Jacob Christensen

I’ll just note that today marked the end of my final course here in Umeå. Now only the marking of two rounds of reports remain and then sixteen years of university teaching will be at an end.

My final, final academic assignment will be to write a survey of recent Danish political history – somehow there is an element of poetic justice in this.

And no, unfortunately I haven’t sorted out my future working life after 15 May.

Methinks – or rather guesses – than an attempt to stop spambloggers from stealing content from this blog backfired so that del.icio.us couldn’t post its daily digest of interesting links. So here is another manual helping:

• Jarl Cordua: Danner sagen om Kofod skole? – Kommunikationsforum
• Economist – Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
• The Monkey Cage: The Imagined Community in Europe and the United States

Well, actually we are talking ducks here, as the new council of Holstebro has failed to cull the numbers of drakes this year due to administrative reorganisations.

Quack, damn you!

John Sides presents a paper he has written with Jack Citrin about popular views of shared traditions and religion in Europe and the U.S.

A fast glance at the post and the paper tells us that Denmark is in the middle of the pack when it comes to wanting homogeneity in customs and traditions (?45%) but closer to the homogeneous end when it comes to religion (?35-40%; countries like Poland, Norway and Greece have more people supporting the homogeneous stance).

Oh, and when you look at the paper, you’ll note a general tendency to overestimate the share of foreign-born in all countriess surveyed (p. 41). (I know, I know – really surprising…but it’s good to have numbers on the misperceptions)

Worth a read, especially as Sides and Citrin can’t produce a good explanation for the variations between countries – factors such as political mobilisation may play a role here, but again Denmark with its relatively big anti-immigration Danish People’s Party (and why not add the Liberals, now we’re at it? After all, Søren Pind is making a lot of noise these days) is fairly inconspicuous.

Maybe I should add my 5 cents about Jeppe Kofod’s adventures at the Social Democratic Youth Association’s Easter conference at some point – here’s what the Danish blogosphere has to say – but in the meantime and with the help of a younger colleague, I’ll put a rock’n'roll perspective on the matter:

First, Iggy Pop “Sixteen”

Then, Rolling Stones “Stray Cat Blues” (in which the girl is fifteen years old, and, yes, the version on Beggars’ Banquet is much better but no-one is stopping you from buying the album, is there?)

It looks nice, but, boy, was it cold on the harbour front on Sunday. The opera can be seen in the background.

del.icio.us or my WordPress set-up seems to have gone haywire so here are my links for today, posted manually:

• Arbejdsdirektoratet – A-kassernes udbetalinger og medlemstal, 4.kvartal 2007
• Jakob Nielsen – Myten om den usynlige Helle – Kommunikationsforum

We’ve always had the odd bit of anecdotal evidence but a group of students in Lund are making the experiment.

We are of cause free to wonder how students would react if university teachers put the same level of effort into preparing courses. Maybe it is time for a controlled experiment: No reading list, no schedule, no lectures and a completely random exam.

HT: Andreas Bergh who also admits the sins – aka Sociology of the Workplace – of his own youth.

I’ve had to opportunity to re-view the first three five episodes of BBC’s dramatisation of John le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (Amazon UK).¹ Probably one of the best TV series ever – and it’s not just Alec Guinness who turns out an excellent performance here: Look at the first two minutes in episode one where the other main characters are introduced.

Brilliant!

1. And I’m going for the last two tomorrow! [↩]

• Bar Tabs and Tax Cuts « Consider the Evidence
  Stories resonate with us far more than do impersonal statistics. But in some instances, such as this one, the reason a story resonates is simply that it affirms prior beliefs, rather than because it offers genuine insight.
  (tags: economics methodology taxation)