Pamela Oliver

@pamelaoliver.bsky.social

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Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of Wisconsin - Madison
I research social movements & protest, especially Black; I do advocacy around criminal legal system. I mostly read & respond to others about random academic or other topics.

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minor annoyance while the world burns: MS Word deciding to randomly capitalize some of the all-lowercase keywords in an imported table

Dealing with a grant budget crisis due to overspending on salaries due to failure to budget for inflation/wage increases. Have to terminate appointments early, including mine. Today's mail from HR: Please see your wage increase letter. Eye roll. The budget doesn't go up when there's a raise.

Today's accomplishment. Worked carefully through the examples in a Stata blog and figured out how to make a nice display of multinomial logit results. Woo-hoo!

Nice touch. I tip somebody off about an empirical pattern nobody else has noticed. They produce a (good) different take on the main factor underlying the same basic empirical pattern and write about it. No thank you or hat tip or citation for the suggestion. That's one way to do it.

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Kick em again

GLAAD is responding to a sensational article about healthcare for transgender people in the New York Times with facts #transgender #trans #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA glaad.org/releases/r...#transgender #trans #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA glaad.org/releases/r...

RESPONSE TO NEW YORK TIMES COVERAGE | GLAADglaad.org GLAAD is responding to a sensational article about healthcare for transgender people in the New York Times today with facts: Fact check: it is critical to look at all sensational headlines and articles with a discerning eye. This article not only relies on a sensational headline, it misses the mark in a number of ways,

Especially for spouses (also others) if you have non-joint bank accounts that should go to someone if you die, list them as a survivor beneficiary on the account and save them a LOT of hassle and delay if you pass unexpectedly. Especially if the survivor has custody of your children.

Trying to get word count for an article down. The references alone are 3100 words! I've seriously reviewed & cited relevant empirical work, especially by scholars of color, not just gratuitous citations to "big names." IMO references should not count for word limits. #Academicsky #Sociology

In my experience, the two cultural groups who always remove shoes are East Asian and US upper Midwest (i.e. snow country). I gather from comments that upper Midwest extends to Canada. (Shoes not removed in my home culture, but I am not a clod and try to behave myself around other cultures.)

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Here's another good reason not to use those stupid MSFT/OpenAI/Meta/Anthropic AI tools: "A ChatGPT-powered search, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a search on Google." www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution.www.washingtonpost.com Some data centers need as much energy as a small city, turning companies that promised a clean energy future into some of the most insatiable guzzlers of power

The reason people try to build some fluff into a grant budget is that when your university changes the pay rate for graduate students, the amount budgeted for their pay does not change. #academicsky

#skyhistorians Sociologist here. In a journal article, we need to cite lots of no-author news articles as sources for quotes in addition to usual academic sources. We are thinking about having a separate list of these. Wondering if historians have standard practices about this. Formats?

#academicsky We need to cite a lot of no-author newspaper articles that are sources for a qualitative content analysis in addition to academic references. Thinking of having a second list for these. Are the standard practices for this? Formats?

@rauchway.bsky.social hoping to be allowed to post to What's History for this question. We need to cite a lot of no-author news articles that are sources for a qualitative content analysis in addition to usual academic sources. Are there practices for having a separate list for this? Formats?

You might think that grants administration is supposed to help you make sure you don't accidentally overspend your budget. #academicsky

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Can we just admire the title (and sentiment) of this new journal article for a minute link.springer.com/article/10.1...

ChatGPT is bullshit - Ethics and Information Technologylink.springer.com Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persist...

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These folks did a great job of breaking, well, *all* the leading LLMs by asking the models an incredibly simple question. These models should not be relied upon to assist anyone with reasoning. Check out the appendix with examples of truly wild confabulations and errors arxiv.org/html/2406.02...

Alice in Wonderland: Simple Tasks Showing Complete Reasoning Breakdown in State-Of-the-Art Large Language Modelsarxiv.org

blug. Obsessing over whether citations are needed for obvious claims like mainstream newspapers cover politics and elections a lot. (I do have a detailed lit review for the more specific research on news coverage of protests.)

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I guess it's good that @sciam.bsky.social Scientific American has its finger on the pulse of discoveries made 30+ years ago in sociology. I'm sure there's a clever joke here about citation paradoxes, but I don't have enough friends to help me develop it. www.scientificamerican.com/article/math...

Math Explains Why Your Friends Are More Popular Than Youwww.scientificamerican.com The inspection paradox makes sense of social networks, long train wait times and why the call center is always busy

grumble. So "rolling submissions" for NSF #sociology does not mean rolling decisions. Earlier submission just means a longer wait for a decision. Oh well.

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Excited to share my new article with @EdwinAmenta & Weijun Yuan in @sociologicalforum on news coverage of social movement organizations (SMOs). It challenges the "protest paradigm" that has dominated research on how activists are portrayed in the media. 🧵 1/6

Worth a read. Good summary of research on how protest works for affecting climate change.

As the long hot summer gets underway (and before the activism starts), it’s a great time to think through the effects of climate activism (and what we still need to know) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How effective are climate protests at swaying policy — and what could make a difference?www.nature.com Why people take to the streets to march against global heating is relatively well documented. But it’s unclear why certain tactics work better than others in reaching the public and policymakers. Why ...

Phooey I forgot to tag this for the right lists. #contentiousky #Sociology #conflictsky research on Black protest events 1990-2010, comparing Black newspapers and mainstream newswires. The sources provide quite different views of what Black collective action is about. Blog overview + link to paper

New working paper compares Black newspapers to mainstream newswires in protest event coverage 1994 - 2010. Link to a blog that has graphs that give an overview of some findings & links to the paper itself. www.ssc.wisc.edu/soc/racepoli...

Black Protests of 1990s and 2000s in Black Newspapers vs Mainstream Newswires – Race, Politics, Justicewww.ssc.wisc.edu

Strange loops. Local measles outbreak. People born before 1957 presumed to have had measles as child. Spouse is sure he never had measles. Ask clinic: thus should he get MMR? Query passed around. Answer: CDC says presume immunity if born before 1957. Sometimes I think people simply cannot read.

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IMHO one of the hardest concepts for people worried about climate change to grasp is that fear-based messages alone are not enough to catalyze change at scale. Fear wakes us up (EPPM, Witte 1992); but if we don't think we can do anything about it (self-efficacy, Bandera 1977), we will do nothing.

This misconception's so widespread that I—a scientist whose research quantifies the severity of climate impacts—am often accused of saying we shouldn't tell people how bad it is 😳 We must! To drive change, however, info on climate risks must be *paired* with actionable and yes, hopeful, responses.

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I made these maps last night, feel like they are always good to share: Who votes for reform DAs, overlaid with shooting data from the Gun Violence Archive (to pick up suburban crime). The story is consistent: reformers win where the violence is. The GOP often says "listen to victims." Well....

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I wrote about whining journalists complaining that students won't talk to them and about the journalists doing it right for Jacobin. jacobin.com/2024/05/stud...

Student Protesters Are Right to Be Wary of Bad-Faith Journalistsjacobin.com The whining of prestige journalists like Peggy Noonan that pro-Palestine student protesters won’t talk to them speaks to both the protesters’ admirable discipline and the mistrust those journalists ha...

A few decades ago for research I sought access to television news transcripts. 3 of 3 local stations first responded by saying "we are not covered by open records laws" (unlike my university which is, as they knew). Mind you, the request was for words that had been broadcast over public airwaves.

"Each room is set up with two comfy queen beds, a writing desk and lounge chair — perfect for a traveling pair." One chair for two people. Perfect, right?