Tag: SOCIOLOGY

Today's high-end prostitutes book their own appointments on BlackBerrys and rely on Facebook, rather than pimps or madams, for self-promotion. That, in a nutshell, is what Columbia sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh discovered while doing research for a Wired report on New York's sex workers. Venkatesh spent a full year following some 290 sex workers in the city, and made careful observations on ...

Eric Fischer has transposed the 2000 Census data to a map, showing the breakdown of race in major U.S. cities. Each dot represents 25 people, divided (as we always seem to be) by color: red for white, blue for black, green for Asian and orange for Hispanic. Check out Fischer's Flickr account for more sociological visualizations. ...

Transactions on Craigslist might begin anonymously, with both users safely shielded by the warm comfort of their computer screens, but when it comes time to actually make the deal, human contact -- and the anxiety it entails -- invariably come into the equation. You may do your best to sniff out the person on the other end of the deal -- and try your hardest to convince them that you're not a ...

digg_url ='http://www.switched.com/2010/02/22/physicist-tracks-human-movements-determines-people-are-incredib/'; Since the dawn of self-awareness and the birth of philosophy, anthropologists have struggled to decipher the mysterious intricacies of human social behavior. Leave it to a nerdy physicist to render those millennia of study obsolete by deciding that people are not only amazingly ...

If you're one of those people with about 3,000 Facebook friends, you probably think you're pretty cool. But we'd bet good money that you only actually interact with a tiny fraction of them. And Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, would probably put money down with us. Dunbar conducted a study that shows most people can only maintain an active social circle ...