The new season of the series Black Mirror is here. This dystopian British series is fantastic. It dealt so well with tensions related to technology in our lives that I organized my winter 2016 CommLead professional MA class around it. We watched episodes, did activities around the themes of the episode, read related pieces about…
Over the past few years I’ve moved away from assigning scholarly work in my undergraduate classes and now most of the outside of class materials are popular media on the topic. I’ve found that a very good journalistic article on technology and society is much more likely to be read and understood than a scholarly…
I’ve written some blog posts in the past where I explain how I use Facebook ads to estimate how many Facebook users there are in a particular country. Here’s a March 2016 update for Armenia! As of mid-March 2016, there are 930,000 Facebook users in Armenia, according to Facebook. That is 31% of the total…
I’ve written some blog posts in the past about using Facebook’s ad data to tell us how many people use Facebook in a particular location, comparing it with World Bank population data. Please see these older post for the methods that I use. Here’s an update. I collected this information on November 23, 2015. In…
I’ve written some blog posts in the past about using Facebook’s ad data to tell us how many people use Facebook in a particular location, comparing it with World Bank population data. Here’s an update. I collected this information on April 3, 2015 and July 16, 2015. In April, there were 1,600,000 Facebook users in…
I did an analysis a few years ago based on 2007 data on desirable qualities in children. The World Values Survey had a similar question, so here are the newer results. For what it is worth, I doubt that the translations are equivalent. So it is quite likely that a word for “thrift” or “obedience”…
Happiness or subjective wellbeing is one of the most difficult things to measure cross-culturally. Every time I see some happiness index I cringe. Gallup results are floating around the Internet, but here are the more transparent results from the World Values Survey. (Here’s more on WVS in the Caucasus). Taking that into consideration, I just…
I see how upset foreigners are about the Baby Leo story. Again, I wish to add some context. As I mentioned in my first post on the topic, I have spent a lot of time in Armenia and the region and I spent most of my pregnancy 6 years ago in Armenia, so I have…
Edits in red to reflect updated information. ETA: Update 11:47pm Pacific 6 Feb: Baby Leo’s mother has come forward to tell her side of the story in an Armenian and English language Facebook post. She claims that her ex is not telling the truth. For the last week the tale of baby Leo Forrest has…
ISIS/L is on everyone’s minds nowadays. Some people are concerned that IDPs in Azerbaijan are especially vulnerable to ISIS recruiting because of their marginalized position in society. (I did a blog post on attitudes toward IDPs in Azerbaijan in 2013.) Some colleagues asked if there was any evidence that Azerbaijani IDPs are more likely to…