Whelks caught in Wales are South Korean ‘aphrodisiac’ (Neil Prior, BBC News, 10 February 2019)
👆 You are witnessing how an ‘urban legend‘ is born. An ‘Othered’ one at that. Whelks are not considered as aphrodisiac in Korea. It is a horrendous slang word to refer to women who have passed out on date rape drugs.
Couldn’t get this out of my head either. Also remembered this clip where a 72-year-old vlogger, Korea Grandma, was grappling with a self-service kiosk at a McDonald’s.
RT @AskAKorean This image haunted me for this seollal. On the crowded LNY trains, all the old people are in the standing seats because they can’t figure out how to book tickets online […] (5 February 2019)
LNY is a big holiday, so lots of Koreans travel home. Train tix for LNY sells out within minutes of being available for sale. And most of them are snapped up online. If you don’t know how to book tickets online, like many old people are, you are often out of luck.
The article describes old folks who show up to the train station hours early just so they can have a shot at buying train tickets. When they’re lucky enough to do so, they are often relegated to standing tickets. Hence, the messed up trains where only the old people stand.
S Korea is the most wired society in the world, and it often decides to simply let people who can’t keep up stay behind and suffer. I hate seeing this type of scene happening again and again.
Had a shaky start to 2019. Was down with the flu early January and I was out of commission for a week. It was a record in a sense. In the past, even when I was unwell, I didn’t usually take more than one day off, and I would still check my work inbox occasionally throughout that day. This time I was barely able to sit up, let alone move around, for one whole week. So I ended up doing nothing but drinking lots of tea and water while watching, in a half-asleep state, the full series of Parks and Recreation for the first time. The lesson of all this might have been that I am no longer that youthful version of me.
Anyhoo, because of this ordeal, I didn’t get to make any New Year’s resolutions. However, a good thing about being from a lunar calendar culture is that there is a second chance!
Well, actually, my resolutions are always the same: less sugar, less screen time on commute, and sleep earlier. Always these same ones, always failing to keep them, and always rolling them over to the next year. As a desperate measure, I have turned to audiobooks — something I would never have imagined myself doing. I don’t even like ebooks that much, so this is a pretty big leap for me. I am pleasantly surprised so far with this new commuting experience — but don’t confuse my new found love for audiobooks with how I feel about commuting.
Most importantly, happy Korean New Year!
Online consequences of being offline: A gendered tale from South Korea
A 13-minute read. Took me forever to write.
Today my news feeds are marked by a new Gillette ad on ‘toxic masculinity‘, the #BrexitVote in the House of Commons, and a new Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Among these equally significant topics, one that has created most buzz, at least in my little social media bubbles, is the so-called KonMari method. We don’t have Netflilx at home, but I gather that her approach to books does not bode well with my friends and colleagues. Apparently she has said that books are first to go when decluttering the house and that the ideal number of books to own is less than 30. Hmmm. What is this familiar feeling? Right, this feels almost like the time when I was shown a picture of books arranged by the colours of their covers.
Konmari or tsundoku? The unbearable lightness of getting rid of books (Sue Carter, The Star, 11 January 2019)
Then once again the answer was right under my nose.
35 years ago, Isaac Asimov was asked by the Star to predict the world of 2019. Here is what he wrote (The Star, 27 December 2018)
If we look into the world as it may be at the end of another generation, let’s say 2019 […], three considerations must dominate our thoughts: 1. Nuclear war. 2. Computerization. 3. Space utilization.
Interesting to read this in conjunction with the news about China’s successful landing on the “far side of the Moon” today (and their potato-growing mission).
In the meantime, here’s another one. Let it sink in.
I have come across these two threads separately, but in my mind they make a perfect pair. *chef’s kiss*
They also remind me of the “3d printed save icon” and “a computer that prints while you type and you don’t have to plug in” jokes, as well as the Onion’s “ruins of ‘Friendster’ civilisation” video and David Macaulay’s illustrated book Motel of the Mysteries (1979).
And another one. I am on listing fire!
# The Road to Representivity (Miller, C. & Krasodomski-Jones, A., 2015)
# Understanding Society Innovation Panel Wave 10: Results from Methodological Experiments (Al Baghal, T. ed., 2018)
# On data linkage: interview with Joseph Sakshaug (Alexandru Cernat, 21 January 2019)
# How accurate are survey responses on social media and politics? (Guess, A. et al., Political Communication, 2018)
# Facebook digital traces for survey research: Assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of a Facebook Ad–based procedure for recruiting online survey respondents in niche and difficult-to-reach populations (Iannelli, L. et al., Social Science Computer Review, 2018)
# How to sample networks using social media APIs (Coscia, M., 11 December 2018)
A little new collection for an upcoming module. 🤓
# Using hierarchical categories in qualitative data analysis (Richards, T. & Richards, L., in Kelle, U. (ed.), Computer-Aided Qualitative Data Analysis: Theory, Methods and Practice, 1995)
# The Social Life of Numbers: A Quechua Ontology of Numbers and Philosophy of Arithmetic (Urton, G., 1997; see also The Social Life of Things, Appadurai, A., 1988; The Inbetweenness of Things, Basu, P., 2017)
# Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You’re Doing It (Beck, H. S., 1998)
# Where Mathematics Come From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (Lakoff, G. & Nunez, R., 2001)
# Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life (Lampland, M. & Star, S. L., 2008)
# What is SNA using qualitative methods? (Crossley, N. & Edwards, G., methods@manchester, 3 January 2012)
# Data not seen: The uses and shortcomings of social media metrics (Baym, N. K., First Monday 18(1), 2013)
# Oh Ordinal data, what do we do with you? (Petty, N. [Dr Nic], Creative Maths, 8 July 2013)
# The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy (Boyle, D., 2014)
# Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World (Alexander, A., 2014)
# Scientific method: Statistical errors (Nuzzo, R., Nature, 2014; see also related articles published in 2015, 2016, 2017)
# Most psychology papers can’t be reproduced (IFLScience, 28 August 2015; crossposted 29 August 2015)
# Measurement: A Very Short Introduction (Hand, D. J., 2016)
# The Quantified Self (Lupton, D., 2016; see also Seeing Ourselves Through Technology, Rettberg, J. W., 2014; Self-Tracking, Neff, G., 2015; The Qualified Self, Humphreys, L., 2018)
# Surveying immigrants without sampling frames — evaluating the success of alternative field methods (Reichel, D. & Morales, L., Comparative Migration Studies 5(1), 2017)
# Computer says so. ([yawningtree], 7 February 2017)
# List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed (Liam Young, 2017, crossposted 1 September 2017)
# Addressing the challenges related to transforming qualitative Into quantitative data in qualitative comparative analysis (de Block, D. & Vis, B., Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 2018)
# How to sample networks using social media APIs (Coscia, M., 11 December 2018)
Everybody in my social media timelines seems to be doing a year-end round-up. I also did one in 2016, but this year I am just glad that there are still a couple more days left before the new term begins. As also mentioned below, I was really looking forward to the winter break this time around. A bit like this illustration that was posted on the Communication Research Methods page last week with no additional caption. Well, no caption was necessary.
Then the first comment that immediately followed was: “It’s a mirage! Save yourselves!” I am not sure if the artist intended it, but upon reading the comment it struck me that I was being all business-as-usual. At least one piece of writing that I have been wrestling with for long is kind of out of the way now. Yay. 🎉
