Dos Passos

Coventry, in the 1970s, was not a great place to live if you liked books. In the city centre there were three bookshops - 2 branches of a long defunct chain called, I believe, Hudsons and a tiny, but hip, cafe cum bookshop called The Wedge. The latter was great if you wanted to buy a volume of the collected works of Lenin or the latest issue of Socialist Worker but space restrictions put severe limits on the stock they carried as well as on room in which to stand and browse. Hudson's in Hertford Street was little more than a glorified W. H. Smith, all right if you wanted a bestseller, cookbook or kid's Christmas annual but unlikely to alert you to the glories of world literature. The other branch was next to the Lanchester Poly and specialised in course textbooks. And that, until I left home, was the sum total of my experience of what bookshops looked like.

Then I went to London. It's difficult after all these years to remember exactly what my feelings were when I walked into Dillon's University Bookshop in Gower Street for the first time, but it must have seemed like an Aladdin's cave. My favourite part was the mezzanine balcony directly in front of the main entrance for - circa 1979 -  this was where they kept the Penguin Modern Classics, shelves and shelves of them. Here were authors I had never heard of, calling out to me, taunting me about how little I had read and inviting me to pick up the lovely green paperbacks each with a colourful piece of artwork on the cover.

Of course, my means being limited, most of my visits were strictly browsing only: but certain books beckoned insistently. One of these was John Dos Passos' USA trilogy. What stood out was the size of the volume, almost 1200 pages in the Modern Classics edition, but I also had a sense that this was an important book. Where or how I formed that impression I can't really say, perhaps I got it from my student drinking buddies as we worked our way from the LSE's Three Tuns bar through various pubs in Camden Town. Anyway I knew that Dos Passos was some kind of American socialist and at the time that seemed like a good enough recommendation. The only problem was finding the time to read such a monster. Twelve hundred pages always seemed like a Herculean labour even if the cause was good.

A few years ago I finally got round to buying a cheap second-hand copy and that seemed like a good first step and there it has sat, accusingly. But not any more. Recently I made a few long train journeys and, being on sabbatical, had no pressing deadlines. Finally I would start the Marathon and now I've reached the finishing line, on the whole I'm glad I did it.
The blurb on the back of my copy says something to the effect that Dos Passos was once spoken of in the same breath as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, but that his reputation has since faded. I can see why. I enjoyed the first book, found the second so-so and began to flag a bit towards the end of the third. Essentially you are told part of the story of a bunch of characters who from time to time, occasionally rather improbably, cross each other's paths. They have dreams and ambitions and stuff happens to them - basically 30 years of American history from around 1895 to 1925. Interspersed at regular intervals are sections of snippets from newspapers and popular songs and a kind of authorial stream of consciousness commentary. I rather liked those bits. I also liked the pen-portraits of various historical characters and events - Henry Ford, Teddy Roosevelt, Joe Hill, Eugene Debs and - of interest to a sociologist - Thorsten Veblen. The narrating of the lives  of the socialist activist characters is done rather well, but I lost interest in the lives of some of the aspiring middle-class females.  It just seemed like one damn thing after another for all of them. Another lover spurned another abortion, more drink another party, an improbable death in an air accident telegraphed from 10 pages before. In the end I couldn't tell one from the other and gave up caring - not a good sign in a novel where the sense of forward momentum is meant to be produced by the intersecting life-courses of the characters. Maybe it hit the buttons of contemporaries in a way that it is difficult for us now to recapture. Maybe you had to be there. What will readers of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities make of his characters in 2060?

More on statistical significance

Back in 2008 I posted something on statistical significance. In his blog Andrew Gelman draws attention to a sloppy piece of writing on the subject which appears to have the imprimatur of the British Psychological Society. As we all know the proper interpretation of a significance test is conditional on what is assumed ie most often p. is the probability that  (T is at least as large as the observed value|H0=True): where T is some function of the observed data ie a "test statistic" and crucially, for the condition in which we assume that the null hypothesis is true. 

This is basically what  I had drummed into me in Stats for Social Science 101. Like riding a bicycle, once you get it you don't forget it. However, we shouldn't pretend that it is a "natural" way to think about inference and so it's not surprising to see all sorts of odd (and wrong) interpretations of p. values are purveyed by those who should know better. A lot of the time it's probably just a matter of not writing very clearly, but if you appoint yourself an authority figure on something then you do have a responsibility to write precisely and get the content right. It is  more than a little tedious to hear a student complain when I correct them: "...but that is what it says in the book."

Funnily enough a few years ago I read a short article in a British sociology journal in which a self appointed guru waxed lyrical about the wonders of statistical significance tests. Only in the land of statistical ignorance (ie British sociology) would this pass muster as a serious contribution to sociological knowledge, but to make matters worse our "expert" managed to make exactly the same mistake that Gelman draws attention to. I wrote a short note pointing out the error and suggested that perhaps prophets should get the message straight before they start to preach. 

The reaction from the journal was interesting. First  my note was rejected without being sent to referees. I insisted that it should be sent to referees. With a certain amount of bad grace it was. It was then rejected again on the grounds that, though I might possibly be technically correct, it was jolly bad form to point out the errors in the original piece and I was obviously motivated by  personal malice towards the author. One referee even accused me of gross professional misconduct, presumably for airing the dirty linen. Actually I didn't know the author from Adam and was only motivated to prevent a silly error receiving reinforcement from publication in a professional journal. Trivial as it was I found the whole episode  revealed at lot both about intellectual standards and about the attitudes of the scientific gatekeepers in British sociology.

On the subject of scientific communication Ben Goldacre links to this hilarious YouTube post. Enjoy!

The BJS and Public Domain Data

It is desirable that data used to generate evidence in scholarly publications should be available for scrutiny by other interested scientists. We can all agree about the principle. How this can best be achieved is less clear, especially once one starts to consider other desiderata - such as safeguarding the right to privacy of subjects who in some cases may never have given explicit consent for their personal data to be used for the purposes of social research. 

Consider the situation in the UK for somebody publishing an empirical article in an academic journal. Anyone  acquiring data from the the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex, for instance, is required to sign an End User Licence which prohibits the distribution of Archive data to a third party that has not him/herself entered into an End User agreement with the Archive. In practice this is not very restrictive as any member of a UK higher education institution can register as an End User and, without paying a fee, acquire the original data. Once you think about it this minimal level of restriction is sensible. Data in free circulation has a tendency to 'mutate' and it is sensible from the point of view of scientific integrity to encourage users to go back to the original source.

Access to some data is much more restricted. Take for instance the ONS Longitudinal Study (LS). This has been created from linked census records, birth and death registrations and cancer records. Use of it is free to UK academics but there is an involved and rigorous process of project approval and the data can only be accessed from secure servers. User are prohibited from distributing LS data to third parties. The LS is a very important source of information about social demographic and epidemiological topics. However, the "subjects" have not given explicit permission for their personal information to be used for the purposes of  research. They have given information about themselves to the state either because they by law have to or because such information is collected as part of the state's routine administrative processes. In the circumstances it doesn't seem unreasonable to be careful about how and for what purposes these data are used.

Now consider another important source of social scientific data in the UK - the  National Study of Health and Development (NSHD) popularly known as the 1946 Birth Cohort Study. Though paid for out of the public purse, latterly by the Medical Research Council, this study is not yet fully in the public domain. There are a large number, myself included, who think that it should be. But there are legitimate concerns that  completely unrestricted access to data of this sort - containing for instance very detailed medical information - compromises the guarantee of  anonymity given to subjects and jeopardises their continued participation in the study. Clearly a case can be made, based on  scientific interest and the ethical treatment of subjects, for having some controls on access to the raw data and for prohibiting unauthorized data dissemination.

So, what seems like a good idea, free and unrestricted access to data, is not as straightforward or desirable as you might think once you start to  take seriously the rights of data providers and the unintended consequences of data mutation.

So why am I preaching this sermon? Because it has been drawn to my attention that one of the major British sociology journals - the British Journal of Sociology - appears to have refused to publish an article because the data used in it are not freely available to all researchers. 

The data in question are derived from the population registers that are maintained, for instance, in all of the Nordic countries. These typically allow linkage- through a unique person number -  of a vast amount of information about citizens. As a social scientific and epidemiological resource these data are of enormous importance and results from them  are routinely published in leading  disciplinary journals throughout the world. These data though are not collected for the purpose of carrying out social or medical research and there are serious concerns about the threats posed by  the linkage of administrative records to the ordinary citizen's right to privacy. For these reasons it is normally prohibited to export  register data beyond the territorial boundaries of the state and access is granted only after a specific project proposal has been vetted. Data users are normally not permitted to make or keep copies of the data and are, of course, forbidden to disseminate it to third parties. With differences of detail the constraints that researchers work under are similar to those imposed on UK users of the LS.

Three things concern me. Firstly, if consistently applied, the BJS policy will exclude leading researchers and cutting edge work from its pages. To me this seems perverse and very bad for British sociology. Secondly, the BJS's data dissemination policy is not itself in the public domain. You can find the current guidance for authors here. As of 03/08/2010 there is no mention of a data availability policy or of any specific requirement to deposit or disseminate data. In the case I have been told about the issue of data availability was only raised with the author, by an editor, after the refereeing process was completed. If I were the author  I think I would feel that I had had my time wasted and that I were being treated less than fairly. Thirdly, the issues at stake were raised with the editorial team by a member of the Editorial Board more than six weeks ago together with a request that a clear statement of the BJS's data dissemination requirements  be added to the notes of guidance for authors. I can't understand why this, as yet, hasn't been done. Those who provide the BJS's copy (for free) and, incidentally,  generate enormous profits for the London School of Economics, deserve better treatment.

My Cultural Capital I

Referring to the first half of the Nineteenth Century, David Vincent  in his Literacy and Popular Culture makes the observation that though book ownership amongst ordinary people was: "...surprisingly widespread, literature was more often inherited than bought, and more often neglected than read." More than 100 years after the period he was writing about, the same thought rather nicely characterizes my own childhood relationship with the the physical artifacts of the word. The few grown-up books that found a  resting place in our house were not things that you put on bookshelves, which is just as well, because we didn't have any bookshelves. My mother's opinion was that books were a species of clutter, sure to "collect dust" and therefore had to be consigned to a drawer or, even better, to the cupboard my father had built into one of  the bedroom chimney breasts. There they were rendered almost inaccessible by the  large ottoman containing spare bed linen that was positioned in front of it.

If one succeeded in moving the obstruction one was confronted with a patrimoine without much discernible survival logic other than natural selection. Of course the origin of much of the stuff was quite clear - improving books awarded as Sunday school prizes being the largest category. Thus in addition to the several small black Bibles one could find: Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) - the uncut pages of which confirmed Orwell's observation that "...it is unusual to meet anyone who has voluntarily read him" and Charles Kingsley's The Heroes  (1856) - a children's version of the more popular Greek myths which the 11 year old CM rather enjoyed. The sole concession to the literature of the modern period was Wells' The First Men in the Moon (1901) - awarded as a Boy's Brigade attendance prize to my father in the 1940s. It showed no signs of  ever having been read. 

Moving onto the non-fiction list there was: Alfred E. Lomax's Sir Samuel Baker: Hunter, Explorer, Administrator (1894); John Hunt's The Ascent of Everest (1953); A. Walker's The Big Walk (1961); Sir Ernest Gower's The Complete Plain Words and J. A. C. Brown's The Social Psychology of Industry. The latter two were probably purchased when my father took a night school class in office administration but judging by the the unmarked pages and unbroken spines - they now sit on a shelf in my own office - they haven't been referred to in the last 50 years. In addition to these there was the odd ready reckoner, a couple of ancient engineering books acquired by my father from the second engineer of one of the ships he sailed on and a small, well thumbed paperback, long lost, on the writing of business letters. Last, but by no means least, was the self-improving The Awful Mathematician's Book, 56 pages of formulae and rules which helped me pass O level mathematics. I certainly wouldn't have passed if I had had to rely solely on what was laughingly called mathematics teaching at my school.
In a separate category I should list two books that had been lent to my parents by friends or acquaintances. For reasons that remain obscure to me these were kept in a small cupboard that was built into the combined telephone table/stool that sat by the front door. Perhaps the idea was that it would be handy to have them there for  when their respective owners returned to collect. One of the  temporary accretions to our cultural capital was Amos Oz's Catch the Water Catch the Wind, the other a paperback called, if I remember correctly, The Cross and the Switchblade. Of course neither was read by my parents and the former was in fact never returned to its rightful owner and I have  become its custodian.
The only book I have any positive memory of my father reading was Mario Puzo's The Godfather. Parts of it had been serialized in the newspaper and he probably wanted to know how it ended. Whether he ever finished it I don't recall. Until I was in my late 20s I don't think my mother read anything apart from newspapers - The Daily Mail, Coventry Evening Telegraph, The Sunday Post - and the DC Thompson staple The People's Friend. Later in life she acquired a taste for Jacquie Collins and Catherine Cookson and, mellowing with age, took to displaying a row of paperbacks on her living room dresser. Once she surprised me by reading and enjoying  Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains  which I had absently mindedly left behind after a visit. Here, at least,  she was  at one with advanced opinion: though, alas, an opinion I didn't share.

The London Nobody Knows 2

A follow up to my earlier piece on The London Nobody Knows. Dan Cruickshank is doing a two part Radio 4 programme searching for some of the sights in  Fletcher's book fifty years on. The first part airs tomorrow, details here.

A lunch time conversation with a colleague confirmed my hunch about the street performer I mentioned in my first post. He  added the intriguing detail that he frequently travelled on the same commuter train between London and Oxford as  the gentleman in question.

Field of Dreams

One of my father's great talents was his ability to rub along with all sorts of people. I'm sure part of it was his accent -  West of Scotland - which in England, in a Farfraesque sort of way,  made him difficult to place socially. Not that he was a pushover. Shortly after arriving in Coventry with his heavily pregnant wife he was insulted on a bus by a boor moaning about Jocks coming down South and taking the locals' jobs. Like his son never one to suffer fools gladly, he told the idiot  that he'd have had no need to be in England if the English were up to the mark themselves and menacingly invited him to reconsider his opinions!

Part of his job involved managing the city's retail market. It brought him into contact with all sorts of interesting people and he numbered amongst his work pals a Jewish market trader who had been in military intelligence during the war and a East African Sikh who arrived in the UK with just the shirt on his back after losing everything in the Ugandan expulsions. For Coventry this was pretty cosmopolitan!

Perhaps the most interesting of his acquaintances though were the travelling showmen who came to the Whitsun and Summer Fairs on Coventry's Hearsall Common. These guys led a tough and independent life. Travelling around the country with their families, stalls and attractions,  their livelihoods entirely dependent on the vagaries of the weather. I remember one of them, a young and rather charming man called James Mellors coming over to our house when I was  about 8 or 9. What impressed me the most was that he had a sports car - if I remember correctly a maroon Triumph Spitfire. What's more he took me  in it on a trip to buy cigarettes at the local off-licence and even bought me a bottle of pop!

The Mellors family are a Nottingham  fairground dynasty and it was James Mellors that risked his shirt in the 1970s to buy one of the first really big elevating Paratrooper rides. Because my dad ran the Whit fair for the city I always managed to get a ride on one of  his big machines for free! I was just a child and I'd really forgotten about him until the other day I came across this story. James Mellors now heads a substantial entertainments business and has plans to build a 100 meter Robin Hood statue with viewing platform and restaurant somewhere on the outskirts of  Nottingham. I imagine the recession, not to mention the planning authorities,  will have put a brake on the scheme but, still, it is a kind of  crazy magnificent dream. I hope he eventually manages to build it.

Provocation

I gather my old LSE colleague Catherine Hakim is raising a few hackles with her latest European Sociological Review article  'Erotic Capital'. There is a nice Times interview here with Kate Spicer. My take is that she has written a brilliant example of what the French would call a provocation. In plain English she is yanking the chains of the gullible, cocking a snook at a part of the British sociological establishment and reaping a windfall of publicity. If I'm right, then good luck to her. 

Consider the evidence. The main claim of her article is that sexual attractiveness is a resource that women (and men) can and do use to their advantage. If Ladbrokes were offering odds on that I'd have a flutter. Consider an employer that had to choose between two job applicants who were equivalent on all characteristics that could predict  productivity. Why would they not choose the more attractive? It won't be better for their business but it might make work marginally more pleasant. What better way to make fools of your adversaries than get them all hot and bothered over a statement of the blindingly obvious. Masterly (or mistressly(?)).

Of course in reality it is rare in job hire situations to find that the ceteris paribus clause is satisfied and that, taken with significant heterogeneity in taste, leads me to believe that the premium to eroticism will be relatively small. But of course it is an empirical issue, so get writing those research grant applications. I should think a within subject design might be a good place to start with each subject being their own pre botoxed and boob-jobbed control.

The real clue though that Hakim has her tongue firmly in her cheek is the use of the word "capital". It's a surefire giveaway of her satiric intention. Why else would she use this sociological pseuds corner way of referring to what you and I would simply call a resource that people can use to their advantage? It really hits the spot though  and sucks in the  intellectually insecure Francophone snobs of  the British sociological world. Congratulations Catherine, you've hit the target again!