mcfarland, 20sep2000


UCLA Soc. 210a, Assignment 1:

Overview; Infrastructure, Local and Otherwise


1. Establish a BOL account (www.bol.ucla.edu has instructions)
if you don't already have one. 

2. Go to www.ursa.ucla.edu and tell ursa your preferred email
address (either your BOLid followed by "@ucla.edu", or some other
address you check regularly), to be included among the recipients
of any email I send to the entire class.

3. Acquire a PC-formatted Zip-100 disk. Keep materials for this
course on it, bring it with you to class and lab sessions, and to
office hour visits.  But do NOT let it be your ONLY copy of those
course materials...

4. Arrange a second place to keep a duplicate copy of everything
you put on your Zip disk.  If you have a home computer with a Zip
drive, you could create a directory named, say, "S210bkup" on its
hard disk, and keep backup copies there.  Another possibility
would be a second Zip disk, marked to clearly distinguish the
backup disk from the one in regular use.  Choose a regular time
to do the backup (e.g., every Thursday evening).
	For this assignment, simply write a sentence telling where
you will keep the backup copy of your Zip disk, and the schedule 
you will follow to update it.

5. Go to www.asanet.org, and download to your Zip disk the 
American Sociological Association instructions for authors 
document in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.  Use Acrobat Reader to read
and print it.

6. Email both of us (mcfarland@soc.ucla.edu and sgsong@ucla.edu)
with your name, student id number, 210A enrollment status
(regular, extension, waitlist), BOL userid, and preferred email
address if different.

7. Examine the data on the 13 western states, which are on a
handout, and come to class prepared to discuss them, especially
the variable describing governors' salaries. You may find it
helpful to review such matters as histograms and shapes of
distributions; mean and standard deviation and their alternatives
(see Chapter 1 of Moore and McCabe). NOTE: The present assignment
is to "come prepared to discuss...", NOT to "write the definitive
analysis of..." these data.

8. Go to JSTOR, and look at the most recent year's issues of
American Sociological Review, and select several papers on topics
that sound at least vaguely interesting to you. For each, list:
author, short title, year, month, beginning page number. Email
your list to me (mcfarland@soc.ucla.edu).  I will assign each of
you a different article, taking your preferences into account but
avoiding duplication. Over the course of the quarter we will
figure out what kinds of empirical questions the author is
asking, and what kinds of data and statistical procedures are
used to address those questions. (Typically they will use things
that do not get fully treated until 210B or C; but that will help
give us a feel for where we are headed.)

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Notes on Assignment 1

BOL or BOL-Gold account. This is mandatory, for access to
UCLA-restricted materials, even if you get your email elsewhere.
        The BOL account, which gives you access at labs on
campus, is no additional cost beyond fees already paid.
        If you have a PC or Mac at home, and would like to dial
in from there, you can purchase a suite of BOL software for $10
at the student store.
        If you live far enough away that it is a toll or long
distance call, you might be able to save some money by
subscribing to BOL-Gold.  The BOL-Gold software comes from
Earthlink when you establish your account.  

        
PC-formatted Zip-100 disk, to hold up to 100 meg of material that
you create or download, that you can carry with you and use on
whatever computer is available. A Zip-100 in the PC format can be
read in a lot of machines, including my office machine, that can
read neither the larger 250 format nor the Mac format. I
understand that they can also be read by Macs, and by PCs with
the Zip-250 drives.

Someplace to back up your Zip disk regularly (a second zip disk,
your hard disk if you have a computer at home, etc.). And a
regular schedule for doing it. No "Dog ate homework" stories for
this course!


ASA Instructions for Authors. This part of the assignment serves
two purposes. First, to make sure you already know how to use PDF
files before reading some assigned article becomes urgent.
Second, although nothing done in this course will be for journal
submission, it is not too early to develop the habit of composing
in the style editors want, and thereby avoid some unnecessary
rewrites in the future.

ASR style should be the default in this course. Later, you may
acquire additional styles; for example, a medical sociologist may
want to write sometimes for Journal of Health and Social
Behavior, which follows ASR style, and other times for Journal of
the American Medical Association, whose style is rather
different.