Losing Face(book)

January 13, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s an update on the technical and ethical Facebook problem I mentioned a few days ago.

The teacher who offered an A+ to any student who could hack into his Facebook page had to admit, to his chagrin, that my colleague’s son had in fact gotten access. (The kid created a sock puppet – a supposed classmate of the teacher – and persuaded the teacher to “friend” him.) But the teacher negotiated the promised A+ down to an extra ten points in every category of the final grade.

The kid didn’t care so much about the grade. To him, the best part was the “mad props” he got from all his classmates.

What do we conclude from this?

• Intangible social rewards from peers outweigh bureaucratic rewards.
• Social solutions (creating a false identity) trump technical ones (hacking).
• Fourteen-year-olds have no ethical qualms about deceiving a teacher who, essentially, asks for it.

Chicken False Consciousness - II

January 10, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Back in November, I blogged about Chicken Delight as the embodiment of false consciousness – the cartoon chicken happily serving up a roasted version of himself for the dining pleasure and convenience of hegemonic humans.

The idea transcends national boundaries, and the picture I used was of a French chicken that I found in Polly’s blog. (Polly is not a sociologist, but her blog is well worth looking at.) Now, she has found this revised and more complex and nuanced version.

The video is by Remi Gaillard at N'importe qui. He has a number of these slightly surrealistic, humorous vids. Mostly silent, so understanding French is not necessary. (I’m still trying to figure out a translation for their motto: “C’est en faisant n’importe quoi qu’on devient n’importe qui.” Literally, “It’s in doing whatever that one becomes just anybody.”)

Facebook Lessons

January 8, 2008

Posted by Jay Livingston

A co-worker tells me this story.

Her 14-year-old son is taking a computer graphics course in school. Talk in class must have veered over to the topic of Facebook because the teacher says, “I’ll give anyone in here and A+ in the course if they can get into my Facebook page.”

The kid comes home last night, goes on line to check out the teacher’s credentials (resumé I guess) to find out where he went to college. Then he creates a fake identity on Facebook and gets in touch with the teacher claiming to be an ex-classmate (“We were in the same math class. . . .”). A few more brief exchanges, and the teacher agrees to friend this old school acquaintance. And the kid is in.

It’s not exactly Megan Meier, and I doubt that anything illegal happened. But the mother had some questions about right and wrong.

• Is it right for a teacher to offer an A+ for something not course related?
• Is it right for a teacher to encourage kids to sneak in to places where they are not wanted?
• Is it right for her son to create a fake identity on Facebook and pretend to be someone he’s not?

I’ll be interested to see how this plays out when the kid reveals the ploy to his teacher.

Sports Betting as a Prediction Market

January 6, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s been some discussion of prediction markets at sociology blogs like Statistical Modeling and Scatterplot. Prediction markets are like stock markets: in stock markets, investors are betting on the ultimate price of a stock; in prediction markets they are betting on the outcome of events like elections, Academy Awards, American Idol, or when the US will start withdrawing troops from Iraq.

The collective wisdom of the investors is reflected in the price of the different options. If you want to buy shares in Obama as the Democratic nominee, you have to pay a higher price now than you would have three days ago.

The question is whether that collective wisdom has more predictive power than do the so-called experts.

Sports betting is essentially a prediction market. The odds or the betting line reflects the collective wisdom of the bettors (or “investors” – the term applied to people who bet on stocks). I blogged about this a year ago, and I came down on the side of the experts – the bookies and oddsmakers who set the initial line.

Yesterday’s NFL games offered a good example (i.e., anecdotal evidence) of what I meant. The oddsmakers made the Seahawks a 4-point favorite over Washington. But the public bet Washington, and the line came down to 3. The Seahawks covered easily, winning by 21. The crowd lost.

The Steeler game was an example of the worst-case scenario of following the “wisdom of crowds.” The Jaguars opened as 1 point favorites. The public bet them heavily, and by game time, the line was 3. If you had bet the Jaguars early in the week, you would have given up one point. But suppose you had waited to see wisdom of the crowd. You see the line going up, you see that the collective wisdom is heavily in favor of the Jaguars, and on Saturday you put down your bet, giving the Steelers 3 points.

The Jaguars won but by only two points. Following the wisdom of the crowd turned a winning bet into a losing bet. (That was cold comfort for us Steeler fans, who may have won our bets but saw our team lose a heartbreaker.)

In today’s games, the 3-point line on the Bucs and Giants hasn’t moved, at least not as of this morning. But in the Chargers-Titans game, the public has been favoring the Chargers. The line opened at 9 and is now up to 10 at most bookmakers. If you believe in the wisdom of crowds, you bet the Chargers. If you think the oddsmakers are smarter than the public, you bet the Titans plus ten points.