrecognized pathogens in a globalized world.

“Around 300 million years ago, there was one supercontinent, called Pangaea, and species could move across almost the whole of the world’s landmass without barriers. Global trade has recreated a functional Pangaea for infectious diseases in wildlife, with far reaching impacts on biodiversity, livestock, and human health,” says Skerratt.

“The world urgently needs effective biosecurity and an immediate reduction in wildlife trade to reduce the risk of outbreaks like chytridiomycosis.”

Source: University of Melbourne

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On January 31, The New York Times responded to a letter from Kimberly Probolus, an American Studies PhD candidate, with a commitment to publish gender parity in their letters to the editor (on a weekly basis) in 2019. This policy comes in the wake of many efforts to change the overwhelming overrepresentation of men in the position of “expert” in the media, from the Op-Ed project to womenalsoknowstuff.com (now with a sociology spinoff!) to #citeblackwomen.

The classic sociology article “Doing Gender,” explains that we repeatedly accomplish gender through consistent, patterned interactions. According to the popular press and imagination — such as Rebecca Solnit’s essay, Men Explain Things to Me — one of these patterns includes men stepping into the role of expert. Within the social sciences, there is research on how gender as a performance can explain gender disparities in knowledge-producing spaces.

Women are less likely to volunteer expertise in a variety of spaces, and researchers often explain this finding as a result of self-esteem or confidence. Julia Bear and Benjamin Collier find that, in 2008 for example, only 13% of contributors to Wikipedia were women. Two reasons cited for this gender disparity were a lack of confidence in their expertise and a discomfort with editing (which involves conflict). Likewise, studies of classroom participation have consistently found that men are more likely than women to talk in class — an unsurprising finding considering that classroom participation studies show that students with higher confidence are more likely to participate. Within academia, research shows that men are much more likely to cite themselves as experts within their own work.

This behavior may continue because both men and women are sanctioned for behavior that falls outside of gender performances. In research on salary negotiation, researchers found that women can face a backlash when they ask for raises because self-promotion goes against female gender norms. Men, on the other hand, may be sanctioned for being too self-effacing.

Knowledge exchange on the Internet may make the sanctions for women in expert roles more plentiful. As demonstrated by the experiences of female journalists, video game enthusiasts, and women in general online, being active on the Internet carries intense risk of exposure to trolling, harassment, abuse, and misogyny. The social science research on online misogyny is also recent and plentiful.

Social media can also be a place to amplify the expertise of women or to respond to particularly egregious examples of mansplaining. And institutions like higher education and the media can continue to intervene to disrupt the social expectation that an expert is always a man. Check out the “Overlooked” obituary project for previously underappreciated scientists and thinkers, including the great sociologist Ida B. Wells.

For more on gendered confidence in specific areas, such as STEM, see more research on Gendering Intelligence.

• Julia B. Bear and Benjamin Collier. 2016. “Where Are the Women in Wikipedia? Understanding the Different Psychological Experiences of Men and Women in Wikipedia.” Sex Roles 74(5–6): 254–65.
• Kelly A. Rocca. 2010. “Student Participation in the College Classroom: An Extended Multidisciplinary Literature Review.” Communication Education 59(2): 185–213.
• Molly M. King, Carl T. Bergstrom, Shelley J. Correll, Jennifer Jacquet, and Jevin D. West. 2017. “Men Set Their Own Cites High: Gender and Self-citation across Fields and over Time” Socius 3: 1-22.
• Linda Babcock, Sara Laschever, Michelle Gelfand, and Deborah Small. 2003. “Nice Girls Don’t Ask.” Harvard Business Review October: 2–5.
• Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, Julie E. Phelan, and Laurie A. Rudman. 2010. “When Men Break the Gender Rules: Status Incongruity and Backlash against Modest Men.” Psychology of Men & Masculinity 11(2): 140–51.
• Mairead Eastin Moloney and Tony P. Love. 2018. “Assessing Online Misogyny: Perspectives from Sociology and Feminist Media Studies.” Sociology Compass 12(5).
• Nicola Henry and Anastasia Powell. 2018. “Technology-Facilitated Sexual Violence: A Literature Review of Empirical Research.” Trauma, Violence & Abuse 19(2): 195-208.

Originally Posted at There’s Research On That

Jean Marie Maier is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Minnesota. She completed the Cultural Studies of Sport in Education MA program at the University of California, Berkeley, and looks forward to continuing research on the intersections of education, gender, and sport. Jean Marie has also worked as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Gumi, South Korea and as a research intern at the American Association of University Women. She holds a BA in Political Science from Davidson College.

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The built environment reflects our social world. From urban streets that encourage neighborly relationships, to “hostile design” and policing practices that keep people out of public spaces, the physical structure of a space carries with it a whole set of assumptions about how people should interact in that space.

But social structure isn’t always just imposed on us by architects and city planners. It also invites the opportunity for improvisation and innovation to create new norms. A great example of this is the emergence of “desire paths“—the people-made paths that defy, or improve on, the work of urban design.

Desire paths were the bulk of my commute for years without even realizing it. When you walk a lot, you start to see how much our neighborhoods aren’t built for this most basic kind of travel. It is fun to spot these paths along the way, because they show little pockets of collective action where people have found a better way to get from point A to B. Authors like to highlight how some universities, for example, even wait for desire paths to emerge and then pave them to fit students’ commuting routes.

That said, it is also important to pay attention to the limits that urban design, like all kinds of social structures, continues to impose in our communities. Research shows that walkability may only be weakly related to the social health of a neighborhood, since community cohesion takes more work than just putting people in the same space. Walkable neighborhoods also attract more drivers as people commute in to walk around to shops and restaurants. My alma mater, Michigan State University, paved a ton of desire paths in student neighborhoods across campus. It was great, but if you needed to get to the other side of campus for class in a pinch, there was still the matter of that big stadium complex in the way. Sometimes social improvement still takes a bit more conscious effort.

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Black history in Appalachia is largely hidden. Many people think that slavery was largely absent in central and southern Appalachia due to the poverty of the Scots-Irish who frequently settled in the area, and who were purportedly more “ruggedly independent” and pro-abolitionist in their sentiments. Others argue that the mountainous land was not appropriate for plantations, unlike other parts of the South, and so slavery in the area was improbable.

As historian John Inscoe and sociologist Wilma Dunaway show us, this is not the case. According to Inscoe, slavery existed in “every county in Appalachia in 1860.” Dunaway—who collected data from county tax lists, census manuscripts, records from slaveholders, and slave narratives from the area—estimates that 18% of Appalachian households owned slaves, which compares to approximately 29% of Southern families, in general.

While enslaved people in the Appalachian region were less likely to work on large plantations, their experiences were no less harsh. They often tended small farms and livestock, worked in manufacturing and commerce, served tourists, and labored in mining industries. Slave narratives, legal documents, and other records all show that slaves in Appalachia were treated harshly and punitively, despite claims that slavery was more “genteel” in the area than the deep South.

My own research, which focuses on the life experiences of Leslie [“Les”] Whittington, whose grandfather was enslaved, helps to document the presence of slavery in Appalachia and the consequences that exploitative system had for African Americans in the region. Les’s grandfather, John Myra, was owned by Joseph Stepp, who lived in Western North Carolina. Census records show that Joseph Stepp owned seven slaves in 1850, five women and two men, who together ranged from one to 32 years of age. Ten years later, in 1860, schedules show Stepp owned 21 slaves, making him one of the wealthiest property owners in Buncombe County, the county in which he and John Myra lived.

Joseph Stepp was not unique. According to Dunaway, slave owners in Appalachia “monopolized a much higher proportion of their communities’ land and wealth” compared to those outside the area, driving wealth inequality in the region. Part of the legacy of slavery, these inequities remained in place after the Civil War, reinforced by Jim Crow legislation that subjugated African Americans socially, culturally, and politically. Sociologist Karida Brown explains how Jim Crow Laws led approximately six million African Americans to migrate from the South to the North between 1910 and 1970.

Those who stayed in Appalachia, such as John Myra and his descendants, faced continued restrictions, like living in racially segregated neighborhoods, having limited employment opportunities, and not being able to attend racially integrated schools. Such systematic forms of discrimination explain why racial disparities continue to exist today, even within a region where poverty among whites remains above the national average. To understand these existing inequities, we must document the past accurately.

Jacqueline Clark, PhD is a professor of sociology at Ripon College. Her teaching and research interests include social inequalities, the sociology of health and illness, and the sociology of jobs and work. 

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definitely a good idea

In February of 1926, Carter G. Woodson helped establish “Negro History Week” to educate teachers, students, and community members about the accomplishments and experiences of Blacks in the United States. A native of Virginia, and the son of formerly enslaved parents, Woodson earned a PhD in history from Harvard University, and dedicated much of his life to writing and teaching about information largely omitted from textbooks and other historical accounts. Although Woodson died in 1950, his legacy continues, as “Negro History Week” eventually became “Black History Month” in 1976.

Nearly a century later, Black History is still at risk of erasure, especially in (once) geographically isolated areas, like Appalachia. The standard narrative that Scots-Irish “settled” Appalachia starting in the 18^th century hides the fact that there were often violent interactions between European immigrants and indigenous people in the region. Even in the 1960s when authors like Michael Harrington and Harry Caudill reported on Appalachian mountain folk, the people were depicted as Scots-Irish descendants, known for being poor, lazy, and backward, representations that are reinforced in contemporary accounts of the region, such as J. D. Vance’s wildly popular memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

Accounts like these offer stereotypical understandings of poor Appalachian whites, and at the same time, they ignore the presence and experiences of Blacks in the region. Work by social scientists William Turner and Edward Cabell, as well as “Affrilachia” poet Frank X. Walker, and historian Elizabeth Catte attempts to remedy this problem, but the dominant narrative of the region centers still on poor whites and their lives.

Work I have been doing documenting the life experiences of Leslie [“Les”] Whittington, a native of Western North Carolina and a descendent of a formerly enslaved people, has opened my eyes to a historical narrative I never fully knew. African Americans, for instance, accounted for approximately 10% of the Appalachian region’s population by 1860, and many were enslaved, including Les’ grandfather, John Myra Stepp. Yet, their stories are glaringly missing from the dominant narrative of the region.

So too are the stories of Blacks living in Appalachia today. Even though the number of African American residents has increased in some parts of  Appalachia, while the white population has decreased, little is formally documented about their lives. That absence has led scholar William Turner, to refer to Blacks in Appalachia as a “racial minority within a cultural minority.” Not only does erasing African Americans from the past and present of Appalachia provide an inaccurate view of the region, but it also minimizes the suffering of poor Blacks, who relative to their white counterparts, are and have been the poorest of an impoverished population.

Woodson established “Negro History Week” to document and share the history of Blacks in the United States, recognizing that, “If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.” The history of African Americans in the Appalachian region is largely absent from the area’s official record, and without making it part of the dominant narrative, we risk losing that history.

Jacqueline Clark, PhD is a professor of sociology at Ripon College. Her teaching and research interests include social inequalities, the sociology of health and illness, and the sociology of jobs and work. 

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The overabundance of fast fashion—readily available, inexpensively made clothing—has created an environmental and social justice crisis, the authors of a new paper argue.

“From the growth of water-intensive cotton, to the release of untreated dyes into local water sources, to worker’s low wages and poor working conditions, the environmental and social costs involved in textile manufacturing are widespread,” says coauthor Christine Ekenga, assistant professor at the Brown School at the Washington University in St. Louis.

“This is a massive problem,” Ekenga says. “The disproportionate environmental and social impacts of fast fashion warrant its classification as an issue of global environmental injustice.”

Globally, consumers purchase 80 billion pieces of new clothing each year, which translates to $1.2 trillion annually for the global fashion industry. China and Bangladesh assembles the majority of these products. The United States consumes more clothing and textiles than any other nation in the world.

Approximately 85 percent of the clothing Americans use, nearly 3.8 billion pounds annually, is sent to landfills as solid waste, amounting to nearly 80 pounds per American per year.

In the paper, Ekenga and her coauthors say that negative consequences at each step of the fast-fashion supply chain have created a global environmental justice dilemma.

“While fast fashion offers consumers an opportunity to buy more clothes for less, those who work in or live near textile manufacturing facilities bear a disproportionate burden of environmental health hazards,” the authors write.

“Furthermore, increased consumption patterns have created millions of tons of textile waste in landfills and unregulated settings. This is particularly applicable to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) as much of this waste ends up in second-hand clothing markets. These LMICs often lack the supports and resources necessary to develop and enforce environmental and occupational safeguards to protect human health.”

In the paper, the researchers discuss the environmental and occupational hazards during textile production, particularly for those in LMICs, and the issue of textile waste. They also address a number of potential solutions, including sustainable fibers, corporate sustainability, trade policy, and the role of the consumer.

The paper appears in the journal Environmental Health

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

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There may be variations, based on sex, in the way that both mice and humans remember pain, according to new research.

Scientists increasingly believe that one of the driving forces in chronic pain—the number one health problem in both prevalence and burden—appears to be the memory of earlier pain.

The researchers found that men (and male mice) remembered earlier painful experiences clearly. As a result, they felt stress and were hypersensitive to later pain when they returned to the location where they’d experienced it. Earlier experiences of pain didn’t seem to stress women (and female mice).

The researchers believe that the robust translational nature of the results, from mice to humans, will potentially aid scientists to move forward in their search for future treatments of chronic pain. It was a discovery that came as a total surprise.

“We set out to do an experiment looking at pain hypersensitivity in mice and found these surprising differences in stress levels between male and female mice,” explains senior author Jeffrey Mogil, professor of pain studies at McGill University’s psychology department and the Alan Edwards Centre for Research on Pain.

“So we decided to extend the experiment to humans to see whether the results would be similar. We were blown away when we saw that there seemed to be the same differences between men and women as we had seen in mice.”

“What was even more surprising was that the men reacted more, because it is well known that women are both more sensitive to pain than men, and that they are also generally more stressed out,” says first author Loren Martin, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

The past comes back

In experiments with both humans and mice, researchers took the subjects (41 men and 38 women between the ages of 18-40) to a specific room (or put them in a testing container of a certain shape—in the case of the mice) where they experienced low levels of pain from heat on their hind paw or forearm. Humans rated the level of pain on a 100-point scale and mice “rated” the pain by how quickly they moved away from the heat source.

Immediately following this initial experience of low-level pain, subjects experienced more intense pain designed to act as Pavlovian conditioning stimuli. Researchers asked the human subjects to wear a tightly inflated blood pressure cuff and exercise their arms for 20 minutes. This is excruciating and only seven of the 80 subjects rated it at less than 50 on a 100-point scale. Each mouse received a diluted injection of vinegar designed to cause a stomach ache for about 30 minutes.

In order to look at the role that memory plays in the experience of pain, the following day human subjects returned to either the same or a different room, and researchers put mice in the same or a different testing container. Researchers again applied heat to their arms or hind paws.

When (and only when) they went into the same room as in the previous test, men rated the heat pain higher than they did the day before, and higher than the women did. Similarly, male, but not female mice returning to the same environment exhibited a heightened heat pain response, while mice placed in a new and neutral environment did not.

“We believe that the mice and the men were anticipating the cuff, or the vinegar, and, for the males, the stress of that anticipation caused greater pain sensitivity,” says Mogil. “There was some reason to expect that we would see increased sensitivity to pain on the second day, but there was no reason to expect it would be specific to males. That came as a complete surprise.”

No memory, less pain?

In order to confirm that pain increased due to memories of previous pain, the researchers interfered with memory by injecting the brains of male mice with a drug called ZIP that blocks memory. When the researchers then ran the pain memory experiment, these mice showed no signs of remembered pain.

“This is an important finding because increasing evidence suggests that chronic pain is a problem to the extent that you remember it, and this study is the first time such remembered pain has been shown using a translational—both rodent and human subject—approach,” says Martin.

“If remembered pain is a driving force for chronic pain and we understand how pain is remembered, we may be able help some sufferers by treating the mechanisms behind the memories directly.”

Mogil echoes this optimism, “This research supports the idea that the memory of pain can affect later pain.”

“I think it is appropriate to say that further study of this extremely robust phenomenon might give us insights that may be useful for future treatment of chronic pain, and I don’t often say that! One thing is for sure, after running this study, I’m not very proud of my gender,” he adds.

The Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Pain Society/Pfizer Early Career Investigator Pain Research Grant, the Louise and Alan Edwards Foundation, Brain Canada, and the Canada Research Chairs Program funded the research.

The research appears in Current Biology.

Source: McGill University

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Political sociologists often study how relationships and resources shape democratic institutions. Classic works like C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite and G. William Domhoff’s Who Rules America? focused on the way wealth and status wield influence. More recent studies about think tanks and industry advocacy groups look at the current power of lobbying and thought leadership. When we talk about “big money” in politics, it is useful to understand exactly what that money is doing. 

One of the challenges for studying elite influence in politics, however, is that much of this influence happens behind closed doors or hidden in a complicated bureaucracy of regulation and reporting.

This is why I’m excited about a new project led by MIT Associate Professor In Song Kim called LobbyView. The team at LobbyView has pulled together a database of lobbying reports filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 and made it fully searchable and downloadable. Now, you can enter an organization and see exactly what kinds of policies they work on. The results might surprise you.

For example, here are the results from a quick search for the Family Research Council—a prominent lobbying group representing the religious right. When I talk about conservative Christian advocacy, most people immediately think about pro-life policy and same sex marriage. LobbyView’s text analysis of their reports shows a much wider range of issues in their legislative advocacy.

You can also see where the money is going. Over the full range of reports collected by LobbyView, FRC has spent about 1.6 million dollars. While much of that went to issues coded under family policy, healthcare, and religion (as we would expect), they also advocate on legislation in foreign policy and defense spending.

Try it out for yourself and see what your industry is working for in Washington!

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The rise of online shopping at the holiday season highlights some pretty Grinchy behavior. Local news and home security companies have been trumpeting market research about so-called “porch pirates” swiping deliveries before people can get home from work or school to bring them inside.

Most of the current solutions for package security aren’t that great. If you don’t feel comfortable trusting Amazon or some other company to remotely run your door locks for deliveries (or if you live in an apartment building without a fancy mailroom), getting packages can be a gamble unless you can route them to a secure delivery site. If someone wants to send you a gift with all the warm intentions of a classic Christmas tradition, their surprise could end up costing everyone a lot more time, money, and stress.

That friction between the idea of the gift and the gift itself is a great example of sociological theory at work. Pierre Bourdieu wrote about gift exchanges throughout his work, especially the idea that giving a gift has a “double truth.” People want to show kindness and generosity, expecting nothing in return, but gifts are still exchanged in relationships. That exchange implicitly demands some things: your thanks, your continued commitment to the relationship, and often a different gift at a different time. This seems like a contradiction, but both things can be true because there are different styles of gift-giving tied to time and place. Exchange too quickly and you look like you’re trying to tie up a relationship and move on. Respond too slowly, and it looks like you have forgotten your loved ones.

To betray one’s haste to be free of an obligation one has incurred, and thus to reveal too overtly one’s desire to pay off services rendered or gifts received, so as to be quits, is to denounce the initial gift…It is all a question of style, which means in this case timing and choice of occasion, for the same act-giving, giving in return, offering one’s services, paying a visit, etc. – can have completely different meanings at different times, coming as it may at the right or the wrong moment… (Outline of a Theory of Practice, 1977, Pp. 5-6)

Package pirates put a whole new strain on our relationships at special occasions. Now, if someone mails you a gift, accepting it gracefully might also mean being responsible for its security. What happens if your apartment has said they will not be liable for packages delivered, or your work schedule may not get you home in time to receive them? Do you sound ungrateful if you complain about these things or ask not to receive gifts?

On the other hand, it might also become much more rude to send someone a holiday surprise without a heads up first. It is also important to ask ourselves whether we are putting the idea of sending a gift ahead of the actual experience of our loved ones receiving it.

This time of year, we often say “it’s the thought that counts.” If that’s true, we might have to think carefully about some of the social norms for sending gifts until the shipping industry can catch up.

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When I teach social statistics, I often show students how small changes in measurement or analysis can make a big difference in the way we understand the world. Recently, I have been surprised by some anger and cynicism that comes up when we talk about this. Often at least one student will ask, “does it even matter if you can just rig the results to say whatever you want them to say?”

I can’t blame them. Controversy about manufactured disagreement on climate change, hoax studies, or the rise of fake news and “both side-ism” in our politics can make it seem like everyone is cooking the books to get results that make them happy. The social world is complicated, but it is our job to work through that complexity and map it out clearly, not to throw up our hands and say we can’t do anything about it. It’s like this optical illusion:

The shape isn’t just a circle or a square. We can’t even really say that it is both, because the real shape itself is complicated. But we can describe the way it is built to explain why it looks like a circle and a square from different angles. The same thing can happen when we talk about debates in social science.

A fun example of this popped up recently in the sociology of religion. In 2016, David Voas and Mark Chaves published an article in the American Journal of Sociology about how rates of religious commitment in the United States are slowly declining. In 2017, Landon Schnabel and Sean Bock published an article in Sociological Science responding to this conclusion, arguing that most of the religious decline was among moderate religious respondents—people with very strong religious commitments seemed to be holding steady. Just recently, both teams of authors have published additional comments about this debate (here and here), analyzing the same data from the General Social Survey.

So, who is right?

Unlike some recent headlines about this debate, the answer about religious decline isn’t just “maybe, maybe not.” Just like the circle/square illusion, we can show why these teams get different results with the same data.

When we put the charts together, you can see how Voas and Chaves fit straight and smoothly curved lines to trends across waves in the GSS. This creates the downward-sloping pattern that fits their conclusions about slow religious decline over time. Schnabel and Bock don’t think a single straight line can accurately capture these trends, because the U.S. saw a unique peak in religious commitment that happened during the Regan years and may have receded more quickly. Their smoothing technique (LOESS smoothing) captures this peak and a quick decline afterwards, and doing so flattens out the rest of the trends after that period.

The most important lesson from these charts is that they don’t totally get rid of the ambiguity about religious change. Rather than just ending the debate or rehashing it endlessly, this work helps us see how it might be more helpful to ask different questions about the historical background of the case. I like this example because it shows us how disagreement among experts can be an invitation to dig into the details, rather than a sign we should just agree to disagree. Research methods matter, and sometimes they can help us more clearly explain why we see the world so differently.Evan Stewart is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota. You can follow him on Twitter.

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Recent news on climate change is deeply troubling, and people around the world are mobilizing to call for immediate action. This unique global problem means we all have to get better at understanding global inequality, but the first step to this might just be getting a more accurate view of the globe itself.

I love this classic clip from The West Wing about the problems with the Mercator Projection—the way we typically draw maps of the world.

About a month ago, data scientist Neil Kaye made a popular animation correcting the Mercator Projection to countries’ true sizes. Watch how dramatically the northern hemisphere shrinks, and the points from Cartographers for Social Equality seem even more serious.

Animating the Mercator projection to the true size of each country in relation to all the others.

Focusing on a single country helps to see effect best.#dataviz #maps #GIS #projectionmapping #mapping pic.twitter.com/clpCiluS1z

— Neil Kaye (@neilrkaye) October 12, 2018

One of the most striking parts of this animation for me is that many of the regions that are most vulnerable to extreme early changes don’t shrink much. If it is true that people attribute importance to size, these maps are an important reminder that we may not have the best mental pictures for thinking about both old trends in economic and political inequality and new trends in climate risk.

(View original at https://thesocietypages.org/socimages)