Moneyball

September 30, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Stanford is a three-touchdown favorite over UCLA tomorrow night.  Which is the more desirable team?

If you said Stanford, you’re probably one of those people who thinks that the Big Ten consists of ten schools.  You probably also thought that football was all about points on the board – six for a touchdown, three for a field goal, and so on.  Silly you. 

As the recent (and perhaps continuing) realignment of conferences makes clear, college football is about points, but they are Nielsen points.  And on the Nielsen scoreboard, UCLA crushes Stanford. 

 

The graphic is from a Nate Silver article at The New York Times (here).  It’s the companion piece to Taylor Branch’s recent article  in the Atlantic.  Branch gives the sordid details. Nate Silver provides the systematic numbers – fan base and TV market share. What both make clear is that college football is not about good match-ups.  It’s about good profits.

The S.E.C.’s interest in Texas A&M becomes easier to understand once you recognize that the Aggies have among the largest fan bases in the country. The fact that Notre Dame’s fans are dispersed throughout the country explains why they’ve been loathe to join a conference. And that the West Coast is less enthusiastic about football than other parts of the country, making the Pacific-12 a harder sale to the television networks, explains why the conference is going to great lengths to expand into football-crazy states like Texas.

Not to go all Marxist here, but by design, the money flows entirely to the networks, to the universities, and to the coaches.  The workers who put their bodies on the line get nothing.  Actually some of them do get some trinkets and favors, but in the ideal world of the NCAA, they are supposed to get zero dollars.  After all, they are not workers.  They are scholar-athletes, and they do get scholarships, which are worth something, though it’s questionable whether they get much of an education.  But even though they produce substantial amounts of revenue for other people, they are not workers. Running back Kent Waldrep was paralyzed during a game in 1974. When his university stopped paying for his medical bills, he sued for workers’ compensation. 

The appeals court finally rejected Waldrep’s claim in June of 2000, ruling that he was not an employee because he had not paid taxes on financial aid that he could have kept even if he quit football.

The university – ironists take note – was Texas Christian.


HT: My colleague George Martin for calling Silver's article to my attention. 

UPDATE, Oct. 2:  By game time, UCLA was a 23-point underdogs.  Stanford won  45 - 19.  No information yet on how many viewers watched the game on TV.

Education Divested

September 28, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here in New Jersey, as in Wisconsin and elsewhere, the governor has been attacking educators and cutting education budgets, and educators have been doing their best to fight back. 

In France too, professors are trying to win public support against the “depouillement” of education.  The word literally means stripping or skinning, leaving something bare, and it carries the same connotations as the English “fleecing.”  So the profs have posed, depouillé, for a calendar. 

The writing on the blackboard carries a message appropriate both to the academic area and to the protest.  The double meaning gets lost in a literal translation.  “Let’s do economics, not budget-cutting.”

The decreasing function in math is more obvious.

As you might expect, the conservative reaction laments that by doing something that might win public opinion to their side, the profs “dévalorisaient la profession.”  Of course, if you really want to “devalue” something, you  reduce the money you allocate to it, which is what the government is doing. 


View and download all twelve months here, all safe for work.  The calendar begins with Septembre 2011, so you’d better hurry.

HT:  Maîtresse

Chic Cliques (or is it Chick Clicks?)

September 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sara Wakefield mentioned on Facebook that Kindergarten Moms’ night was “remarkably like high school where I did okay with all groups but fit in with none.”  (I took note because at the time,  I was just about to leave for my own high school reunion.)

The social structure of high school, it seems, is all about cliques – freaks and geeks,* jocks and emos, preps, goths, cool kids, et. al.  But there’s a paradox here.  Whenever I ask students about cliques in high school, they all say pretty much what Sara said.  (I mean, that's what they say once they figure out that when I say “clique” – rhymes with “antique” or “unique” – I really mean “click.”)  I ask them to jot down a list of the cliques at their school.  Some make longer lists, some shorter, but nobody sits there with a blank sheet of paper. Then, when I ask them which they were in, it turns out that nobody was a member of any clique.  Instead, like Sara, they affiliated loosely with many of the groups, or they had friends in several different cliques.

But wait a minute. You can’t have a group without members.  So if nobody is a member of any clique, then cliques don’t exist.  How can everyone see all these cliques when nobody in the school belongs to a clique?

The paradox stems from two different definitions or ways of thinking about cliques – as an actual group, and as a label.  When we think about other people, we think of the clique as both – group and label.  But when we think about ourselves, we think of the clique primarily as a label.  And while we are very willing to apply a label to other people, we resist labeling ourselves. 

Attribution theory has a similar take on “personality.”  If we are given a list of personality traits – from Affable to Zany –  and asked to say whether they apply to some person we know, we have no trouble going through the list and checking Yes or No for each trait. But when asked if those traits apply to us, we balk and go for the column marked “depends on the situation.”  As one of the attribution pioneers (Walter Mischel?) put it, apparently a personality is something that other people have. 

The same self/other difference shapes our ideas about cliques – that they are something that other people belong to – and for the same reason: the clique label, like the personality trait, is too limiting.  To say that I am “introverted” implies that this is how I am.  Always.  But “always” doesn’t feel right.  For one thing, I know that sometimes I can act in a very outgoing way. And for another, if I assign myself that label, then I can never act effusively and still be true to who I “really” am.

Similarly, to label myself as “one of the cool kids,” flattering though that may seem, limits me to that characteristic – coolness – when in fact I know there are times when I feel very uncool.  And besides, I sometimes hang around with kids who are not in the cool group.  (I’m using “I” in the hypothetical, generic sense. In reality, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the cool kids.)

The distinction probably even applies to official groups like the football team.  If you’re not a member, you might think of them as “the jocks” with all the connotations that the word carries. But I suspect that your local linebacker is more reluctant to apply that label to himself. There’s no doubt that he’s on the team. But he probably doesn’t think of himself as a jock.   

So while cliques have a certain reality embodied in real people, they are also cognitive categories that we construct and use to simplify and make sense of the social life of school.  Perhaps it’s equally useful to think of cliques not so much as actual groups of people but as ways of being that real people slide into and out of. And if any of what I’m saying here is accurate, how might it apply outside the high school microcosm – for example, to the concept of social class?

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* At about this same time when Sara and I were thinking about high school, Mrs. Castelli’s  students – actual high school students –  were thinking and blogging about “Freaks and Geeks.”

danah boyd on Bullying asTrue Drama

September 23, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Long ago, David Matza contrasted two styles of studying deviance –  “corrective” and “appreciative.”  The corrective approach is moralistic.  It applies a prior set of values and shows how the subject under review fails to measure up.   It asks, “Why do these people do these bad things, and how can we get them to stop?”  The appreciative approach asks, “How does the world look from the subject’s point of view?”

That was the point of my post about sociologists in Las Vegas.  But if you want a better example, read the op-ed (here) on bullying in today’s Times by danah boyd* and Alice Marwick.  While most writing and research on bullying falls squarely in the corrective camp, boyd and Marwick actually talk with teenagers and listen to them.  A lot.  Mostly online.

 Given the public interest in cyberbullying, we asked young people about it, only to be continually rebuffed. Teenagers repeatedly told us that bullying was something that happened only in elementary or middle school. “There’s no bullying at this school” was a regular refrain. . . .
While teenagers denounced bullying, they — especially girls — would describe a host of interpersonal conflicts playing out in their lives as “drama.” . . . .

At first, we thought drama was simply an umbrella term, referring to varying forms of bullying, joking around, minor skirmishes between friends, breakups and makeups, and gossip. We thought teenagers viewed bullying as a form of drama. But we realized the two are quite distinct. Drama was not a show for us, but rather a protective mechanism for them.

You should really read the whole article.   

boyd has been writing about social media and “drama” for at least five years.   Now that she’s in the newspaper of record, maybe her ideas and observations will get the attention they deserve.

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*The Times insists on initial caps, the first time I’ve ever seen her name printed that way.