Sociological Images

An interesting representation of  flu pandemics (full size found here) throughout history.

The US National Archives has a wonderful set of images (like the one below) related to The Influenza Epidemic of 1918.

Another example of hair removal and standards of female beauty. Not at all subtle encouragement for women in the new ad from Schick/Wilkinson Sword razors for women.  Shaving apparently makes you happy enough to sing songs with obvious innuendo.

From the Pew Center on the States report, One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections, “Adding up all probationers and parolees, prisoners and jail inmates, you’ll find America now has more than 7.3 million adults under some form of correctional control. That whopping figure is more than the populations of Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego and Dallas put together, and larger than the populations of 38 states and the District of Columbia. During Ronald Reagan’s first term as president, 1 in every 77 adults was under the control of the correctional system in the United States. Now, 25 years later, it is 1 in 31, or 3.2 percent of all adults.”

See the press release for a quick summary and the full report for much more data.

“Polls have always shown that the vast majority of Americans believe religion is “an important part of their daily lives” — 65% in a recent Gallup poll versus just 34% who said it wasn’t.

But that national average obscures a stunning variety by region.”

via The Wall Street Journal.

More precise data can be found at Gallup. In the comments, Jay pointed out work by John Sides at The Monkey Cage, that re-maps the data using absolute levels and accounts for a full range of responses, showing that “even in the least religious states, there’s plenty of that old-time religion.”Given that the dot-plot and map use the same data, it could make for an interesting debate on how to present data and the implications of differing analytic categories.

Found at Boing Boing, from their guest blogger Charles Platt.

Population density has a long sociological history (c.f., Wirth’s Urbanism as a Way of Life) and is one of several factors that plays into discussions of land use, health, and population growth. This visualization presents an interesting start to spark a discussion. Is it misleading? What does it leave out? Does population density play a vital role in explaining human behavior?

I stumbled across a blog posting with the provocative title, As an Athiest, I Prefer Hockey that contained the following image.

I realized I had watched the Super Bowl and likely seen this a similar image. I have probably seen images of athletes gathered in prayer hundreds of times, to the point where they have become a taken-for-granted aspect of sport. It could be an interesting start to a discussion of religion and sport. Is this concentrated on sports that are primarily played in the US? Or only particular team sports? I don’t recall ever seen such prayer groups in basketball. Are such sights common in soccer or cricket?

Though there are other ways to promote vegetables, as others have previously mentioned, PETA often makes it easy for us to find examples of objectification and the sexualization of activism. Now comes news that NBC has rejected PETA’s “Veggie Love” Super Bowl ad for being to racy. To quote from Cameron Scott’s Thin Green Line blog,

“It’s likely that they never expected the ad to pass muster, and have used it purely as a publicity stunt. The ad is, indeed, steamy. It features scantily, S&Mishly clad women engaged in highly sexual movements and poses with vegetables. A woman also gets into a hot bath with vegetables, suggesting that she’ll become part of a soup. Watch it here.