As a social demographer, I always have an eye out for interesting sources of data about human social life. This particular source is a little bit of a stretch, but I found it very interesting nonetheless -- WordCount, a search engine and ranking of the most commonly used words in the English language. In case you’re dying of curiosity, 86,800 in their database, the top ten most commonly used English words are:

1. The
2. Of
3. And
4. To
5. A
6. In
7. That
8. It
9. Is
10. Was

The highest-ranking two-syllable word is “about” (#55) and the highest-ranking three syllable word is “government” (#140). I was a little disappointed to see that two words that I commonly use didn’t rank higher: “bogus” (#14,606) and “dude” (#35,307).

Bogus, dude.

Many people on both sides of the political ideology aisle criticize contemporary media companies for a whole host of offenses. To try to compare different media outlets around the world on their level of transparency (how openly their disclose their ownership, conflicts of interest, editorial policies, openness to criticism and complaints, etc.), the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda at the University of Maryland has just released the results of their study.

As the results, show, the Guardian (UK) and the New York Times are at the top, followed by the BBC, CBS, the Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. Personally, I wasn’t surprised to see Fox News near the bottom, but I was a little surprised to see ABC and The Economist to be near the bottom as well, as I’ve generally respected the reporting of both of these outlets. I guess I should be a little more wary from now on.

Approval ratings seem to be a commonly-used way to compare Presidents and their administrations. With that in mind, the Wall Street Journal has a chart that compares how approval ratings for each President since Truman have fluctuated over the course of each President’s term:

The WSJ article also has detailed charts for each President and major events during their presidency that influenced their ratings. Two results that particularly struck me are that the biggest dropoff from highest approval ratings to their lowest for a single President are for Harry Truman. I’m not an expert on his presidency, but I always had the impression that he was a relatively popular President.

The second interesting result is that the only President who had a higher approval rating at the end of his term than at the start was Bill Clinton. That’s a distinction that not even Ronald Reagan can claim. I guess Slick Willy was a little more popular than many conservatives give him credit for.

As American society becomes more culturally diverse, it seems that it would make sense for our colleges and universities to reflect that change (or if anything, be at the forefront of such changes) and have faculty that also is culturally diverse. But as Diverse Education reports, these efforts still have a long way to go in order to become reality:

This is the breakdown by race/ethnicity of full-time faculty for 2003 according to U.S. Department of Education, IPEDS Fall Staff Survey; EEOC, EEO-6 Survey: White 81 percent; Black 5 percent; Hispanic 3 percent; Asian 6.5 percent; American Indian less than 1 percent; race/ethnicity unknown 1 percent; and non-resident alien 3.3 percent.

They shared their experiences of racism and some universities’ deferred efforts to diversify their institutions as part of a discussion to identify the problem behind low faculty diversity. Some blamed institutional racism, which they agreed to be the most dangerous form of racism, yet the most prominent on their campuses. “We are our own enemies,” said Dr. Marybeth Gasman, chair of the AAUP Committee on Historically Black Institutions and Scholars of Color and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“When I was in grad school and decided to do my dissertation on philanthropy and African Americans in higher education, I was pulled aside by a senior faculty member who said, ‘I know you’re interested in this but you will be ghettoized if you do this, not get published or find a job.’” Gasman said many students of color are given this same message and a lot of faculty “poo-poo” on their ideas, which is why having a diverse faculty is critical.

To summarize and unfortunately, despite the fact that most academic disciplines and colleges in general tend to be more liberal than conservative and therefore should be much more aware and open to having a more culturally diverse faculty, the practical reality is that there are still too many mechanisms of institutional entrenchment, aversion to change, and outright racial discrimination that result in minority students and faculty feeling unsupported and unwelcome.

In other words, there is plenty of talk, but not much walk.

I’ve written before that research continues to support the notion that in general, immigrants produce more benefits than drawbacks for American society and its economy. As further reinforcement of this argument, Diverse Education reports on a new study that again demonstrates that immigrants --particularly from Asia -- create a disproportionate number of high-tech businesses in American society:

[O]f 2,054 hi-tech companies founded during 1995-2005, around 500, or 25.3 percent, were founded by immigrants. The companies had more than $1 million in sales, 20 or more employees, and company branches with 50 or more employees. Out of the 500 companies, 144 were surveyed and it was found that 96 percent of founders held bachelor’s degrees, 47.2 percent held master’s degrees and 26.8 percent held a doctorate degree. More than half (53 percent) of the immigrant founders completed their highest degrees from U.S. universities.

“Census data shows immigrants are better educated than average Americans,” says Vivek Wadhwa, co-author and adjunct professor at the Pratt School of Engineering. “No one can refute this data. If the U.S. wants to be a world leader in technology and innovation, then we have to support them.”

The study also found that very few immigrant founders came to the United States with the intention of starting a new company. Around 52 percent came to study, 39.8 percent came for a job opportunity and only 1.6 percent for the sole purpose of entrepreneurship. Immigrants from India, China and Taiwan were interviewed for the survey, but Indians founded more companies than any other group combined. . . .

“As foreign-born engineers start businesses, they collaborate with former classmates and colleagues from their home countries, sharing the business contacts and know-how as well as market information that support entrepreneurial success,” Saxenian says. “Successful entrepreneurs not only contribute to the regional economy, but also become powerful role models and mentors, attracting subsequent generations of immigrants to the area.”

These immigrant-founded high-tech companies are most visible in California but their effects can be seen on the national and international levels since, as the article notes, such entrepreneurs draw resources from all around the world and directly or indirectly attract more highly-educated immigrants to the U.S., all of which lead to numerous benefits for American society.

We should note, as the article does, that such findings do not reflect directly into the current debates on immigration reform. If anything, it strengthens the argument that we should let in more of these highly-educated and skilled immigrants. I certainly do not oppose that particular suggestion, but I do oppose it when it comes at the expense of reducing the number of immigration visas for family reunification, which as I’ve argued before, is a severely short-sighted plan that disproportionately hurts Asian Americans and ignores the significant benefits that family members bring with them to the U.S.

In short, the solution is to keep family reunification immigration visas at their current levels (if anything, they need to be increased to reduce the significant backlog of current applications) and also increase the number of H1-B visas for highly educated immigrants because, as research continues to show, both sets of immigrants produce notable benefits for American society and its economy.

I just came across the DismalWorld.com site that contains a collection of historic and poignant photographs taken through the years. As the title of the site implies, the photos do not depict “happy” scenes. Rather, they illustrate in very stark ways the tragedies and suffering that we as humans perpetrate against our own kind. Many of the photos I had seen before, but many were new to me. In fact, the one that really struck me and made me take a few minutes to think about was this one:

Following up on my earlier post about how achieving socioeconomic mobility seems to be so difficult these days, you might be wondering how your situation compares to other Americans. In general, regardless of whether they make $15,000 a year or $150,000, when asked, most people tend to identify themselves as “middle class.” But what exactly are the boundaries that separate social classes? To try to answer that question, the New York Times has an interactive feature that allows you to input your education, occupation, income, and wealth (the four major factors of social class) and see where you rank with the rest of American society.

My results show that in most cases, I place very close to the top fifth of American society. Either way, I consider myself very socioeconomically privileged in relation to most Americans, and certainly in relation to most people around the world. I enjoy a relatively high standard of living and although I’m not rich, am pretty financially secure. It would be easy to take these things for granted, but in my research as a sociologist, I see many examples of just how lucky I am in comparison to others.

Those in academics should be familiar with RateMyProfessor.com (RMP) by now -- the website that lets any student at a particular school rate any professor and the courses s/he teaches on that campus. As I’ve written about before, unlike many professors who vehemently denounce RMP, I don’t necessarily object to its existence, but neither do I care to log onto it and see what students say about me because I realized long ago that, in the words of Bill Cosby, “I don’t know what’s the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

At any rate, one of the criticisms about RMP is that it since the students’ ratings for a particular professor are not a statistically representative sample, those ratings ultimately bear little similarity with the professor’s actual formal course evaluations. However, as Inside Higher Education reports, a new study argues that at least for good professors, there does seem to be a strong correlation between their ratings on RMP and their formal course evaluations:

The key findings are that RateMyProfessors.com ratings have a significant correlation with the formal student evaluations on the questions about the overall quality of the course and the relative difficulty or ease of the course. . . . At the same time, Coladarci [one of the study’s authors] cautioned that the correlation isn’t universally high.

The overlap is highest among those professors who are popular on RateMyProfessors.com — they also do extremely well with traditional student evaluations. “The pattern of this association suggests that when an instructor’s RMP overall quality is particularly high, one can infer that the instructor ‘truly’ is regarded as a laudatory teacher,” the study says. However, the correlations are much weaker for those who don’t score well, so Coladarci is much more hesitant to assume that poor RateMyProfessors.com ratings are equally meaningful.

In other words, professors who rate high on RMP also tend to rate high on their formal course evaluations. However, the correlation is much weaker for those professors who don’t rate so high on RMP -- in many cases, their formal course evaluations may also be low and in other cases they might be average or higher.

The article also notes that previous research has shown that on RMP, those professors who students judge as “hot” (i.e., physically attractive) or an “easy grader” are also much more likely to have a high overall course rating. However, the new study finds that there is no correlation between being judged as “hot” on RMP and that professor’s overall performance on formal course evaluations.

So I suppose there’s something for everyone here. RMP critics can claim victory that at least for professors who tend to score low on RMP, there is only weak evidence that their formal course evaluations may also be low. On the other hand, RMP supporters can crow about the finding that professors who score well on RMP also tend to score well on their formal course evaluations, lending more credibility to that particular aspect of the website.

I would now like to see a similar study on the correlations between students who gripe about professors on RMP and their actual grades. Now that would be quite interesting.