Proof Reading's For Losers

Before I begin, I have to cite my source for the inspiration (and content) of this post: Kaitie. You're rad, Kaitie (CBIH). For those of you who hear me talk about her but haven't met her, you should; she's the best person you'll ever meet. And I know 'best' is thrown around way too much, but hang out with her for one night and you'll know what I mean. We're celebrating 20 years of friendship September 2007.

So---we were discussing our secret hidden snobbery: we're the grammar/language gestapo. So, because I so thoroughly enjoy compiling lists, here's a brief run-down of some of the most notoriously widespread misuses of the English language, be they in print or vocal form:

1. Seen. As in 'I seen her the other day.' No--you SAW her the other day. If you're saying this, my mental picture of you immediately transforms you into a Dr. Phil reifying Pilsner-drinker who thinks that calling someone from East Asia a 'Paki' is not politically incorrect, or that bragging that you 'Jewed them down' on your latest purchase is as unoffensive as saying 'I got a really good deal.' Philistines.

2. Your. This can only come up in a print format, such as emails or papers; ex: "Your such a nice person." No--YOU'RE such a nice person. This makes me think that you probably just don't pay attention to anything (a very, very dangerous quality on so many levels), and that you're (note the proper use) completely inconsiderate for making me sit through your poorly written emails/papers/etc. This becomes especially true when reading an email in which someone is insulting you, if any of you have ever recieved these (i.e.: your such a bitch for____________). Actually, I kind of like it when I get emails of this nature from people who clearly dislike me, 'cause it reminds me that I probably sensed their lack of awareness in the first place, and subsequently covertly tried to them dislike me so I didn't have to see them anymore.

3. Orientate; ie: 'we're being orientated this weekend;' 'I felt so disorientated.' What's hilarious is that I can't even count how many times I've heard very well educated people say this publically. I don't need to say more--it's obvious, isn't it?

4. To. As in 'this is to much for me to handle.' AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!! This one KILLS me. Besides generating the feelings outlines in number 3 (above), this makes me actually question the public education system, 'cause I can remember spending sooooo much elementary class time discussing this. Thus, it begs the question: who were your teachers?? If, however, they did teach this to you, then I have to again return to my note in number 3 about the complete lack of paying attention.

I Hate Celebrity

While 'studying' for stats (aka: basically looking around online for anything remotely more entertaining--not exactly a difficult task) I found this disturbing bit of information: http://www.brethart.com/aladdin.asp

What the fuck? Why is it that people in the entertainment industry think that it's just a natural or logical move to move from one arena of entertainment to another? While I may not completely understand it, I do recognize that famous people tend to think, "I'm a model, so I should be an actor.....I'm an actor, so I should be a singer.....I'm a singer so I should be a model." But going from being a WRESTLER to a BROADWAY ACTOR???? Again, WTF?? This is a new one for me. Have we not learned anything from disasters such as "Get Rich or Die Tryin", anything Jessica Simpson's acted in, or anything that Lindsay Lohan produces (I'm not really sure about how to categorize her in the first place: terrible musician? terrible actor? terrible drunk? I think I'll just go with terrible). But the thing is, sometimes I wonder if I'm in a minority in thinking that these types of 'cross-over' moves are completely pathetic, 'cause I've heard that tickets to this shit show are actually selling.

Oh, and speaking of celebrities: I want to punch Tom Cruise in the face. His level of douchebaggery is quite stunning, really. I've officially stopped looking at newstand magazines, channels other than Showcase or HBO, or popular radio, 'cause it's sick that people are so psyched for his wedding to Katie Holmes. Why do people care? Do you KNOW him? Are you old friends? Are you preparing a speech for the happy couple and their child with the misgiuded name (hahahahaha--they thought it meant princess!)? Are you excited for the open bar and the opportunity to dance (badly) to Michael Jackson songs in a druken stupor? NO! You're not! 'Cause you won' t be there! Instead, you'll be sitting at home watching Brian Mulroney's son make a compelte fool out of himself on E Talk Canada or whatever it's called, breaking down the details of the ceremony in the most vague and obscure fashion possible.

The reason this fires me up so much is that I feel the culture of celebrity and entertainment is now paramount in the lives of most people. Seriously, when I was a TA last year, I could swear that my students thought they were living out storylines from the OC in their lives here in Calgreasy, Alberta. And I hear people say ridiculous things that I'm assuming they're appropriating from mysoginistic, shitty hip hop that bastardizes what fabulous acts ike PE, A Tribe Called Quest, and Grandmaster Flash tried to get going. For example, I bumped into a guy from high school, and he was telling me about breaking up with his girlfriend, and he said "I met her in Mavi's and I left her in Sevens." And why does everyone try to look like a celebrity? U of C is one of the biggest fashion shows I've ever seen! How are people affording this?! And how do they have time to look that good by 9 am in the midst of papers and exams? And last, I'm sooooooooooooooooo sick of this new 'I'm alternative and original' look that's being appropriated from celebrity culture: you know, the skinny jeans, a 'funky' t-shirt (probably purchased at the gap), unusual looking sneakers, a military inspired jacket, and an IPod on, probably blaring the college rock band crap that's popular this week. The reason this chaps my ass is that I've talked to some of these people, and they're the least original people I've ever come across.

Ahhh, that feels better. Back to stats...........

What I Hate About Academia: Part II

Okay, so maybe this isn't so much about 'academia' as an aggregate, but it certainly does concern what I hate about one class I'm taking within the academic context: STATS. Fuck stats.

And no, I don't hate it for the typical undergraduate reason of 'it's soooooooo hard.' The thing is, it's actually not that hard! My problem with it is that it represents everything from my undergraduate experience that I thought I'd checked at the grad school door.

For example, when I left my BA, I thought I'd finished having to regurgitate 'black-boxed' knowledge (if you can call it that) on an exam. But alas, we now have to know "you use this for that, but don't worry about why. Just answer it." Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.....that'll really help me on the test, particularly when we're asked to explain why we're using it, 'cause no doubt we will be asked to if the first test was any indication. While this might be good enough for some, I simply don't have the ability to understand sociological concepts PARTIALLY; I need to know WHY I use them, and when I use them. Context counts, dammit! Why don't quantitative people realize this??!!?!??!?! Sociology is NOT about memorization, at least not in my books. Especially not at the M.A. or PhD. level.

And about those exams: Why the fuck do they have to have a multiple choice component? That's another thing I thought I left in the great land of 400 person geography and geology lectures. There's like 14 people in the class, so making us circle boxes is just fucking lazy. Further, I always fuck up on multiple choice, and I'll bet a survey of my class would tell you that the majority of classmates feel the same way about the first test: if they lost marks at all, that's probably where it happened. All m/c questions at this level do is test your ability to take a test.

Oh, and another thing about it: we're actually expected to complete labs on material we've never learned! Am I taking crazy pills, or is this just about the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard? Labs are supposed to be about PRACTICE, and in my many years of 'practice' experience (I did do 16 years of piano, after all), you PRACTICE WHAT YOU'VE ALREADY BEEN TAUGHT!!!! This is theoretically equivalent to telling my 4th grade piano students to go home and learn ARCT-level Chopin nocturnes with absolutely no knowledge of romantic music and related techniques, and then getting pissed when they don't 'try.' Needless to say, I wouldn't, 'cause I'd recognize that it's a complete waste of both my time and theirs. And this is exactly what the last 3 weeks has been, which is just fantastic, considering that the last three weeks comprise the basis of next Friday's test.

And perhaps most importantly: if it hasn't been done by about 109e0483045703485734875 other researchers in about 20934802875938475038457 other boring journals, you can't even DO stats, 'cause you wouldn't know about what "theoretically relevant variables to include." And of course you couldn't go and try to figure it out without extant literature, 'cause that would be the big statistical 'no no' of data mining.... So, any original, exciting, or current analysis is precluded from even being examined in this quantitative fashion, confirming what I've always thought: STATS ARE USELESS, unless of course your main goal as a sociologist is to replicate the tired old regression analyses that other sociologists have already been producing since the mid 70's.

My conclusion: when it comes to stats, it's all been done. So why can't we just be done with it?

On the Love of Nuance

If I had to sum up my evolution as a sociologist over the course of my graduate degree in a single word, I think I would have to go with 'nuance.' I realized this today after posing a question to my stats teacher, asking him 'don't you lose some nuance when you ________(insert boring stats concept I don't want to go into here).' Although I asked it very innocently (i.e.: not trying to be a mouth piece about quantitative methods), it served as a catalyst in prompting me to reflect upon my experience over the past (almost) year and a half.

As a young, undergraduate sociologist, I was taken by the 'expert' knowledge and organized, tight little schemata presented in my textbooks; I loved that I could speak about human behaviour, particularly crime, in broad, authorative terms to friends and people at parties. I loved it that I could field questions from people uneducated in criminology, particularly about sensational crimes largely reported in the media, such as the Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo case. I'm a little embarassed to admit this now, but it's true. I also found myself embracing the explanatory 'power' of criminal behaviour theories, particularly Cohen and Felson's 'routine activities theory', as it probably provided me some sense of 'control' over the dark circumstances I could potentially encounter as a woman.

But....then came Contemporary Social Theory (Soci 633), and my whole world view was (fortunately, miraculously, and gloriously) shattered. Under the direction of our spectacularly brilliant professor, I abandoned my ill-founded roots and stretched in a number of frightening, exciting, and passion-driven directions. And all of these were driven by the concept of 'nuance' in sociology.

Given that I beleive that you cannot 'check' your sociological epiphanies at the 9th floor exit, I have found that this concept has rapdily expanded into all facets of my life, particularly in my choice of cultural representations in the form of music and film. Specifically, I thought about what I posted on my blog profile as 'favourites.' For example, I fell in love with American Beauty at age 18, because it represented opposition to narrow-mindedness, the dog-eat-dog tactics of corporate America, and the monoculture of suburbia. However, upon re-watching it recently, I noted that it accomplished this is an incredibly obvious way; the sweeping music plays in the background as Lester Burnham reflects in a voice-over about his spectacular epiphanies and methods of social resistance, and dies in the end in the most dramatic of fashions, thus representing the great tragedy that is our North American misguidedness. Contrastingly, I recently watched the fantastic and totally under-celebrated 'I Heart Huckabees', which accomplishes all of these themes with exponentially higher nuance, subtlety, and humour. Excerpts that come to mind include: the comment by Naomi Watt's to her bourgoisie boyfriend, 'we don't have to have children; we can just be ourselves, jet skiing, or whatever' ; the conveying of narrow and tragic Christian attempts to convert members of other religions, evidenced by the dinner table conversation centering around a suburban family's Sudanese 'son' who repeatedly apologized to his 'parents' for, essentially, just being his African self ; and the hilarious presentation of Jason Schwartzman's public misfitedness due to his love for, and activism centered on environmental issues. So, while this movie doesn't TELL you, or DEMAND you, to adopt leftist sentiments, it stills presents them to you in layers of nuance, complexity, and laughability.

Another fantastically subtle moment in film was found for me in 'Vanilla Sky,' when the deformed and devestated Tom Cruise dances with his mask on to Underworld's 'Cowgirl.' I thought this was so spectacular, since the movie centres on insatiable greed, ethics, the interference of science in human existence, and the uncontrollable desire for another human's complete devotion and love, and the lyrics to 'Cowgirl' are 'everything, everything, everything' repeated continuously, along with 'I want to give you everything....this is my machine, this is my beautiful dream....I'm hurting no one.'

The same goes for music. I once loved the politically charged music of Rage Against the Machine, whose 'Bulls on Parade,' 'Killing in the Name,' or 'Know Your Enemy' could completely fire me up. While I still enjoy their stance and driving--albeit simple--composition, I alternatively find myself now continually drawn to the poly-rythtms of Tool, the transendental sound of Radiohead (particularly that found on 'Hail to the Theif'), the esoteric poetic lyrics of the former Soundgarden ('Fell on Black Days' is an excellent example) and the gloriously tortured complexity of Rachmaninoff's piano concertos (No. 3 is arguably the most incredible song ever composed for the piano).

Overall, perhaps what I love about these cultural pieces is the fact that they challenge you to THINK about their message, rather than just deliver it for you in a slick package. Much of this line of thought was sparked also by reading Paul's amazing 'The Annotated Everything' (see http://qmass.wordpress.com/), which asserted in a comment on the new 'Borat' film that this type of work is IMPORTANT; it's not delivered as being 'huge,' 'earth-shattering', or 'monumental' film-making, but it is nonetheless in what it presents to viewers, who, if they could only think about it, will recognize it's enormous significance.

What I Hate About Academia

Lately, some things have really started to get me thinking about the internal hate-on I have for academia and what it does to people. You see, I never realized I had this deep-seated love/hate relationship with higher learning, so it's thrown me for a real loop.

On a re-run of 'Law & Order: SVU' last night, the 'case' centered around a perpetrator who was, at the beginning of the episode, killing prostitutes. Since this is my thesis topic, I tuned in pretty closely to see what good old Dick Wolf would have to say about this, just in time to watch the police appointed 'psychological profiler' pace back and forth, providing a succint and fascinating profile of this crzay killer for a captivated group of hard-nosed cops who were hanging on his every word. And it just pissed me off.

This got me soooooo angry about the general 'perception' of academia we see in TV, and that which is subsequently, or at least simultaneously, picked up by academics themselves. A lot of these issues I have with it I've discussed with fellow sociologists, in particular the fabulous and completely brilliant Ms. Catwomyn Jayde, so I owe a lot of my ideas to conversations the two of us have shared. So, in no particular order, here are the things I hate about sociological academia/academics:

1. The concept of 'expert knowledge.' Academics are desperate to be recognized as 'experts' by their students, colleagues, the general public (particularly the media) and their friends and family. This makes them feel sooooooo cool. Now, this doesn't mean that I don't think that some academics certainly do have expert knowledge, such as certain medical researchers or hard scientists. But this type of knowledge is completely inappropriate in social science generally, and sociology specifically. Why? Because expert knowledge is based entirely on the ability to predict an outcome before it happens, centering on a complete knowledge of the factors that produce such an outcome. So, while a chemist may accurately predict a chemical reaction based on the properties of a certain element, attempting to 'predict' human behaviour in the same fashion is just plain stupid.

As a result of this obsession with coming off as 'experts', sociology has rapidly devolved into a confused pile of statistics journals and actuarial typologies. The main problem with these is that such approaches lead researchers to go and out and find people who 'fit' their rigid little schemas, rather than attempt to understand the complexity and nuance of individual stories.

Now, this doesn't mean that I think sociologists have no knowledge base; they certainly do. Our knowledge can be vast, it can be critical, and it can be ever-evolving based on continual research. But can we really be 'experts' who can know the social world better than the people who live in it every day? Fuck no. What we can do better, however, is thoroughly, respectfully, and critically study it.

2. The obsession with 'productivity.' Academics measure the sum total of their lives and the experiences they have within those lives solely in terms of how productive it is. A 'how was your weekend?' inquiry will be met with 'Fantastic--I finished my article' or 'Horrible--I just hung out and didn't get anything done.' Horrible?! Spending time watching TV, a wicked movie, or hanging out with your best friends is 'horrible' ??? WTF??? It gets to the point with some people that all experiences that are not productive are considered a waste of time and are forfeited before the fact, because their social value cannot possibly compare to their potential gain in productivity. And when I think about it, the happiest times in my life have not necessarily been the most academically productive.

3. The EGOS. Do I really need to go further with this? If I was to make any comment, I would say that this ego makes people miss sight of the potential that social research holds to advance knowledge or alleviate issues of human suffering, because academics are too damn concerned about coming off as the 'best.' When people get obsessed with this, they display annoying behaviours, such as coming to conferences and responding to your presentation with a synthesis of their own research that has nothing to do with a fucking word you just said. Or, when you ask them about coursework, they say 'it's great, I've got all A's.' Yeah, but did you LEARN anything, tool? Or they love to tell you about how much funding they have from any number of sources. The funniest thing is that these people think that sociology's all about THEM, when what they should really recognize is that they're all about sociology.

Sorry for the rant, but that's what the blog's for.

You're Probably an Asshole if:

1 You don't think my dog is cute
2. Cowboys is your favourite place to hang out
3. You think Stephen Harper is the best person to lead Canada
4. You have a membership at the Calgary Petroleum Club
5. Your mom and dad don't know anything about your personal life or values, but deposit $2000 into your bank account on the 1st of every month.
6. You love telling people about how you can get VIP at Calgary bars
7. You're rude to Jean or Ted Carter
8. You concentrate on, and worry about the people who treat you like shit more than the people who call you every day
9. You truly believe that private schools provide better education than public schools
10. Your conversations with your 'friends' center around your monthly income (unless of course it's to laugh about how teeny tiny it is), vacation properties, and new car lease
11. Tool and the Nine Inch Nails music makes you 'uncomfortable', but you own all of the Nickleback albums (I don't care if they're from Alberta-they're fucking terrible....and why would I like someone just 'cause they're from Alberta? Stephen Harper's from Alberta!)
12. You don't let people with children come over to your house
13. You don't 'believe' in homosexuality
14. You scoff at Sociology while simultaneously pursuing a 'duh'-gree in Economics
15. You have a job promoting 'Rev' drinks in Calgary liquor stores and bars, and drive around in the company hummer giving 'hot' guys/girls the 'winking gun' while blasting Nelly music.
16. You don't think Larry David is fucking fall-down hilarious.
17. You stand in the foyer of Science Theatres passing out Conservative Party pamphlets
18. You wear a suit to class and spend your day standing in front of the stock marker 'ticker' in Scurfield Hall, laughing and talking in the loudest possible tone so that the first-year girl sitting 10 seats away who works as a beer tub girl will think you're ultra-cool and sophisticated
19. Your favourite band changes weekly, 'cause it's the one featured on the O.C. while Ryan sits there and pouts about his latest tragedy, as Marissa sits in hear 'beach house' holding her knees in her hands.

And, perhaps the most important and/or telling measure of your asshole-ishness:

20. Nate won't return your phone calls.

If I Can't Successfully Google You, You Must Not Be Important

I'm obsessed with google. Obsessed. I use it for absolutely everything--including my masters thesis research. I don't even use a dictionary anymore, 'cause if I don't know how to spell something, I type it into google and it corrects me if I'm wrong with the fabulous 'did you mean ___________?' feature. But of more import is its capacity as an incredible stalking device. Now, I know some of you are saying 'wow, you're a freak', but ADMIT IT! Anytime any of you have met someone that you think is interesting, you google them. I know I do. And when I say 'interesting', I don't mean that you're looking to bump uglies with them, perverts. Besides, I stopped googling potential dates when Nate came along (Nate the Great). 'Interesting' could just be a really cool prof, or a tool of a prof for that matter, or a person you met at a party who you're a little curious about. Or someone who you think is lying to you, and you wanna check the facts.

But now, I fear that google is becoming another one of those shitty measures in society that we stack ourselves up against and usually come out feeling bad because of, kinda like the clothing sizes at Club Monaco. You see, now that everyone knows about googling other people, we all think that we have to have several links that are really 'ours' if someone is to perform a google search on us; for, if we don't, then in no way can we be distinguished academically, or in our careers, or active, contributing members of society. In other words, we can't really be that 'important' if we can't be googled.

I can't tell you how many times people have said in either a desperate or defeated tone, 'I googled myself and nothing came up.' And what's worse is that you can't really get yourself on google--you actually do have to do some/be involved in pretty important shit for people to write about you online in any kind of authorative capacity.

Perhaps it's all a huge conspiracy concocted so as to get people into action, but I say fuck it! This is clearly a measure of informal social control that encourages people to do all sorts of 'stuff' just so they can have their egos stroked by seeing their name online; it's a twisted little bit of fame, really. And I used to buy into it, but I'm out. I'm going to continue to spend my days half-assedly writing my thesis while intermittently publishing on this site that nobody probably reads anyway, tossing that up with a little Law and Order: SVU, original Degrassi and after school specials that we now get on our massive 900 channel cable package, and the occassional phone call to my parents or Kaitie.

And you wanna know why? 'Cause nobody probably googles me, anyway.

A Shout-0ut to my Former 'Hood

So, as most of you probably know, I now officially live in suburbia. 'Well of course you do!' is what you're probably all thinking; after all, this is Calgary, land of suburbia. But no, friends, it has not always been this way.......


Contrarily, I grew up the great land of Thorncliffe/Greenview/North Haven. You see, all of these neighbourhoods are sort of thrown together into a glorious pile of confusion, and they're a mere 15 minute bus ride or 10 minute car ride to the center of the city. And...this will make many jealous....a 6 minute drive to U of C if you do 100 on John Laurie! Ahhh, how I miss sleeping in 'til 8:30 and still parking, grabbing a coffee, and getting a good seat in a 9 am class.

Now that I'm immersed in bona fide S.W. Calgary suburbia, I feel like a martian here. After sorting through this, I've come up with some striking parallels between suburbia and my former neighbourhood, which I've lovingly dubbed the 'T-Cliff.'

1. S.W. Calgary is a mono culture of well-off white people who only speak English and eat meat and potatoes. Honestly, I have not met a single immigrant since living here, and everytime I see a person of colour I'm actually surprised, and I want to run over to them and make friends. And the vast majority of our neighbours are BORING!! They're incredibly predictable; on Saturdays, they get up at 8, put on their $400 mountain biking jackets from MEC, cruise around the Glenmore Resevoir for about an hour, and then go sit in the local Starbucks and talk about their renovations. Don't believe me? Head to Glenmore Landing (90th Ave SW) on a Saturday around noon.

And on the food: seriously, I cannot find a good Vietnamese, Thai or Indian restaurant to save my life here. What is available is miles of Earl's, Kelsey's and Steak Houses, though. Oh, everything also closes at about 9 pm, too. After a night of partying, Nate and I ended up having a $65 cab ride 'cause we spent so much time trying to find a place that was open for a druken snack--we didn't.

Alternatively, the T-Cliffe is a cultural mosaic: tonnes of new immigrants settle in this area that's relatively close to downtown, and people really keep their cultural connections and practices burning in this area. Put it this way: in my elementary and junior high schools, ESL classes were at capacity or more. Down in the SW, most schools don't even run ESL programs. And the white people that did live there were not a monolith: on our street alone, we had a retired farm couple who's wife used to drop the f-bomb on him from the front stoop, a Wiccan couple who home-schooled their three children who decided to become goths at about 12 years of age, a pot-smoking oil executive, an elderly couple who wore matching jogging suits and knew everything about everyone who lived on the street, an ultra-boring geologist couple and their ultra-boring children (they'll probably move to the SW), a crotechty old British woman who threw garden tools at my brother, a Polish Holocaust survivor who made his own shoes, painted his house orange, and built an illegal carport that practically touched my parent's roof (they didn't care), an Italian couple who would get so bombed that the husband would stumble over to the local Safeway and buy his neighbour's steaks if he saw them there, and a Thai couple who started a totally rad restaurant and had karaoke parties with transvestites at them. I'm honestly not making this up: ask Kaitie, who lived on the next street (which would be a whole other post). And, I know of two families who lived in T-Cliff who actually brought HORSES to their homes as pets--yes, HORSES (Kristina--you should tell this story on your blog!).

2. Nobody stays put in the SW. Seriously, EVERYONE who lives here talks about moving on to 'bigger and better.' In our particular spot, we've got plenty of the young and ambitious, who constantly stress about when they're going to get a bigger, fancier place and when. They visit showhomes constantly, and direct conversations around home improvement techniques designed to maximize sale profit, not their own enjoyment.

Alternatively, NOBODY leaves the T-Cliff. No matter how much money someone acquires, or if their occupation moves them to a different part of the city, they do not leave. They paint, renovate, whatever, but they don't go until it's time for a nursing home or they die. And, so many people who I went to school with can still be found there. Case in point: the pot-smoking oil exec wasn't always rich. But once he made the bucks, what did he do? Move to a giant walk-out in suburbia with a bonus room, five piece ensuite and oversize double garage? Fuck no! He stayed in a spot where he could smoke his morning blunt on the stoop in a peaceful, nonstigmatized setting, and he bought the orange house with the illegal carport (the owner moved to a nursing home) for his also pot-smoking and once arrested children, so they too could stay in the T-Cliff. He figured it was the best gift he could ever give them.

I think he was right.

Everything I Needed to Know About Life I Learned from Statistics........

Well, maybe not everything, but a lot! As I plough through my grad stats course, I feel myself continually needing to connect the practical, concrete concepts I'm learning to broader, more abstract social phenomena. In thinking about this, I've concluded that there are many aspects of statistical analysis that may/can be considered analogous to social life:

1) Relationships are like Pearson's Correlation Coefficients: And I'm not just talking about romantic relationships. ALL relationships may be compared to this magical little statistical measure. You see, the Pearson's 'r' measures the degree of association between two variables, ranging in value from zero to negative or positive 1; a relationship of 1 indicates perfect association between two variables, and zero indicates that there is no assoication. Doesn't this remind you of people you know? There are those rare, beautiful ones that you seem to just connect with so well; you're postive about things that they're positive about, and negative about things that they are as well. If you have strong thoughts on a certain issue, you're almost certain that they'll feel the exact same way. Alternatively, there are those people that I like to personally term the 'Anti-Me.' You know who I'm talking about: those annoying philistines who are your moral juxtaposition, like people who listen to Kevin Federline music because they thinks it's good, not because it's funny. Like a Pearson's r value, your measure of association with these people is at a value of zero--the two of you really have no association. And, finally, there are those ambiguous in-between values that statisticians are still unsure about, asking themselves, "does this equate to a 'moderate' relationship? A weak one?" while continually scratching their heads. These are the people who you occasionally have a fabulous time with, yet they annoy the fuck out of you at the next event. So, the lesson is: Don't get mad about this lack of association. Instead, embrace your perfect 1's, and recognize that the only way you can transform a variable is in a strictly artifical sense that does not accurately reflect reality.

2) Perfect Models Don't Exist in Real Life: As a social scientist rather than a natural scientist, I study statistical data that is based on actual human experience, rather than abstract mathematical concepts. In this, we generate predicitive equations; these equations are the 'models' for our data, which offer the best predicitions of the dependent variable given our set of independent variables. However, our results NEVER perfectly match these models. Rather, they constantly deviate from the model we've predicted, thus making our model a nice idea, but not an actual reality. Thus, I've learned that 'model' anything is just that--a model. So, while we may point to individuals or groups, calling them the 'model family', 'model couple', 'model student' or 'fashion model', I like to take comfort in knowing that they, too, have error terms stamped all over their perfect little facades.

3) People are Like Data Sets: When you work with data sets, you're bound to come across two potential types of errors: random errors and systematic errors. Random errors can be produced by little human mistakes in data entry or question asking during a survey, and pose no serious threat to the end results of your analysis. Alternatively, systematic errors bias your entire analysis. Lesson learned: People are totally like data sets! Many, or probably ALL have random 'errors', or little annoying qualities to them that won't horribly impact the entire product of their life and/or relationships. However, we do come across the occasional douche-bag of a human being who's general stance towards everyone and everything will destroy all that is in her/his wake.

and last, but certainly not least:

4) You Can Only Get So Far With Quantitative Measures: There are some things happening in the social world that can simply not be accurately studied/analyzed using numbers, and thus, qualitative research methods have to be employed. Analogously, in life, we cannot measure our total experience using income, value of the home we live in, the vehicles (or, in the case of Calgary, SUV's) we drive, or any other tangible product that we can know the quantitative value of.