Sexting and Percentaging - The Wrong Way

December 23, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Pew survey on sexting – it came out over a week ago. I don’t know how I missed it. Must be the holiday blahs. And where was the media hysteria? Most news outlets ignored it, probably because the results weren’t all that alarming.

For the entire sample of eight hundred 12-17 year olds, the estimated proportion who sent “sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of themselves” was 4%. Given the margin of error, that means that the actual percentage, as Dan Ryan at Sociology of Information notes, is somewhere between 0% and 8%.

Of course, we’re not going to see a headline like “Sexting Teens May be 0%.” Not when you can goose up the numbers to 30%. Here’s the headline that ran in The Washington Post:

Sexting hasn't reached most young teens, poll finds;
30% of 17-year-olds report getting nude photos on their cells

That subhead manages to get the highest percentage by

• using only the oldest subgroup in the sample
• measuring receiving rather than sending

Dan has some other methodological criticisms, including this one. First the Pew summary paragraph:

One parental intervention that may relate to a lower likelihood of sending of sexually suggestive images was parental restriction of text messaging. Teens who sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images were less likely to have parents who reported limiting the number of texts or other messages the teen could send. Just 9% of teens who sent sexy images by text had parents who restricted the number of texts or other messages they could send; 28% of teens who didn’t send these texts had parents who limited their child’s texting.

I spent the last two weeks of the semester trying to get students to percentage tables correctly. “Percentage on the independent variable,” I repeated and repeated. And now Amanda Lenhart at the Pew Foundation undermines all my good work. As Dan says,

It is unlikely that the authors are thinking that sexting causes parental restrictions – the sense is just the opposite – and so the percentaging should be within the categories of parental behavior and comparison across these.

Dan even does the math and finds:

• Children of restrictive parents who ever sent a sext: 1.4% (3 of 218)
• Children of non-restrictive parents who ever sent a sext: 5% (29 of 572)

Read Dan’s entire critique. Or for the truly absurd and probably counter-effectual, see the anti-sexting videos featuring (I am not making this up) James Lipton.

Max Weber Takes on the Left and Lieberman

December 19, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The politics of health care reform presents a dilemma for those who want change. It’s the dilemma of compromising with evil. Do we sacrifice real improvement for the sake of ideological purity?

MoveOn.org wants me to sign a petition that says, “America needs real health care reform—not a massive giveaway to the insurance companies. Senator Bernie Sanders and other progressives should block this bill until it’s fixed.”

With illness, we have to understand that bad things happen to good people. But with health care (and other issues) the difficulty is that good things may happen to bad people. With the bailout, it was galling that in order to save the country (i.e., most of us) from economic disaster, we wind up rewarding the bankers and traders who got us into this mess.

With health care, it’s the insurance companies. MoveOn.org says better to risk letting the whole bill fail, with its added protections for millions of people, than to let the bad guys continue make a profit.

The dilemma sent me back to Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” (and not just because the squabbles on the left made me think that maybe the German title was “Politik als Beirut”).

Weber distinguishes between the politics of purity (“ethic of ultimate ends” and the politics of the possible (“ethic of responsibility”)

There is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends – that is, in religious terms, ‘The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord’ – and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one’s action.

I like “abysmal.”

The believer in an ethic of ultimate ends feels ‘responsible’ only for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not quenched: for example, the flame of protesting against the injustice of the social order. To rekindle the flame ever anew is the purpose of his quite irrational deeds, judged in view of their possible success. They are acts that can and shall have only exemplary value.

I like “quite irrational.”

So Weber knew about the MoveOn.orgs in his day and in history. Weber also had this to say about Joe Lieberman.

Vanity is a very widespread quality and perhaps nobody is entirely free from it. . . . The sin against the lofty spirit of [the politician’s] vocation, however, begins where this striving for power ceases to be objective and becomes purely personal self-intoxication, instead of exclusively entering the service of ‘the cause.’ For ultimately there are only two kinds of deadly sins in the field of politics: lack of objectivity and – often but not always identical with it – irresponsibility. Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as clearly as possible, strongly tempts the politician to commit one or both of these sins.

Weber, however, lacked YouTube and sock puppets.



Hat tip Ezra Klein.

The Best Way to Travel

December 17, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

When you take your seat on JetBlue, here’s what you see on the screen – the one on the back of the seat in front of you, the seat your knees are pressing into unless you paid the extra $3-4 an inch for more leg room.

(Click on the picture for a larger view.)

Yes, while the plane sits on the runway, before it lifts off and that screen now offers you 43 television channels and 94 XM channels, you see this picture, and you think, Ah, that’s the way to travel.

It’s a train – the ocean on one side, trees on the other, and it’s whizzing along the coast so rapidly that that it appears slightly blurred in the photo. (That’s JetBlue’s camera blur, not mine. Compare the sharpness of the Fasten Seat Belt message.) Meanwhile, you sit on the runway, looking out at the tarmac and wishing that your seat wasn’t so close to the toilet and that the woman squeezed in next to you wasn’t wearing all that perfume. You hear the pilot’s voice crackling on the PA to tell you that we’re now fourth for takeoff.

And you look at this picture of the train. What is JetBlue trying to tell you?

The Recession - The View from a Cab

December 16, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Poll Reveals Depth and Trauma of Joblessness in the U.S.

That was the front page story in the Times yesterday.

I hadn’t seen the paper when I got into the cab at 6 a.m., but my ride to JFK was itself a look at the recession. The cabbie wasn’t what I expected – a woman, for starters, with an accent that wasn’t Asia or Africa but pure New York. And she asked me whether I wanted to go via the Triboro or the Midtown Tunnel.

She had just started her shift, picking up the cab from a fleet in the Bronx. She had three kids – a daughter recently graduated from Fordham, a son at NYU, and another son at Yale. She had worked on the trading floor for JP Morgan, not as a trader but in some auxiliary role that was nevertheless important and probably well rewarded. Family trips to London most winters.

Then she got fired, and since last spring, she’s been driving a cab. And she knows many people, former colleagues, who aren’t even doing that. (I didn’t ask her about money and how she managed two high-end tuitions. She never mentioned a husband, so I assumed she was a single mom. But I didn’t ask about that either.)

She also sold Christmas trees on the street, though that was mostly to support the Boy Scouts. Their trees were expensive – $60 and up – but sales were very slow, and even now, well before Christmas, she was knocking down prices for customers who seemed reluctant. (This is all anecdotal evidence. The Wall Street Journal reports that tree sales are strong. )

Funny, It Must Be a Guy Thing

December 14, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s a question (not taken from a publisher’s test-bank) from the final exam I gave today:

2. One observer of culture commented, “I'll tell you what I like about Chinese people. They're hanging in there with the chopsticks. You know they've seen the fork; they're staying with the sticks. I don't know how they missed it— going out all day on the farm with a shovel. Come on: shovel — spoon. You're not plowing 50 acres with a couple of pool cues.”

To say that using chopsticks instead of a fork and spoon is like plowing land with pool cues — this idea is an example of
a. particularism
b. ethnocentrism
c. the sociological imagination
d. group polarization

I offered a bonus point to anyone who could identify the culture critic who was the source of the quote. (Answer here.)

I didn’t realize it when I was composing the exam, but I was guilty of sexism. None of the females in the class even took a guess. Most of the guys did, and sixty percent of them got it right. I might as well have asked which NFL teams Brett Favre has played for (or hasn’t played for).

I do know at least one female Montclair sociology graduate who would have nailed the bonus point. But in general, comedy, especially stand-up, seems to be a guy thing, and I’m not sure why.

Maybe I should have used a quote from Gray’s Grey’s Anatomy.

The Power of Positive Phrasing

December 13, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

1. T / F ____ Most universities are now in the final exam period.

2. T / F ____ A negatively-phrased question is rarely less confusing than a positively-phrased question.

To answer Question #2 correctly, to say that negatively-phrased questions are more confusing, you have to go through the mental contortion of negating the negative.*

Take a look at the test-bank that accompanies a textbook, and you’ll see at least a few items like this. Those questions are not written by professional test-makers. Sociology textbook test banks are written by sociology instructors, history test banks by history instructors, and so on. Neither they nor the authors of the books themselves are schooled in writing test questions.

But what about this item?

Agree or Disagree: My home life is rarely stressful.

Maybe you recognized it. It’s from the GSS (STRSSHME). A student in my class had used it in her cross-tab exercise. She had thought that women would be much more likely than men to experience stress at home. But, she said showing me her table, 43% of women disagreed; only 28% of men.

I had to look twice at the item and think it through carefully. The item is about stress, I explained, but if you want to say that you agree that your home life is stressful, you have to disagree with the question.

I assume that the GSS questions are written by people who know what they are doing, not instructors who need to supplement their income by writing textbook supplements. I also assume that the survey experts at the GSS test drive each item before including it in the interview schedule. But STRSSHME makes me less confident about the way the GSS develops questionnaire items.

Did the GSS compare this item against the same idea phrased positively:

My home life is often stressful.

No. STRSSHME seems to be part of a 2002 module that was given only once. I wonder if the GSS will use this question again.

*Another post on negativity is here.

Values in Air Travel

December 12, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I went to church last weekend. Well, not really. I went to see “Up in the Air.” But the sermon was such a familiar one about American values that as the house lights went up, I expected the audience to do the handshake of brotherhood or whatever non-touching H1N1 substitute is currently in effect.

Here’s the message, sinners. Pursue not selfish career goals, especially in place of human relationships.

We’ve all heard it before. Don’t sacrifice human connection for the sake of individual mobility. It’s a staple of American fiction, movies, and TV. And maybe it is in fact like a church sermon, something we Americans like to hear over and over again each Sunday because we spend the rest of the week doing just the opposite. That seems to be the schedule: M-F, Achievement/Success; Sunday, the sermon about relationships (Saturday is more open, though shopping, fixing up the house, and kids’ soccer games are strongly encouraged).

The nice thing about “Up in the Air” is that it doesn’t stack the deck so obviously (pardon the abrupt change of metaphor). Make no mistake – the central character, Ryan Bingham, is all about mobility. He spends most of the year traveling. His main goal in life is to accumulate ten million miles and get the sacred black airlines card possessed by only a handful of other fliers. He disdains relationships. He never married – all sex is causal sex – and he’s distant from his siblings and their families. And, he repeatedly tells us, that’s the way he likes it.



And what is his job that requires so much time away from home (not that he has a home; his apartment is bare, his refrigerator empty)? He fires workers. Their own employers are too fearful or incompetent to do it well or do it at all, so they hire Bingham’s firm. Bingham loves his job, and he does it very well.

OK – a guy who like firing people, wants no real relationships, and aspires mostly to a small, black plastic rectangle because almost nobody else has one. In most movies, you’d dislike this guy from the moment he walked into the frame. You’d easily reject him and his values. But with “Up in the Air” you can’t, mostly because it’s George Clooney. I mean, you just cannot dislike George Clooney. The film makes it even easier to like him by giving him a young apprentice – a 23-year-old MBA – who wants to make firing people even less human by instituting an online version. With her austere suits, severely pulled-back hair, and impersonal style of speaking, she makes Clooney’s character look even nicer.


The movie is worth seeing – most critics gave it high marks (check it out at MRQE) – so I won’t go more into the plot except to say that the ending (possible hint of a spoiler here) doesn’t cheat. The ending also shares something with “Funny People” and very few other American films that I can think of offhand. (However, in other ways, the ending of “Funny People,” as I noted here, does cheat.)

Here’s the trailer. It says pretty much what I just said.

Signs of the Times

December 11, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The fifty best protest signs of 2009 (collected at Buzzfeed) included this one – for academics only.

(Click on the picture to see it larger.)

A lot of the good ones seemed to come from the gay side of the street.


See all 50 here.

Hat tip: Jenn Lena

Sociologists on the Gridiron

December 10, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The NFL has six African American head coaches (and one of them was a sociology major). Six out of 32. In the NCAA’s 120 Football Bowl Subdivision schools, there are just nine black head coaches.

The pros are apparently less racist than colleges. And it is racism, not the lack of talented black coaches. Some of those NFL coaches couldn’t even get an interview at the college level. Tony Dungy (African American and a former NFL head coach) isn’t a sociologist, but he has sense of where to look for the racism in the social structure. Not the athletic directors and college presidents who do the hiring. It’s those middle-aged wannabes and jock sniffers waving their pennants at the homecoming game. In a Times op-ed earlier this year, Dungy wrote of his unsuccessful efforts to get colleges to hire black coaches: “Alumni and boosters were involved, and the presidents often felt pressure to hire coaches the boosters would support.”

In the pros, the coach’s job is to win. In the colleges, winning is good thing for a coach to do, but the head coach is also a PR man, a fundraiser. He has to make nice with boosters and alumni, and those people want a coach that they’d feel comfortable hanging out with. Someone who is, you know, more like us.

Dungy repeated this argument on NBC Sunday nigh. (The video, which I cannot embed, is here.) Dungy urged college presidents to show some spine and stand up to the boosters. He also said that the lack of black coaches was “disgraceful.”

The same word might have been applied that night to the Steelers. They lost – at home, yet – to the Raiders forgodssake, blowing the lead twice in the fourth quarter. (Dungy was a defensive back and later an assistant coach for the Steelers.) Whither the Steelers? Superbowl champs just 11 months ago, they have lost four straight. Tonight they play the Browns, who have won one – count ’em one – game this season. Maybe, just maybe, the Steelers can win.

(Update: Several weeks ago, under a photo of Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin and quarterback Ben Roethlisberger I added a caption to the effect that they were discussing sociology. Ridiculous, I know. Ben was not a sociology major.

But two weeks ago, with Ben concussed and backup QB Charlie Batch out with a broken wrist, the Steelers went with Dennis Dixon, who in fact was a sociology major and academic all-American at Oregon.

Dixon, whose NFL experience had consisted of throwing two passes, exceeded expectations and even ran 20 yards for a touchdown, and the Steelers took the favored Ravens into overtime. Unfortunately, in the overtime, Dixon misread the defensive pass coverage and threw an interception that cost the Steelers the game.

Inequality and (Missed) Opportunity

December 8, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

It was supposed to be about the distribution of income. It turned out to be about something else, and I keep thinking I let another teachable moment slip away.

The general topic was inequality. The strategy – not original with me, but I have no idea who came up with it – is to use something students can grasp, something familiar in their experience, to convey the idea of inequality. Here’s the drill

1. Ask students how much they would need per person to have a really nice evening out.
   
   
2. When they come up with a number, multiply it by the number of students. Then divide the class into five groups, and say something like, “I could just give each group the same amount. But I’d like to reward the students who have done well and contributed to the class. I don’t think that they should get the same amount as the absolute slackers. So if we have five groups ranked from most deserving to least deserving, how much should each group get?”
   
   
3. Show the distribution. If possible, use Excel and make a pie chart. It will almost certainly be more equal than the distribution of income in the US.
   
   
4. Then show a pie chart of the distribution of income in the US. If the amount for nice evening was $100 apiece, it would mean that the couples in the top fifth would have $500 for the evening (as, “What could you do with $500 for the evening?”). The least deserving couples would share $34.
   
   
5. Students will be appalled by the disparity.

Here’s what really happened. The students got into just about the liveliest discussion we’ve had all semester. But it wasn’t about the distribution of income. In fact, we got stuck on step #1 – what they would need for the evening out. What kind of restaurant, what movie or show or club. How much to spend on pre-gaming. One girl said that she’d have to get a new outfit – she always got a new outfit; it’s so much easier than deciding what to pull out of your closet. Someone else brought up the cost of parking in New York, which would raise the nut considerably.

Eventually, I had to call a halt. It’s just an analogy, I said loudly and moved on to steps 1-4. But surely there was some lesson here, some sociological point to be made about their concern and about the specific things they thought should or shouldn’t be included. After all, the general topic was stratification and inequality. Maybe the package of goods you deemed necessary for a nice evening – specific things themselves, not just the total cost– carried some message about social class.

Alas, I didn’t think of that at the time, and besides, I’m not sure what that message was.

You've Got a Friend. Ashley Has 1,376 Friends

December 6, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I don’t really think Facebook did much to change the definition of community. But what has FB done to friend?

In a comment on the previous post, Aftersox suggests that we need a new definition of community, maybe something that encompasses online communities. My point was that the word has already been stretched to include all sorts of agglomerations of people. I doubt that many Facebook users thought that there was anything strange about the message the referred to a community of 350 million. That’s why, when we want to refer to a truly communal group, we go back to Tönnies’s German vocabulary – Gemeinschaft.

But what are we to do about friend? Surely a retronym is called for.

A retronym is a term that comes into use when technology makes the old term confusing. Acoustic guitar, for example. When electric guitars came along, we needed a special term for the instrument which for hundreds of years had just been a guitar. Manual typewriter, prop plane, desktop computer, land line, manual or standard transmission, broadcast television.

What term will we use to distinguish friends in the old sense of the word from Facebook friends?

Language Posts Revisited

December 4, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

1. Last month, I noted that although Gemeinschaft was usually translated as community, the English word has been stretched to include groups that were much larger that what old Tönnies had in mind.

How large can a group be and still be a community? Oh, I don’t know. How about 350 million?
If you logged in to your facebook page today, you saw this at the top of the page:

Facebook has just reached 350 million users and will soon be making some changes to serve our growing community.

2. Back in April, I suggested that phrasing something in the positive made it easier to understand. Negative constructions invite confusion, and the more negatives you use, the harder it becomes to figure out the meaning. An op-ed piece in the Washington Post last month centered on “this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?”

Good question. Here’s how the author, James McWilliams answers it:

“So it’s hard to avoid concluding that eating cannot be personal.”

I still can’t figure out what he means.

Cool Tone?

December 2, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Two and a Half Men is funnier because it dances at the border of acceptability. “Can they say that on network television?” Most of us, it seems, cheer for the naughty boys to sneak in the dirty word and get it past Standards and Practices.

A similar games goes on at the DMV. The Smoking Gun has a list of over 1500 requests for vanity plates that the New York DMV has rejected. New York prohibits any plate which “is, in the discretion of the commissioner, obscene, lewd, lascivious, derogatory to a particular ethnic or other group, or patently offensive.” That includes hostile messages like UPYOURS (also UPURS and other variants). I guess nobody at the DMV got very far in French class. I saw this one on Broadway last week.

TON CUL – literally, “Your ass.” But I think “Up yours” better captures the sense and spirit of the phrase. (Native French speakers, please correct me if I’m wrong here.)

This one probably wouldn’t have gotten off the press in California. “A California vanity plate request, for example, is thoroughly reviewed by several people with both foreign language and slang dictionaries.”

For hundreds of vanity plates, most of them from NY and most neither offensive nor amusing, just personal, go here. (I did recently see, but didn’t photograph, an older man getting out of car (Lexus?) with the license plate SONZADOC. I guess MY SON THE DOCTOR wouldn’t fit.)

Surely, there must be some sociological research on vanity plates. I just don’t know of it.

Best-selling Sociology

November 30, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I was leafing through the New York Times Book Review on Sunday, and when I got to the best sellers page, I noticed that three of the top ten books on the nonfiction list are sociology. Well, maybe not exactly sociology in a narrow sense, but in the sense of social science that isn’t psychology.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

At number four is Superfreakonomics. The authors claim to be doing economics, but in the sequel as in the original, purely financial matters play a secondary role. Much of both Freak books looks a lot like sociology.

Numbers five (What the Dog Saw) and 10 (Outliers) are collections of Malcolm Gladwell essays, many of them based on research by sociologists. Gladwell is a journalist, but sociology is a large sector in his beat. He even spoke at the ASA a couple of years back.

Should I mention Mitch Albom in the #2 spot – a sports writer who wouldn’t be on the list at all were it not for his first best-seller about Tuesdays with a sociology professor? No I shouldn’t mention it.

Thanksgiving

November 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Last year’s post-Thanksgiving post, was a response to a repost at The Situationist fretting about the conservative framing of Thanksgiving (The Situationist reposted it again this year.). The high priests of our society exhort the poor and downtrodden to give thanks for a system that is screwing them. Don’t question or rise against, is the message, but rather be thankful for the few crumbs it brings. The holiday is an exercise in false-consciousness.

From a Durkheimian perspective, I argued, this is the nature of all rituals not just Thanksgiving. “All rituals are inherently conservative. They idealize and uphold the society as a whole and promote the attachment of individuals to that whole.”

I added.

I just wonder whether godly conservatives, those who “recognize that everything we have is a gift from God” included the election of Obama as one of those gifts . . . and gave thanks for it last Thursday.

This Thanksgiving, I’m less sure that the spirit of Durkheim reigns in the land. My guess is that the thanks we hear from the right side of the table will come mixed with a generous portion of snark. The “Pray for Obama” campaign, hawked on everything from bumper stickers to teddy bears, is a recent example of the sort of thing we might get.

Psalm 109, verse 8 is: “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.” And in case it wasn’t clear what “days be few” means, the next verse spells it out: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

Clever, isn’t it? Doesn’t it bring a smile to your face in this holiday season?

Conservatives know how to avoid false-consciousness. So expect more of this today. I hope someone else is reading the right wing blogs and watching Fox so I don’t have to.

Sour Grapes and Sweet Snickers

November 25, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Let a group of kids trade their candy bars – the “I’ll swap you three Krackles for a two Milky Ways” sort of thing – and you’ll wind up with an allocation that, on the whole, has greater value.

That’s the gist of a Marginal Revolution post by Alex Tabarrok. Now we know what Alex did with his leftover Halloween candy. . . only the “kids” were college students in his economics class, and the trading was not post-Halloween fun; it was a classroom exercise to demonstrate “gains from trade.”

Students open the bag and are then asked to write down how much they would be willing to pay for the bag's contents. But before snacking, students are allowed to trade. After a few minutes of trade, ask the students to write down their valuation again. Voila! Gains from trade. With a few numbers pulled at random from the students you can do a back of the envelope calculation for the total increase in value.

No doubt the economic explanation is valid, but when I read the post, the idea that sprang to mind was something that didn’t occur to Tabarrok or any of the people who commented on the post: cognitive dissonance, more specifically “postdecision dissonance.” People will value something more if they’ve chosen it rather than having no choice. 

It’s the converse of “sour grapes” (if I can’t choose it, it wasn’t sweet). Ask people what each of two candy bars is worth or how much satisfaction each would bring. Then have them actually pay something for their preferred treat. Now ask them to evaluate the two choices again. The subjective value of the chosen candy will have risen relative to the unchosen one. The valuation of the candy will have increased, but there has been no trade, just choice.

Two and a Half Jokes

November 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I finally watched an episode of Two and Half Men. The show’s been around for five or six years, and it’s still in the top ten – even in a week when there’s a really good football game in prime time (Colts-Patriots). So it was on my to-do list. As Everett Hughes said, the worst sin for a sociologist is snobbery.

Ideally this post would analyze Two and a Half Men in its social context – its relation to aspects of US society and culture. Maybe another time. For the moment all I could think of was this:

Basically, it’s the “in bed” fortune cookie thing. You know, you read the fortune, pause, then add meaningfully, “in bed.” Funny, right? It’s been around for years (maybe since around the same time that 2.5 Men started), but it still works. I heard Jon Stewart do it just a few days ago on the Daily show.

Sex makes it funny. If something’s already funny, sex makes it funnier. And basically, that’s 2.5 Men. Why is sex funny? Probably because it’s still something we don’t talk about openly. Any laughter a joke might evoke gets the add-on of the tension that comes from touching on a taboo topic. So we hear the essentially the same joke again and again and again. . . . in bed.

The central plot of last night’s episode was that Chelsea wasn’t having an orgasm when she and Charlie had sex. Charlie’s self-centered insensitivity is, I gathered, a regular comic element of the show. But add sex, and it becomes even funnier. Same with Berta. She’s caustic and earthy; she can say sardonic things about her husband and her marriage. But if it’s about sex (like who got to be on top) it’s like adding “in bed” to the Chinese fortune.

Yes, there was a subplot only tangentially related to sex – Alan trying to get a date by using spray-on hair to cover his bald spot. (It took me a few moments to remember where I’d seen this before. Beau Bridges in The Fabulous Baker Boys twenty years ago.). Then Alan goes on J-date and pretends to be Jewish – also not exactly a new idea in comedy.

But mostly, if last night’s episode is typical, 2.5 Men makes its living by taking standard sitcom jokes and adding “in bed.” And it works.

OTOH, or is it really the same hand, there’s XKCD’s take.

Sociology for Psychics

November 23, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I knew it was the ecological fallacy – using aggregate data to draw conclusions about individuals – but I took a shot. And even though I got a bull’s eye, more or less, the effect wasn’t what I’d hoped for. Here’s the story – sociological knowledge in action.

I wanted to make a change in my phone account, so I tried the “chat with one of our representatives online” option.

My chat window correspondent typed, by way of introduction, that she was Wendy M. Now Wendy was a name I hadn’t heard for a while. So as we were waiting for the system to register the changes I’d requested and that she was entering, I opened another window and looked for Wendy at the Census site on baby names.


The name Wendy had peaked in popularity in from 1969 to 1972, climbing as high as 28th place.
In the chat, I asked if Wendy was her real name or if perhaps she was really in Bangalore and Wendy was merely her nom de screen.

No, she assured me, she was Wendy, and she was in Georgia.

I guessed that the Georgia curve for Wendy might have lagged the national average by a year or two. So I said,

Me: OK, are you 37 years old?
Wendy: I’m 36.

And that was all. Not, “Wow, very close!” not “How did you know?” I thought she would be stunned – after all, the only cues I had were typed words in a chat window, no picture, no voice – and I had come within a few months of her precise age. But Wendy seemed utterly unimpressed with my psychic powers – far less than I had been. So I didn’t bother asking her about her school friends Jennifer, Kimberly, and Michelle.

(Previous posts about names here, here, and here.)

Journalism Out to Lunch

November 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Interesting line-up on the Times op-ed page today. David Brooks’s column is on the left, Paul Krugman’s on the right. They’re both writing about Timothy Geithner. Krugman

key officials — most notably Timothy Geithner, who was president of the New York Fed in 2008 and is now Treasury secretary — have shied away from doing anything that might rattle Wall Street. And the bitter paradox is that this play-it-safe approach has ended up undermining prospects for economic recovery.

Brooks:

Well, the evidence of the past eight months suggests that Geithner was mostly right and his critics were mostly wrong. The financial sector is in much better shape than it was then. TARP money is being repaid, and the debate now is what to do with the billions that were never needed.

Brooks, the conservative is waving the flag for the Obama administration; Krugman, the liberal, is taking pot shots at it. Standing with Krugman are others that don’t usually line up alongside him in the same shooting gallery – The Wall Street Journal and other right-wing outlets.

The main difference seems to be the source of information about Geithner. The critics, right and left, are focusing on the Inspector General’s report on the AIG bailout, which says, essentially, that the Government gave away the store. It put much more money at risk than it had to. Rather than negotiating effectively, it protected bankers to the tune of 100 cents on the dollar.
David Brooks, on the other hand, had lunch with Geithner the day word of the report leaked.* Instead of mentioning the IG’s report, Brooks writes about Geithner’s “mentality,” his “ philosophy,” his “policy instincts.”

I was reminded of I.F. Stone and what you might call his sociology of journalism – how the interplay of networks, information, and relationships shapes what gets printed. Stone was one of the best Washington investigative journalists, often finding truths that revealed the lies the government was peddling. (All Governments Lie is the title of a biography of him; that title has to be a direct quote from Stone himself.) He had no inside sources – nobody in official Washington wanted to be seen talking to him. Instead, he relied on transcripts of Congressional hearings, other government documents, and, for foreign affairs, the international press.

Stone thought that his isolation from the people in power made it easier for him to be a better journalist.

“Once the Secretary of State invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you're sunk,” he said.

Or the Secretary of the Treasury.

*To be scrupulously accurate, Brooks does not actually say that he lunched with the Secretary. He refers only to “an interview.”

M*A*S*H-Up

November 18, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Men Who Stare at Goats, now playing at a theater near you, is a military comedy. It’s not M*A*S*H. It’s a mash-up – two mentalities: military and hippie.

Comedies are about mismatches. In military comedies, one of the mismatched elements is bureaucracy, especially its rule-bound lack of imagination, impersonality, and inability to adapt to novel events. These qualities are usually embodied by an authority, a high-ranking officer. Sometimes the authorities are benevolent, as in the fish-out-of water scenario. Here, the mismatch is that someone who was never meant to wear the uniform winds up in the Army. The authorities, with patience and firmness, manage to mold him or her (Pvt. Benjamin) into a soldier.

More typically, the mismatch is between the bureaucratic mentality of authorities and the human, fun-loving good guys, who are forever figuring out ways to get around the rules. The heroes are like little boys impishly scheming to have fun by fooling gruff old dad. But in the American version, the boys who ignore the regulations and the brass not only gain illicit pleasures (alcohol, sex, money); they also always turn out to be the ones who can actually accomplish important goals. They did it every week on M*A*S*H.

In The Men Who Stare at Goats, the Army creates a special program for soldiers to develop psychic superpowers. The program is sold to them largely by a former soldier (Jeff Bridges) who has done the hippie trip and now returns to train a select group of soldiers, the dippy dozen. The brass in their spotless uniforms give him great latitude, since they are looking for anything that can help win the Cold War. The soldiers let their hair grow long, do yoga, and try to develop supernatural abilities, like the ability to kill or at least stun animals by staring at them. Or to walk through walls.

Neither mentality comes off very well. The New Age ideas seem ridiculous, especially as military applications, and the military looks foolish too for being so desperate to beat the Soviets that they’ll believe this stuff. In an emblematic moment early in the film, we see an officer in full uniform psych himself up and try to walk through a wall at full speed. The result is inevitable.
That’s the gag that gets repeated throughout the movie – every time someone (usually George Clooney) tries to use these psychic powers, reality thwarts them, but they still continue to believe.

The message, one that is repeated not just on every episode of M*A*S*H but in many American movies, is this: acting on the basis of ideology is bad, whether that ideology is New Age or Cold War; acting on the basis of personal feelings for others is good. In Goats, what makes us like George Clooney is that despite his nutty ideas that never work, he doesn’t let the ideas get in the way of his more human impulses.