sociology

THIS WAS CREATED IN DEDICATION TO THE PHOTOGRAPHER VIVIAN MAIER, A STREET PHOTOGRAPHER FROM THE 1950S - 1970S. VIVIAN'S WORK WAS DISCOVERED AT AN AUCTION HERE IN CHICAGO WHERE SHE LIVED FOR 50 YEARS BUT WAS ORIGINALLY A NATIVE TO FRANCE. HER DISCOVERED WORK INCLUDES BETWEEN 30-40,000 MOSTLY MEDIUM FORMAT NEGATIVES. BORN FEBRUARY 1, 1926 AND DECEASED ON TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 2009.

The current financial crisis has brought out a fatal flaw in the foundations of the economic theories that guided economic agents and regulators: the unwarranted claim to precision and robustness. In this article I try to diagnose this flaw and discuss possible remedies. I argue that actual agents are intrinsically less sophisticated than the models assume they are, and that the various proposals to sustain the models by appealing to "as-if rationality" all fail. I next consider behavioral economics as an alternative to the standard models, claiming that while they may allow for successful retrodiction, they do not hold out much promise for prediction. I also discuss the use of statistical models, arguing that they are subject to so many traps and pitfalls that only a handful of elite practitioners can be trusted to use them well. Finally, I offer some speculations to explain the persistence in the economic profession and elsewhere of these useless or harmful models.

Pajek (Slovene word for Spider) is a program, for Windows, for analysis and visualization of large networks. It is freely available, for noncommercial use, at its download page. See also a reference manual for Pajek (in PDF). The development of Pajek is traced in its History.

SocSciBot is a Web site crawler designed for link analysis research. It can be used to conduct link analysis on a single site or collection of sites, or to run a search engine on a collection of sites. It can also be used in teaching, to illustrate how link analysis and search engines work.

LexiURL Searcher is a program to conduct automatic analyses of the impact of collections of documents or web sites, or to create network diagrams of collections of web sites. It has the ability to automatically submit queries to search engines and process the results.

Civil rights history does not divide neatly into pre-1968 light and post-1968 darkness. A response to Richard Kahlenberg.