Selling (Out) Public Transport

June 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Even in my early morning stupor, I couldn’t help noticing the new turnstiles at Penn Station. Where once spotless chrome gleamed, proclaiming the subway’s purity, now speaks the crass voice of commerce: There’s a sale at H&M waiting for you upstairs when you leave the station. You can get something for as little as five bucks. Cheap.



It’s not so different from the ads on the walls, I thought. Besides, it might help to keep the fare from going up too much. At least the MTA isn’t selling naming rights to the subway the way the Port Authority nearly sold the George Washington Bridge to Geico (see my old blog entry here.)

That was then. Yesterday, the MTA announced that the Atlantic Ave. Station in Brooklyn will henceforth also be known as the Barclay’s Bank station. The station is a major hub, with transfers available from at least four different subway lines. For a large British bank, the $200,000 a year is pocket change. Talk about cheap.

Oh well, at least they didn’t sell the name for my station.

Taylorized Eating

June 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The 1954 musical The Pajama Game makes fun of “scientific management” and efficiency experts. The comic foil in the show is Hinesy, the time-study man. (See my post of last December on Taylorism.)

In the song “Think of the Time I Save,” Hinesy tells the female workers in the pajama factory of how his personal life is devoted to saving time. He even eats so as to maximize efficiency. The song includes this verse:

At breakfast time, I grab a bowl.
And in the bowl I drop an egg,
And add some juice.
A poor excuse for what I crave.
And then I add some oatmeal too,
And it comes out tasting just like glue,
But think of the time I save.

Parody, right? Could never happen, right? Maybe not, but as Mike at Pragmatic Realists Idealists reports, one fast food chain, BBQ Chicken, is coming close.

Twenty-five Is Not a Random Number

June 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Political scientists Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco have a simple test for electoral fraud in the Iranian election. Here are the results from Qom

• Ahmadinejad . . . . .422,457
• Karroubi . . . . . . . . . . 2,314
• Mousavi. . . . . . . . . .148,467
• Rezaee. . . . . . . . . . . . 16,297

Which digits are the important ones? The left-most ones, of course – Ahmadinejad’s roughly 420,000 to Mousavi’s 148,000.

But Beber and Scacco were interested in the right-most digits, the ones that we might throw out and round to zero. Here’s why:

When people try to make up numbers that appear to be random, they show certain preferences. Try it yourself. Think of any random number from 0 to 100. I’ll wait. Got your number? O.K. Chances are it’s an odd number that does not end in 5. More than likely, it does end in 7.*

In an honest vote count, about 10% of the final digits should be fives, and 10% should be sevens. If five is underrepresented, and if seven is overrepresented, someone is trying to make up numbers and have them seem random.

Beber and Scacco looked at the 116 results (four candidates x 29 provinces) and . . .

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average – a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another – are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

In a second test, Beber and Scacco also looked at the last two digits.

Psychologists have also found that humans have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers.

Sure enough, the totals had fewer non-adjacent pairs than would be expected, especially in the province totals for Ahmadinejad. The two tests provide a fairly persuasive case for what most people think anyway – that the vote totals reported by the Iranian government were fabricated.

Beber and Scacco report their research in the Washington Post here.

*Street magician David Blaine uses this same tendency in one of his mind reading tricks. A lot of people pick 37.

Hat tip to Joshua Tucker at The Monkey Cage, which has links to the electoral data.

States' Rights, and Wrongs

June 19, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Supreme Court decision in Osborne yesterday allows a state to prevent a convicted person from re-examining evidence using modern DNA testing, even though such testing might prove innocence.

That’s bad enough – especially for people who have been wrongfully convicted and who might be exonerated. But my guess is that the conservative majority has bigger things in mind – rolling back incorporation.

Incorporation is the theory that the Warren Court used to prevent states from violating individual rights. The language of the Bill of Rights clearly protects people against actions by the federal government. “Congress shall make no law . . . ” But it says nothing specifically about what state governments may do. The Fourteenth Amendment, like the other two Civil War amendments imposes limitations on the states. No slavery, no denial of the vote. The Fourteenth requires states to follow “due process” in criminal cases.

The trouble was that what state courts considered due process varied widely. In Mississippi, beating defendants till they confessed and then using that confession to convict them was not a violation of due process.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Court handed down some landmark decisions saying basically that certain due process rights which already existed at the federal level (a free lawyer, the exclusion of illegally seized evidence, etc.) were incorporated on the states via the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The conservatives seem to want to restrict these protections and return the definition of due process to the states. As Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his opinion.

This approach would take the development of rules and procedures in this area out of the hands of legislatures and state courts shaping policy in a focused manner and turn it over to federal courts applying the broad parameters of the Due Process Clause. There is no reason to constitutionalize the issue in this way.

“No reason to constitutionalize.” There is a reason, actually – making sure that a state is not locking up (or executing) an innocent person. But that’s a small price to pay for taking one small step in rolling back the constitutionalizing protections of the Court’s more liberal period. Of course, when it comes to state practices the conservatives don’t like (restricting guns, allowing abortions and assisted suicide, counting Democratic votes), I doubt that we’ll hear much from them about the evils of constitutionalizing and incorporation.

None of the legal blogs have mentioned incorporation (at least not the two I looked at). So what I’m saying is either so wrong or so obvious that it isn’t worth noting.