Market Capitalism, Race Manners, Portland's Chinatowns, and Survival Analysis

[sanguinity]

Assorted nonfic:

Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy.

Expansion upon the major themes of Stuffed and Starved: The Battle for the World’s Food Supply (while coming in at a far shorter page count). Part 1 is a description of the history and contemporary effects of market capitalism, while Part 2 is an overview of ways to resist market capitalism. Nice follow-up to S&S (in that it responds to the “but what should we DO?” question that so many readers had), but doesn’t require S&S.

Bruce A. Jacobs, Race Manners: Navigating the Minefield Between Black and White.

Attempts to walk the delicate line between “both sides have a habit of behaving badly” and “the aforementioned bad behavior is unequal in degree and effect”. I’m unsure who would be the proper audience for this book: while he explicitly calls out the tone argument for what it is in the sections written to white people, his strategic advice to black people includes ceding all ground to the tone argument. While this book could be a useful primer for white people who are stuck in the kindergarten-level argument of “But he said something unfair, too!” I fear it gives too much implicit “I don’t have to play nice unless he plays nice!” cover to those same people. (And to my ear, the advice to black people mostly sounds like parental nagging about being the bigger person. YMMV, especially since my ear isn't the one that matters on that.) I hear Jacobs updated this book in 2007; I’m curious to know if he has revised his “the only way to learn is to suck it up and take the risk of talking to people” position to take advantage of bloggers and other internet resources. In all, I was disappointed, especially given how much I've enjoyed some of his poetry.

Marie Wong Rose, Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon.

Reads as if it was based on a doctoral thesis: reams of detailed historical data on Chinese society in the Pacific Northwest, with a loose focus on Oregon and Portland. While vast sections of it are something of a slog (see "doctoral thesis"), there is also a wealth of fascinating history here, much of which I had never heard before. A must-have reference for anyone setting historical fiction in Portland or Oregon, or for those who are trying to get at the less-talked-about histories of the city/region.

Jong Sung Kim and Maria Tableman, Survival Analysis Using S.

It's a grad-level stats textbook; if you're interested in knowing more about it, ask. I'm counting it because 1) it's POC-authored and THUS I GET TO, and 2) given the dozen-or-more POC professors I've had in math and stats, it is somewhat shocking to me that I have never before had a POC-authored math or stats textbook. (NB: Tableman is white.)

Comments

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

I had introductory grad-level stats using a sort of idiosyncratic approach (more about model comparison and evaluation than anything else)--do you think Survival Analysis Using S requires more background than that? I'd like to expand my stats library.

[sanguinity]

I'm not sure it's clear from the title: this isn't a generalist grad-stats book. It focuses exclusively on time-to-event data, with or without censoring. (But mostly with, because without is getting on toward trivial.)

Do you have much background in working with the formal mathematics behind your models, or in customizing the math to match the idiosyncracies of the data? Because Kim and Tableman are both formalists, and a decent chunk of the text is the derivations that justify the content. (Every so often, the text shouts "and WHY!" -- Kim and Tableman's version of the more traditional, "The derivation is left as an exercise for the reader.") The bulk of the rest of the text is instruction/recipes for getting S or R to crunch your data for you.


...and because you asked about the book, and thus might have the background to be amused: a comic I did about a derivation that was one of the exercises in the book.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

Oh, I figured!

Hmmm. I think I will have to poke around further to see whether the applications of survival analysis in my field are ever likely to come up for me. That book is probably too advanced/specialized for me at this point.

....I want a whole stats book using poodles and unicorns to explain the math now. :D