Berkeley Colloquium Talk on Participatory Governance

Monday 10 February

2-3:30 PM

402 Barrows Hall

Democracy in Motion: Participatory Blueprints and the New Spirit of Governance.

The presentation will discuss one of the chapters of a forthcoming book on the travels of participatory blueprints in our current moment, taking the example of participatory budgeting.   From its inception in Brazil in the late 1980s, Participatory Budgeting has now been instituted in over 1500 cities worldwide. This talk examines what travels under the name of Participatory Budgeting. The principal argument is that for the idea to travel it became detached from the administrative reforms and political project of which it was a part. Originally established by a leftist city government, Participatory Budgeting was part of an ambitious project of reforms of the municipal administration that also included significant transformations in administrative practices and structures. It succeeded, and became emblematic of a kind of successful leftism that was then adapted throughout Brazil and Latin America. In the late 1990s, however, it was adopted in a format that reduced it to procedures divorced from administration and political project. This talk describes the way this was taken up by actors from all ends of the political spectrum in its more reduced form.  

Gianpaolo Baiocchi, associate professor of individualized studies and sociology at NYU, is a sociologist and an ethnographer interested in questions of politics and culture, critical social theory, and cities. He has written about and continues to research instances of actually existing civic life and participatory democracy. While much of his research and writing has been about Brazil, his most recent book, The Civic Imagination  (co-authored with Elizabeth Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Stephanie Savell, and Peter Klein) examines the contours and limits of the democratic conversation in the US today. His most recent research, with Ernesto Ganuza, has been about the global travel and translation of blueprints of urban participation in the current era. An engaged scholar, Gianpaolo was one of the founders of the Participatory Budgeting Project and continues to work with groups improving urban democracy.  At NYU he directs a new initiative, the Urban Democracy Lab.

Counting Words in Social Science: Talk at Stanford

The Data, Society, and Inference Seminar Series

is pleased to announce a talk by:                                                              

  

Matthew Taddy, Associate Professor of Econometrics and Statistics

The University of Chicago, Booth School of Business

Title: Counting Words in Social Science

Abstract: Social scientists are embracing the idea of using `text as data’ as a way to quantify, measure, and discover social concepts.  Professor Taddy will discuss a brief history of how this strategy has worked and evolved, and present the high dimensional multinomial logistic regression models that he uses as a basis for text analysis.  Illustrated with a series of applications — tweets about politicians, reviews on yelp.com, congressional speech — Professor Taddy will give the how and why of this approach.  The “how" touches on distributed computing and regularized estimation techniques.  The “why" considers questions of prediction, treatment effects estimation, and finally inference about the content of text itself.  Despite all being based on the same models, these goals each involve a different set of assumptions and challenges.

Monday, Feb 10, 2014

1:10 – 2:30 pm

Location: 

Stanford University

McClelland Building, Room M104 (map attached)

Graduate School of Business

Click here to coordinate carpooling to and from Stanford

Lunch is provided. Please RSVP to afrooz@stanford.edu by Friday, Feb 7

Summer Archaeology Expeditions

ARCHAEOLOGY IN BELIZE, CENTRAL AMERICA

The Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project announces its archaeological investigations for the summer of 2014!

In 2014 BVAR will continue investigations at the ancient Maya sites of Cahal Pech, Baking Pot and Lower Dover. These sites are among the largest prehistoric Maya sites in the upper Belize River Valley. Despite many years of investigations at Baking Pot, large portions of the monumental site core remain unexcavated and sections of the settlement area remain unexplored.  Lower Dover, in contrast, is a recently discovered site and investigations here are only just beginning. Excavations at Cahal Pech have revealed that this site is the location of some of the earliest Maya settlements in the Maya lowlands. 

During the 2014 season, BVAR will continue its research agenda with excavation in the monumental core of Baking Pot, with the purpose of understanding the nature and complexity of the polity’s decline. Research at Lower Dover will also focus on the monumental architecture in the site core in order to determine the sociopolitical development of this center.  The investigations at Cahal Pech will continue in the site core and periphery in an effort to further elucidate the status and complexity of this center spanning the Preclassic to Terminal Classic periods.   

Students will be involved in all aspects of these archaeological investigations, from the setting of excavation units to the production of site maps. The project also incorporates daily laboratory work where students participate in the processing and documentation of the cultural remains recovered from the site (including ceramic and lithic artifacts and human and animal remains). Weekly lectures will present an overview of Maya civilization and will provide introduction to other specific topics such as ceramic analysis, archaeological survey methods, human osteology, and ancient Maya ritual and ideology.

Dates:

Session I: June 2 to 27, 2014

Session II: July 7 to August 1, 2014

This Field Research opportunity is also available in two-week sessions:

Session I: June 2 to 13, 2014

Session II: July 7 to 18, 2014

Academic credit is available!

Registration fees for the project are $1100 U.S. per two-week session or $2100 for the one-month field school.  Fees include lodging, weekday meals, and transportation to and from the airport.  Academic credit, travel to and from Belize, and incidental expenses are the responsibility of the participant.

For applications and more information all interested parties should respond via e-mail to Myka Schwanke at: BVARarchaeology@gmail.com

Find us on the Web!  WWW.BVAR.ORG

UCB Colloquium, Today 2:00-3:30 PM Barrows 402

The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity, and Redistribution
Based on survey evidence and media coverage dating back to the 1980s, McCall argues in her new book that Americans have long been more critical of economic inequality than is commonly recognized, and that critical views are heightened when inequality is perceived as benefiting the rich at the expense of shared prosperity for most Americans. As a result, concerns about inequality are more likely to be expressed in support of opportunity enhancing policies in education and the labor market rather than in support of traditional redistributive policies. The "opportunity model" advanced in the book incorporates views about inequality as well as views about opportunity and redistribution, and raises questions about the "welfare state model" that nearly all research on American beliefs about inequality assumes. In the talk, McCall will also briefly discuss new collaborative projects that seek to test this model using survey experiments and cross-national, representative surveys. 

Leslie McCall is Professor of Sociology and Political Science, and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University. She studies public opinion about inequality and related economic and policy issues as well as trends in actual earnings and family income inequality. She is the author of The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity, and Redistribution (2013) and Complex Inequality: Gender, Class, and Race in the New Economy (2001). Her research has also been published in a wide range of journals and edited volumes and supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, Demos: A Network of Ideas and Action, and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University.

NEW PhD program in Network Science at Northeastern University

The PhD program in Network Science at Northeastern University is a new interdisciplinary program that provides the tools and concepts for understanding the structure and dynamics of networks across diverse domains, such as human behavior, socio-technical infrastructures, or biological agents. Students have the opportunity to work with some of the most prominent network scientists in the world, and can participate in cutting edge research activities and work with unique large-scale network datasets. Network Science is deeply interdisciplinary, yet shares a common core, and students in this program both develop expertise in these core concepts, and interact and learn from members of the network science community across a wide range of fields, including computer science, information science, complexity, physics, sociology, communication, organizational behavior, political science, and epidemiology.

Northeastern University is a world leader in Network Science, with prominent faculty in the field such as Albert-László Barabási, Alessandro Vespignani, David Lazer, and Alan Mislove; numerous affiliated faculty; and multiple centers and labs with scores of researchers. A key element of the program involves careful mentoring from these faculty and immediate involvement in the cutting edge research taking place at Northeastern. Current formal concentrations of study, in addition to the core material, include the physical sciences, the social sciences, health science, and computer and information sciences.

We offer a generous complete package for the first year that includes a full tuition waiver, full medical coverage and a competitive yearly stipend as long as the student remains in good standing at the end of the academic year.

More information available at:  http://www.northeastern.edu/networkscience/

Resources for Thesis Writers First Edition

First of an occasional series.  This from my wiki pages "Resources for Students."  Here's a list of sources of data for students who might be interested in doing research related to families.

• The Centers for Disease Control have sponsored a data collection effort called National Survey of Family Growth. Info about data access is here. The site also contains useful reports and a bibliography.

• Pew has just released a dataset called Gender and Generations that might be useful to a student interested in family. It's among many datasets they make available.

• The MIT "Reality Commons" project at the human dynamics lab makes some data available. Some of it looks like it might have a family connection.

• The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study is a joint effort by Princeton University’s Center for Research on Child Wellbeing (CRCW) and Center for Health and Wellbeing, the Columbia Population Research Center and The National Center for Children and Families (NCCF) at Columbia University. The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study is following a cohort of nearly 5,000 children born in large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000 (roughly three-quarters of whom were born to unmarried parents).

• The National Center for Children in Poverty published an inventory of datasets in 2009.

• The Kinsey Institute maintains a page on datasets and a list of data archives

How to Read More Faster Better

From Inside Higher Ed

Click image to read more

And two more "tricks of the trade" handouts making similar points.