Hi all,

First post of this my new science blog, after Posterous (where I kept my old blog) got bought by Twitter, then shut it down.

This ones for all those who hate/love, or have some interest the British class system. A few weeks ago there was a radio article about the "Great British Class Survey",  see this. All very good, and sounded intriguing. Well, I downloaded the paper, from the journal Sociology. You can get it yourself for free here: http://soc.sagepub.com/content/47/2/219

OK, still interesting stuff.  But the stats, oh the stats! And the methods were shocking. And NO methods section. No mention access to raw data.  These people collected data from 161,400 web respondents, and I get the sense they didn't really know what to do with it.  Didn't they know how to use R? The plots were terrible too. 

This material just would not have flown in ay half-decent scientific journal. So why did Sociology publish it? 

Conclusion: get it together Sociologists!

cheers,
Dan

PS: If you'd like to know what class you are (in all its distasteful putting-you-in-a-box-flavour), you can stick your vital statistics in here. Go for it. Or, alternatively if you'd like to go into the real data (that can't be retrieved), you can sign up, and be part of the actual survey here. I suggest you lie.