The Face That Launched a Thousand False Positives

May 27, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

What bothered the woman sitting next to him wasn’t just that the guy was writing in what might have been Arabic (it turned out to be math). But he also looked like a terrorist. (WaPo story here.)

We know what terrorists look like. And now an Israeli company, Faception, has combined big data with facial recognition software to come up with this.

According to their Website:

Faception can analyze faces from video streams, cameras, or . . . databases. We match an individual with various personality traits or types such as an Extrovert, a person with High IQ, Professional Poker Player or a Terrorist.

My first thought was, “Oh my god, Lombroso.”

If you’ve taken Crim 101, you might remember that Lombroso, often called “the father of criminology,” had the idea that criminals were atavisms, throwbacks to earlier stages of human evolution, with different skull shapes and facial features. A careful examination of a person’s head and face could diagnose criminality – even the specific type of lawbreaking the criminal favored. Here is an illustration from an 1876 edition of his book. Can you spot the poisoner, the Neapolitan thief, the Piedmont forger?

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Criminology textbooks still mention Lombroso, though rarely as a source enlightenment. For example, one book concludes the section on Lombroso, “At this point, you may be asking: If Lombroso, with his ideas about criminal ears and jaws, is the ‘father of criminology,’ what can we expect of subsequent generations of criminologists?”

Apparently there’s just something irresistible in the idea that people’s looks reveal their character. Some people really do look like criminals, and some people look like cops.* Some look like a terrorist or a soccer mom or a priest. That’s why Hollywood still pays casting directors. After all, we know that faces show emotion, and most of us know at a glance whether the person we’re looking at is feeling happy, angry, puzzled, hurt, etc. So it’s only logical that a face will reveal more permanent characteristics. As Faception puts it, “According to social and life science research, our personality is determined by our DNA reflected in our face.” It’s not quite true, but it sounds plausible.

The problem with this technique is not the theory or science behind it, and probably not even its ability to pick out terrorists, brand promoters, bingo players, or any of their other dramatis personae in the Faception cast of characters. The problem is false positives. Even when a test is highly accurate, if the thing it’s testing for is rare, a positive identification is likely to be wrong. Mammograms, for example, have an accuracy rate as high as 90%. Each year, about 37 million women in the US are given mammograms. The number who have breast cancer is about 180,000. The 10% error rate means that of the 37 million women tested, 3.7 million will get results that are false positives. It also means that for the woman who does test positive, the likelihood that the diagnosis is wrong is 95%.**

Think of these screening tests as stereotypes. The problem with stereotypes is not that they are wrong; without some grain of truth, they wouldn’t exist. The problem is that they have many grains of untruth – false positives. We have been taught to be wary of stereotypes not just because they denigrate an entire class of people but because in making decisions about individuals, those stereotypes yield a lot of false positives.  

Faception does provide some data on the accuracy of its screening. But poker champions and terrorists are rarer even than breast cancer. So even if the test can pick out the true terrorist waiting to board the plane, it’s also going to pick out a lot of bearded Italian economists jotting integral signs and Greek letters on their notepads.

(h/t Cathy O’Neil at MathBabe.org)
----------------------

* Some people look like cops. My favorite example is the opening of Richard Price’s novel Lush Life – four undercover cops, though the cover they are under is not especially effective.

The Quality of Life Task Force: four sweatshirts in a bogus taxi set up on the corner of Clinton Street alongside the Williamsburg Bridge off-ramp to profile the incoming salmon run; their mantra: Dope, guns, overtime; their motto: Everyone’s got something to lose.  [...] At the corner of Houston and Chrystie, a cherry-red Denali pulls up alongside them, three overdressed women in the backseat, the driver alone up front and wearing sunglasses. The passenger-side window glides down . “Officers, where the Howard Johnson hotel at around here ...” “Straight ahead three blocks on the far corner,” Lugo offers. “Thank you.” [. . .] The window glides back up and he shoots east on Houston. “Did he call us officers?” “It’s that stupid flattop of yours.” “It’s that fuckin’ tractor hat of yours.”

It wasn’t the haircut or the hat. They just looked like cops.

** The probability that the diagnosis is correct is 5% – the 180,000 true positives divided by the 3.7 million false positives plus the 180,000 true positives – roughly 180,000 / 3,900,000. (I took this example from Howard Wainer’s recent book, Truth and Truthiness.)

A Time for Cliches

May 25, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

You can imagine what the reaction on the right would be if students heckled their graduation speaker with shouts of “Trash” and “Get off the stage.” Actually, you don’t have to imagine. You can find what  the National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and similar conservative havens have already said – that campus liberals are against free speech and that they are afraid to even hear ideas they disagree with.

Will they say those same things about the students at Cal State Fullerton who erupted during a graduation ceremony at the College of Communications. The speaker was Maria Elena Salinas, an anchor at Univision, At one point, she spoke briefly in Spanish “to encourage students interested in going into Spanish-language media and to tell them she has a scholarship for them,” (WaPo) The Fullerton student body is 40% Hispanic.

Tensions worsened as Salinas began offering advice to journalism students to use the tools of media to rebut political figures such as Donald Trump. That’s when folks began yelling things to Salinas such as, “Get off the stage!” and “Trash!” (OC Weekly )

Were these students* against free speech? Were they afraid to hear her ideas about Trump? I doubt it. I can only repeat what I said a year ago at graduation time (here): graduations are not about the exchange of ideas, they are about symbolism, and what the ritual, almost any ritual, symbolizes is group solidarity. Conflict is out place. If a speaker represents policies that are highly divisive, or if the speech becomes explicitly partisan, or if the speaker excludes part of the assembled group (e.g., by speaking a language half the group cannot understand), the temporary unity is ruined. The students who heckled Salinas probably felt that she had a right to her opinions and her language, but this was their graduation ceremony, and she was spoiling the show.

I guess there’s something to be said for tepid speeches with their cliches about hard work and achievement, about the future and seizing opportunity, about following your passion and making a difference and all those other phrases on your Commencement Speech Bingo card.

-----------------------
* The students who voiced their displeasure must have been a small minority and seated away from the microphone. In the video in the WaPo link, their heckling cannot be heard. If you watch the video excerpt, you can also hear that the Spanish portion of the speech took less than thirty seconds. So possibly the Post is making a bigger deal out of this than is warranted.

Is It Trivia?

May 21, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

 Is knowledge important? Or in the age of the Internet, is it all just trivia?

1. A quiz posted on Facebook says “97% of Adults Can’t Pass This Elementary Test (21 Questions).” What is the closest planet to the sun is, where was Einstein was born, which president served three consecutive terms. . . .

I could answer most of the questions. But instead of basking in the glow of the screen’s telling me I was a genius, or being horrified that so many of my fellow Americans flunked, I was bothered by the more important question: so what? What’s the point of knowing facts like these? Unless you’re going to be on Jeopardy, does it matter any more? Most of the 97% do not need to know which planet is closest to the sun, and if they did ever need that information, they could find it on the Internet.

And yet, I probably use someone’s knowledge of stuff like this as a proxy for their ability to think.

2.  Most multiple-choice exams are based on this same assumption – that students who can remember more facts are better students. Years ago I was discussing this with an economics adjunct who had an office near mine.  “Why not use multiple-choice tests for grading?” I said. “If you used some other kind of test, you’d get the same results.”

    “Then why not just ask them their parents’ income?” he said. “You’d get the same distribution.”

3. I told one of my classes that they could choose the kind of final they wanted: open book – meaning books, notes, phones, whatever – or traditional. With open book, I warned, the questions will be harder– not just giving a definition or fact. Even the multiple-choice items will require you to think. I gave them this free sample:

A Mastercard ad shows a father and son at a baseball game.  The voiceover says, “Two tickets $46. Two hot dogs, two popcorns, two sodas $27. One autographed baseball $50.  Real conversation with eleven-year-old son, priceless.”  The idea that conversation with your own son is “priceless” – that its value cannot be put into dollars – means that its value is     a.    worthless     b.    utilitarian     c.    universalistic     d.    particularistic

Besides, I said, looking up stuff on the Internet or in your books, notes, or downloaded PowerPoints takes time, time that you’ll need for writing.

“So now, how many want open book?” I asked. Hands flew up. It wasn’t even close.

4. Question #10 on the Facebook quiz:

More trivia, important, if at all, only because the US is still stuck with its pre-metric system.

The day after I took this test, I was in the locker room at the gym. One guy there had an empty three-liter Poland Spring jug, He must have been about to use it to mix up some energy elixir. He was asking his friend how many ounces in a gallon, wondering, I guess, if the jug would be large enough. The directions for the magic powder he’d bought probably told him to mix so many scoops with one gallon of water. 

The label said three liters or 101.4 ounces.  The friend was pretty sure that a gallon was 162 ounces. Oh, well. When it’s time to mix the cocktail, they can look it up on their smart phones. And if they don’t, the guy with the jug didn’t look like someone whose buffness would suffer much from a potion that, like his general knowledge, was too diluted.

Auctions – Making a Killing

May 12, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Anything can happen at an auction, especially when the item is unique. The baseball that was hit for a record-setting home run is indistinguishable from the baseball you can buy for $25 or less at Wal*Mart. But it’s worth more because of its close association with an important event or person.

How much more? If there has been a market for that kind of item, we can make a fairly good guess. Maybe we know what other home-run balls have gone for the same way we know the auction histories of Rothkos, Chippendales, and other collector’s items.

But what if the object is truly unique? What if the event, unlike record setting home runs, happened only once and will never happen again. And to add to the uncertainty, what if the bidders are similarly unknown – people who have never entered an auction?

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Yes, George Zimmerman is auctioning the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin. I’m curious to see what happens. As far as I know, there’s no established or even occasional market for guns used in celebrated killings.

Some objects acquire their value because of they carry the magical power of the person they belonged to. A celebrity’s signature, a rock star’s sweaty t-shirt tossed to the audience. But I suspect that the bidders want this gun not because it was touched by Zimmerman. Even gunslingers, I would guess, don’t see him as a charismatic figure. Instead, the value lies in the sacred event. It’s like buying a piece of the Berlin Wall. The event in this case is the killing of Trayvon Martin and all its symbolic meaning. Even Zimmerman makes that point in the description of the item.

(Click to enlarge. Or see the text, in a readable font size, at the bottom of the page.)

Zimmerman also stresses the gun’s symbolic political meaning. He says that “a portion” of the money will go for political purposes.

How much is it worth to own the crucial artifact of that killing? We’ll know by tomorrow.

You can bid on the gun here. Bidding starts at $5000.

Text of the auction description

Prospective bidders, I am honored and humbled to announce the sale of an American Firearm Icon. The firearm for sale is the firearm that was used to defend my life and end the brutal attack from Trayvon Martin on 2/26/2012. The gun is a Kel-Tec PF-9 9mm. It has recently been returned to me by the Department of Justice. The pistol currently has the case number written on it in silver permanent marker. Many have expressed interest in owning and displaying the firearm including The Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. This is a piece of American History. It has been featured in several publications and in current University text books. Offers to purchase the Firearm have been received; however, the offers were to use the gun in a fashion I did not feel comfortable with. The firearm is fully functional as the attempts by the Department of Justice on behalf of B. Hussein Obama to render the firearm inoperable were thwarted by my phenomenal Defense Attorney. I recognize the purchaser's ownership and right to do with the firearm as they wish. The purchaser is guaranteed validity and authenticity of the firearm. On this day, 5/11/2016 exactly one year after the shooting attempt to end my life by BLM sympathizer Matthew Apperson I am proud to announce that a portion of the proceeds will be used to: fight BLM violence against Law Enforcement officers, ensure the demise of Angela Correy's persecution career and Hillary Clinton's anti-firearm rhetoric. Now is your opportunity to own a piece of American History. Good Luck. Your friend, George M. Zimmerman ~Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum~

UPDATE: As you know if you clicked on the link, the 9 mm piece of history has been removed from the auction site. Neither GunBroker.com nor Zimmerman has offered an explanation.

Sometimes I Feel Like . . . a Muddledness Child

May 1, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Molly Worthen* is fighting tyranny, specifically the “tyranny of feelings” and the muddle it creates.  It’s a tyranny without a tyrant (sorry, Obama haters; you can’t pin this one on him). Instead, it’s like the Yeerks in the Animorphs books my son used to read – worm-like aliens that slip in through a human’s ear, wrap themselves around his brain, and take over his thought. We don’t realize that our thinking has been enslaved by this tyranny, but alas, we now speak its language. Case in point:

“Personally, I feel like Bernie Sanders is too idealistic,” a Yale student explained to a reporter in Florida.

Why the “linguistic hedging” as Worthen calls it? Why couldn’t the kid just say, “Sanders is too idealistic”? You might think the difference is minor, or perhaps the speaker is reluctant to assert an opinion as though it were fact. Worthen disagrees..

“I feel like” is not a harmless tic. . . . The phrase says a great deal about our muddled ideas about reason, emotion and argument — a muddle that has political consequences.

The phrase “I feel like” is part of a more general evolution in American culture. We think less in terms of morality – society’s standards of right and wrong – and more in terms individual psychological well-being. (I almost always dislike the phrase “in terms of,” but in this case, it is apt. I am talking about words.) The shift from “I think” to “I feel like” echoes an earlier linguistic trend  when we gave up terms like “should” or “ought to” in favor of “needs to.” To say, “Kayden, you should be quiet and settle down,” invokes external social rules of morality. But, “Kayden, you need to settle down,” refers to his internal, psychological needs. Be quiet not because it’s good for others but because it’s good for you.

In an earlier post (here) I reported that “needs to” began its rise in the late 1970s. “I feel like” is more recent, says Worthen, going back only a decade or two.

[Update: After I originally posted this, Philip Cohen ran “I feel like” through Google nGrams, as did Mark Liberman at Language Log, and found that, like “needs to,” the phrase “I feel like” began its rise in the late 1970s,not in the 90s as Worthen seems to think. Here is my own nGrams version. To ensure that “I feel like” excludes phrases like “I feel like taking a walk ” or “I feel like a motherless child,” I added a pronoun so that “I feel like” has to be followed by a clause, e.g., “I feel like he is too idealistic.” To get both lines on the same grid, I had to multiply “I feel like” uses by 500.]

Regardless of when the tide of “I feel like” starts its rise, Worthen finds it more insidious. She says that the phrase defeats rational discussion. You can argue with what someone says about the facts. You can’t argue with what they say about how they feel.

Worthen is asserting a clear cause and effect. She quotes Orwell: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” She has no evidence of this causal relationship, but she cites some linguists who agree. She also quotes Mark Liberman, who does not agree and is much calmer about the whole thing. When you say, “I feel like. . .” people know what you mean despite the hedging, just as they know that when you say, “I feel,” it means “I think,” and that you are not speaking about your actual emotions.

The more common “I feel like” becomes, the less importance we may attach to its literal meaning. “I feel like the emotions have long since been mostly bleached out of ‘feel that,’ ”

Worthen nevertheless insists on the Yeerkish insidious quality of “I feel like.”  “When new verbal vices become old habits, their power to shape our thought does not diminish.” She does not provide any evidence to show that “I feel like” has actually shaped our thoughts or that it has a shadowy power to cloud men’s minds.

“Vices” indeed. Her entire op-ed piece is a good example of the style of moral discourse that she says we have lost. Her stylistic preferences may have something to do with her scholarly ones – she studies conservative Christianity. No “needs to” for her. She closes her sermon with shoulds:

We should not “feel like.” We should argue rationally, feel deeply and take full responsibility for our interaction with the world.

-------------------------
*Worthen’s op-ed in today’s New York Times is here.

Happy Birthday, Duke

April 29, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Edward Kennedy Ellington, born April 29, 1899.  His work – its quality, quantity, and diversity – is one of the treasures of American music. And he wrote most of it while working full-time as CEO of a touring band. Here is a 1940 recording of “Cottontail” – “modern jazz before there was ever such a term,” according to David Rickert (here)

One early morning years ago, I was driving to work, feeling not especially cheerful about, well, everything. The radio was on – WBGO – and the DJ played this recording, and suddenly the fog lifted. I especially like the saxophone section chorus that starts shortly after the 2:00 mark.

There’s also Ben Webster’s famous solo on the second chorus – “one of Webster's best solos, and also one of the greatest ever recorded,” says Rickert ,adding that it’s a great example of a solo telling a story. But for the full story, listen to the lyric by Jon Hendricks –  Beatrix Potter meets Duke Ellington. It begins,

Way back in my childhood
I heard a story so true
’Bout a funny bunny
Stealing some boo from a garden he knew.

(Hendricks wrote it in around 1960 – it’s on LHR’s 1962 album (listen here). But “boo” is a 1940s term for what we now call weed. )

How the Other 47% Lives

April 25, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Remember the 47% – those Americans whose income was so low that they were not required to pay any income tax? Mitt Romney talked about them four years ago when he was running for president. They are generally a concern among conservatives, who have identified them variously as “dependent,” “irresponsible,” “takers,” “lucky duckies,” and probably other unflattering names. 

That number, 47%,  cropped up again about a year ago when the Federal Reserve issued the results of a survey on household economic well-being (here). The Fed asked people what they would do if faced with an unexpected emergency costing $400. Only 53% of Americans said that they had enough cash hand or that they could pay it off on their next month’s credit card bill. The other 47% would have to sell something or go into debt. And some said that they would just be unable to find the money.

The Fed’s question is hardly hypothetical. Nearly a quarter of the households reported at least one financial hardship in the past year. Medical and job setbacks accounted for over half of these.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

The Fed survey found that even among people earning $40,000 - $100,000, only slightly more than half (56%) could deal with a $400 crisis with either cash on hand or one-month credit card debt. Those with lower incomes, especially Blacks and Hispanics, fare even worse. Only 23% and 31% respectively could handle a $400 setback.

It’s possible that Obamacare will reduce the financial burden of medical emergencies. The survey was done in 2014 before the full effects of Obamacare were felt. Still, even among those with insurance and incomes in the middle category reported foregoing some medical treatment because they couldn’t afford it.

There’s a quote I’ve come across a few times in discussions about these kinds of uncertainties. “I’m just one illness, or one job, or one divorce away from poverty.” I’m not sure who said it – probably many people. The point is that it’s not only the poor whose economic position is precarious.  Middle-class people may just be less likely to admit it. Financial worry and need can be matters of shame, especially for those who seem to be solidly middle class. It’s not something anyone wants to talk about frankly.

Neal Gabler comes out of the financial-fear closet in a recent article in The Atlantic. I remember seeing Gabler on TV in the 1980s as half of the team that replaced Siskel and Ebert chatting about new movies on PBS. I figured he was doing all right. But no. He has not been living extravagantly, but with an income at about the US median, he too has to struggle.

I know what it is like to have liens slapped on me and to have my bank account levied by creditors. I know what it is like to be down to my last $5—literally—while I wait for a paycheck to arrive, and I know what it is like to subsist for days on a diet of eggs. I know what it is like to dread going to the mailbox, because there will always be new bills to pay but seldom a check with which to pay them. I know what it is like to have to tell my daughter that I didn’t know if I would be able to pay for her wedding; it all depended on whether something good happened. And I know what it is like to have to borrow money from my adult daughters because my wife and I ran out of heating oil.

Gabler has social capital (friends, family), and perhaps cultural capital, that he can, in an emergency, convert to financial capital. Most of the others in the 47% are not so lucky.

 UPDATE, April26:  Scott Winship has a critique of Gabler’s article and of the Fed data.  His article is online at National Review (here). Winship is the Walter B. Wriston fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank (Walter Wriston was the CEO of Citicorp from 1967 to 1984), and he scoffs at the notion that nearly half of us would be hard pressed to deal with a $400 setback. He parses the language of the Fed’s questionnaire (saying how you would cover the $400 is not the same as saying whether you could cover it). And besides, lots of people don’t save that $400 because of the multitude of people and institutions they have at their back:

“various forms of private insurance, a more general insurance system is constituted by 401(k) loans and distributions, home equity, credit cards, the public safety net and social insurance, bankruptcy courts, legally mandated emergency-room care, marriage, family, and friends.”

No right-wing critique of the economic hardship (and according to Winship the hardship isn’t really that hard or widespread) would be complete without reference to individual virtue, and Winship comes through for the team:

“If too few people have $400 in emergency funds, it might mean that the economy is doing poorly by them. But it might also mean that too few of us have internalized the virtue of thrift.”

He also hints that in his heart of hearts he believes that the impact of the economy on individuals is less important than the impact of individual virtue on the economy.

“We should want to both promote responsible choices and have an effective economy; we cannot simply presume that more economic growth would promote thrift. The reverse could very well be true.”

Reality Trumping Satire

April 23, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s hard to do political satire when reality keeps catching up with you. I don’t know who first made this observation – Mort Sahl, maybe. Tom Lehrer said that political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the issue of the The New Yorker that came out earlier this week, all the cartoons were about Donald Trump. Roz Chast imagined the Trump campaign saying that the Trump we’ve been seeing for the last months or perhaps years was just an act.

Two days ago, Trump’s campaign manager announced that the Trump’s performance as a candidate was just what the Chast said – all a big put-on.

Speaking at a private meeting of Republican Party leaders, Paul Manafort, who was recently hired as Trump’s campaign chief, acknowledged the billionaire businessman has been  “projecting an image” in order to energize voters in the primary election campaign.  “When he’s out on the stage, when he’s talking about the kinds of things he’s talking about on the stump, he's projecting an image that's for that purpose,” Manafort said. [source]

Then it gets really meta. Roz Chast’s cartoon on page 49 anticipated the reality. Later in the magazine, on page 88 Robert Leighton’s cartoon anticipates the anticipation.

Of course, the best example of the reality-overtaking-satire problem remains the Onion headline a day or two before the 2001 inauguration of George W. Bush.

Linda Tischler

Linda Tischler died on April 11. She was a wonderful woman, intelligent and gracious, and an excellent journalist. In January 2007, an evening with her and her husband Henry (a sometime colleague of mine at Montclair) provided me with material for a blogpost in the early months of the Socioblog. As a sort of Flashback Friday, I'm reposting it. The title of the post was “Little Miss Raincloud” (the movie “Little Miss Sunshine” had recently been released, and I had blogged about it.) I still think the post is pretty good, mostly thanks to Linda. (Tributes by her colleagues are here.)

January 31, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Optimism, hard work, success. They’re part of the culture, and we drink it into our consciousness just like Coca-Cola. If you have the right, positive attitude, and you work hard at your idea, you’ll be a winner.

Even if you personally don’t live by these basic American values, they are such a dominant part of the culture that you probably think you should live by them. Values are ideas and principles that are intrinsically good. You can’t argue with them. As my friend Linda Tischler found out.

Linda (wife of sociologist Henry Tischler) is a journalist, and she has been writing about business for a long time. As a senior writer at Fast Company magazine, she was invited to be on a panel at a conference of the N.A.F.E., the National Association for Female Executives. They couldn’t pay her, but they’d cover her expenses. The name Laguna Niguel, California had a nice ring to it. So did the name Ritz Carlton, so she took the offer.

The audience was full of hopeful female entrepreneurs —“momtrepreneurs” as they liked to call themselves— women who had started up a business during naptimes. What they wanted to hear from the journalists was how to get their product into an article in Fast Company, Business Week, or similar magazines.

Linda told them frankly that the odds were very much against them. “I get seventy-five e-mails every day pitching story ideas like that, plus the phone calls and snail mail. And a lot of those pitches are from well-paid PR people at GE, Apple, etc.” She was telling them, in effect, it’s very unlikely that we’re going to do a story about you.

This was definitely not what the audience wanted to hear, and from the comments and reactions, she thought the momtrepreneurs at Laguna Niguel might wind up dumping her in the laguna. After all, these were women who had paid $400 for a conference that promised

Featured business sessions include “A View From the Top” with the country's leading female CEOs; building your brand; effective networking; balancing work, relationships and family; conversation with leading journalists. Attendees will be able to connect with Fortune 500 companies and present their products and services through exclusive invitation-only matchmaking event.

They wanted a pep talk, a “motivational speaker,” someone who would tell them how they could get on the cover of Fortune. And she gave them reality.

She also told them how she screens the pitches. “If your e-mail is bigger than two megabytes, it’s going to get deleted unread. If it doesn’t tell me in the first short paragraph or two what the idea is, out it goes,” and so on. I think her mistake was that she put her advice in the negative, what not to do. That along with her basic message made her a raincloud spoiling the sunny clime of Laguna Niguel.

Linda and Henry recounted her sad tale at dinner last night. It’s not all we talked about. Conversation turned, as it often does, to Iraq. And now I wonder if there isn’t a parallel. The Bush administration sold the invasion on fear (remember those WMDs), but they also sold it on American optimism. We would oust Saddam, and all the Iraqis, just like the Munchkins when Dorothy liquidates the witch, would be free and happy and forever grateful to their liberators.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way— the optimism was more based on neo-conservative fantasies in the US rather than realities in Iraq— but Bush still frames the war in terms of winning and losing, as though international politics is some kind of game with only two outcomes— victory and defeat, success and failure. Since, in another phrase much beloved among motivational speakers, failure is not an option, he’s throwing in another 20,000 troops.

As I walked home after dinner, I passed the building of an acquaintance, Allen Seiden. Allen is a good poker player, and he’d been playing long before the current poker boom — a boom that has allowed him to go from smoky house games to lecturing and teaching. “The first thing you have to learn if you want to win money in poker,” he tells his audience, “is a four-letter word that begins with F. The word is fold. Use it early, use it often.”

The audience nods, but the chances are that most of them don’t really learn the lesson. Most poker players, the average pigeons, will call the bet just to see one more card rather than admit that the hand is a loser, optimistically hoping for the card that will fill their straight and bring them success  Which is why Allen has been able to make money playing poker. And which may also be why Bush just sent more troops to Baghdad.

Image or Brand

April 22, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

One word in today’s headlines seemed like a throwback to an earlier era: image.

It was in the 1960s that politicians, their handlers, and the people who write about them discovered image. The word carries the cynical implication that voters, like shoppers, respond to the surface image rather than the substance – the picture on the box rather than what’s inside.  A presidential campaign was based on the same thing as an advertising campaign – image.  You sold a candidate the same way you sold cigarettes, at least according to the title and book jacket of Joe McGinnis’s book.

 (That pack of Nixon’s should have carried the Surgeon General’s warning.) 

 
Then, sometime around 1980, image began to fade. In its place we now have brand. I went to Google N-grams and looked at the ratio of image to brand in both the corporate and the political realm. The pattern is nearly identical.

The ratio rises steeply from 1960 to 1980 – lots more talk about image, no increase in brand. Then the trend reverses. Sightings of image were still rising, but nowhere nearly as rapidly as brand, which doubled from 1980 to 2000 in politics and quadrupled in the corporate world.

Image sounds too deceptive and manipulative; you can change it quickly according to the needs of the moment. Brand implies permanence and substance (not to mention Marlboro-man-like rugged independence and integrity.) No wonder people in the biz prefer brand.

Decades ago, when my son was in grade school, I met another parent who worked in the general area of public relations. On seeing him at the next school function a few weeks later, I said, “Oh right, you work in corporate image-mongering.” I thought I said it jokingly, but he seemed offended. He was, I quickly learned, a brand consultant. Image bad; brand good.

In later communications, he also said that a company’s attempt to brand itself as something it’s not will inevitably fail.  The same thing supposedly goes for politics

“One thing you learn very quickly in political consulting is the fruitlessness of trying to get a candidate to change who he or she fundamentally is at their core,” said Republican strategist Whit Ayres, who did polling for Rubio’s presidential campaign before he dropped out of the race. “So, is the snide, insulting, misogynistic guy we’ve seen really who Donald Trump is? Or is it the disciplined, respectful, unifying Trump we saw for seven minutes after the New York primary?

These consultants are saying what another Republican said a century and a half ago: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

This seems to argue that political image-mongers have to be honest about who their candidate really is. But there’s another way of reading Lincoln’s famous line: You only need to fool half the people every four years.

Miles Ahead

April 21, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Don Cheadle didn’t want to do a biopic, and how can you blame him? As a person, Miles was not an attractive or sympathetic character. What he cared about was himself – his music, his painting, his drugs. He treated the women in his his life as though they were possessions, like his stylish clothes and cars, except that as far as we know he did not beat his suits or Ferraris. Besides, Cheadle probably wanted to avoid the biopic cliches – the significant childhood scene where the boy’s talent first becomes apparent, the early struggles, the success (fast montage of club posters with the hero’s name rising in the billing), the downfall, the redemption.

“I was born, I moved to New York, met some cats, made some music, did some dope, made some more music, then you showed up at my house.” Miles delivers this line, along with a right hook to the face, to a journalist who shows up at his door wanting to do a story. It’s as though Cheadle is saying to the audience, “You want biography? Here’s your biography.”

But the movie avoids only some of the biopic cliches. It keeps others.  That journalist who wants to track down the “real” person, for example, is a familiar movie device (“Citizen Kane”). At least the movie doesn’t end with him rolling a sheet of paper into his typewriter and tapping out the “The Real Miles” or some such.

Instead of biopic, Cheadle gives us a completely made-up story, complete with guns and high-speed
car chases – not exactly what comes to mind when you hear the name Miles Davis. The trailer, as usual, gives you the plot such as it is.



It’s another venerable plot line – the artist preserving his art from the  vultures who want it only because they can turn it into filthy lucre. The art in this case is that tape that Miles recorded privately and keeps locked in a drawer. (There may have been such a tape, but on it Miles plays organ, and from all reports, not very well. And nobody stole it.)

There’s even a song-origins scene hokey enough to be in a 1940s songwriting team “and then we wrote” movie. Miles, at home watching his wife Frances Taylor dance, picks up his horn and starts to play a melody that sounds like the children’s song “Put Your Little Foot.” Jazzers will get the reference: that melody turned up as “Fran-Dance” on the 1958 album “Jazz Track.”

Music was the best and most important thing about Miles, so the big disappointment (for me at least) is that so little of the film is about the making of music. The secondary role is logical given that Cheadle chose to set the film in the late 1970s when Miles stopped playing and disappeared from public view for five years. So it’s mostly in the flashbacks that we hear Miles’s music. Cheadle apparently learned to play trumpet, and he fingers accurately to Miles’s recorded solos from well-known albums like “Kind of Blue.” But these snatches rarely last more than about 15 seconds. There is one music-making scene: Miles and Gil Evans discuss some details in the arrangement of “Gone” during the recording session of “Porgy and Bess.”

Still, Cheadle carries the film. He captures an essential part of Miles’s character – the absolute confidence and the apparent indifference to what anyone else thinks. Miles, who, even in the 50s when jazz was struggling to be respectable, walked  off the set during his sidemen’s solos and literally turned his back on his audience, who then to the dismay of many turned his back on bebop for electric and rock (there’s a parallel here with Dylan and his audience). That’s the Miles we see. I just wish that we got to hear more of his music.   

Who’s Smarter?

April 17, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

I was not optimistic when I tried a version of the old Quizmaster-Contestant-Observer game* that illustrates the fundamental attribution error. This is the error that occurs when we explain someone else’s behavior mostly in terms of their personal traits and ignore the effects of the situation. My attempts to replicate well-known effects usually fail. My students and I are just bad replicators I guess. But this time it worked.

Here’s the set-up: I asked students to come to class with seven trivia questions – challenging but not impossible, the kind that even when you can’t think of the answer, and then someone tells you, you say, “Oh, of course.” I gave them some samples and added, “This is not a graded assignment. You can get help from your friends. You can use the internet (I did).”

In class, I divided them into groups of three and told them to choose** roles. They could be the Questioner, the Contestant, or the Observer. Then the Questioner asked the seven questions, the Contestant tried to answer and was told if the answer was right or wrong, the Observer observed. They then returned to their regular seats and got this form.

We assume that most Contestants will get a few wrong. We also can be sure that the Questioner knows all the answers. But what are we to conclude from that? That the Questioner knows more than the Contestant? Of course not. It’s easy to ace the quiz if you’re the one who makes up the questions. If the roles had been reversed, if the Contestant had been the one to ask the questions she thought up, she would be the one with more answers.

But we just cannot resist the temptation to draw conclusions about the persons themselves and to ignore the advantages and disadvantages of the positions. The chart shows how participants in the different roles rated the Questioners and Contestants.

As attribution theory predicts, Observers were quick to make judgments about the relative knowledge of the Questioner and Contestant. They ignored the role differences and concluded that if the Questioner knew more answers, that’s who must know more trivia.

Attribution theory also says that when we look at our own behavior, we are more likely to make “situational attributions.” Accordingly, Questioners and Contestants may have taken the constraints of role into consideration. In any case, they did not see so large a difference, though even they could not escape the conclusion that the Questioner was better informed. Contestants were impressed by the knowledge that the Questioner supposedly possessed, even though they knew that the Questioner could have gotten the questions from the Internet.

Sometimes the fundamental attribution error extends beyond what might be suggested by the specific tasks – in this case, knowledge in a trivia game – and gets to more permanent qualities. We see someone trip and stumble. Why? Because he’s clumsy, we say. We have assigned him a more or less permanent trait on the basis of one brief event. And similarly, if we see a rigged trivia game where the person who wrote the questions knows all the answers . . .

---------------------------------------

* See Ross, Amabilie, and Steinmetz,1977 (here).

** The roles should be assigned randomly. That was not the only way in which my experimental design was deeply flawed, and I report the results here not because they are convincing, but merely because I was so pleased that in at least one way they turned out the way the theory says they should.

Screwed

April 13, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Does anyone remember what Charles Murray said about Black political choices in his 1984 book Losing Ground – the part where he says that African Americans had been “screwed”?

Call it “Jesse Jackson-ism” – the willingness of Blacks to support demagogues like Jackson and Louis Farrakhan. It goes along with a general attitude of resignation and alienation. These are expressions of a lot of legitimate grievances that Blacks have with the ruling class in this country. Those grievances include  the cultural disdain that the White ruling class has for Blacks. Those grievances include the nature of the labor market for Blacks – the loss of manufacturing jobs, the relegation to the least secure and lowest paying sectors, and, as has been shown in study after study about hiring and promotion, employers’ preference for Whites. Basically, it’s all the ways in which, if you’re Black and working class, you’ve been screwed.

Of course you don’t remember that passage. I made it up. I based it on what what Murray actually did say recently about Whites who support Trump

Trumpism is the expression by the White working class of a lot of legitimate grievances that it has with the ruling class – everything from the cultural disdain that the elite holds the working class in to the loss of all kinds of manufacturing jobs, the importation of low-skilled labor – all the ways in which, if you’re a member of the working class, you have, over the last thirty forty years, been screwed. [from a walk-and-talk interview with Paul Solman on PBS].

What Murray actually did say in 1984 about Blacks was that while “discouragement” might explain the alienation, unemployment, and decreasing labor force participation of rural populations, “it is not possible to use discouragement as an explanation for the long-term trend [in Black labor force participation].”

The problem was not in the kinds of jobs available to working-class Blacks.

The problem with this new form of unemployment was . . . that young black males – or young poor males . . . moved in and out of the labor force at precisely that point in their lives when it was most important that they acquire skills, work habits, and a work record. [p. 82.]

In Murray’s view, everything in the US was fine. The trouble was not that people had been screwed by forces they had no control over. The trouble was that these Black guys turned their backs and refused to seize opportunities – skills, work habits, a work record.

Murray’s divining rod for finding dysfunction used to point to poor people themselves. Now, it hovers over more abstract sources – the culture, the economy. Some see this change as evidence of Murray’s racism – one kind of explanation for Black poverty, another for Whites. But there are geographic differences – urban, non-urban – and maybe the economy is different in important ways than it was thirty years ago.

Not all Murray’s conservative brethren shift their attention to these broader forces to explain Trumpism. For readers who might be getting nostalgic for “It’s their own damn fault”  – the idea that poor people and their culture are to blame for poverty and its attendant miseries – I close with an excerpt from Kevin Williamson’s recent fire-and-brimstone sermon in The National Review :

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. . . .  The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.

Sins and Solutions

April 9, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Where Americans see sin that should be punished, Europeans often see a problem that needs a solution. Drug policy is the obvious and important example. Our forty-year prison-bulging moral panic contrasts with policies in the Netherlands, for example, which focused less on righteous punishment for offenders and more on reducing harm.

The same rational, non-moralistic approach applied to sex was the topic of a recent “Friday Flashback” post by Lisa Wade at Sociological Images (here), posted originally in 2010. Lisa mentioned Dutch government policies on prostitution – Amsterdam’s red-light districts for legal and regulated prostitution may be more famous even than the cannabis-selling coffee shops. But her example was from Scotland

Julieta R. sent in this picture, shot by her friend at the Aberdeen Pub in Edinburgh, Scotland. Sex in the bathroom, it appears, had begun to inconvenience customers. But, instead of trying to eradicate the behavior, the Pub just said: “Ok, fine, but just keep it to cubicle no. 4.”

This flashed me back to post (here) from 2007. I’m not too proud to recycle my garbage, especially since our moralistic approach to problems came up in class last week. So here is that post again in slightly altered form.
 

*          *          *         *         *          *         *

Men can be slobs, especially at the urinal.

At airports, for example, jet lagged travelers, men at least, tended to be, how shall we put it, careless? aimless?

What to do?

Americans tend to frame problems in moralistic terms. If something is wrong, drug use for example, punish the wrongdoers.  And if that doesn’t work, make the penalties even harsher.  Applied to the problem of spillage and splash in the men’s room, we might expect to see signs warning: “No Spillage or Spraying. Penalty $500 fine.”
 
The Dutch have a more practical approach, more focused on solving a problem than on punishing evil.  The Dutch also have a reputation for cleanliness.  Around 1970, when the men’s rooms at the Amsterdam airport were looking and smelling like, well, like men’s rooms, Schiphol, the company that runs the Amsterdam airport, looked into the problem. And the problem was  that most men weren’t looking.  They simply didn’t watch where they were going.  So Schiphol came up with a simple and non-punitive solution:

It’s that black spot (I’ve added the red outline).  Click on the photo for a larger view, and you will see that it’s a fly.  Or rather, it’s a realistic picture of a fly.  The idea was that men would aim for the fly – the stream would go from one fly to another (I’m sure this pun doesn’t translate to Dutch) – and the men’s room would stay cleaner.

It worked.  A study by Schiphol’s social science team found that fly urinals had an 80% reduction in spillage.  Some years after that, JFK hired Schiphol to run the International Arrivals Building there.  So now at JFK too, the urinals have the target flies.  At the Newark airport, I saw urinals with a cartoon-like bee (a realistic bee might have might have triggered a counterproductive startle and flinch). [This post is from years ago. Things at these airports may have changed.]

More recently, urinal targets have gotten even more playful.  For the Europeans, there’s soccer.

This was still before soccer was at all popular in the US. So an American company, not to be outdone, encouraged men to piss a field goal through the uprights.

Good clean fun.

--------------------

Update, April 10: Language Log had a post yesterday not exactly on the same topic  – it’s really about the perils of translation  – but it does focus on signs intended to improve the aura of men’s rooms, and it’s too good to pass up. 

For more information on the mis-translation go here.

AKD 2016

April 8, 2016 
Posted by Jay Livingston

On Monday, April 4, we had our annual induction for students joining AKD, the sociology honor society.  These are our best – the students who, when they’re in your class, make you think that maybe this teaching thing is a pretty good gig.

We were lucky to get Syed Ali as our speaker. Syed is co-editor of Contexts, the sociology journal whose valiant and successful efforts make sociological knowledge accessible to people outside of the academy. No “contextualization of the instersectional nuances of multiple discourses.”

Accordingly, Syed’s talk “Life Hacks From Sociology” told students and their parents what practical advice can be gleaned from research findings. For example, peers matter a lot more than parents, which translates to, “Don’t hang out with those kids; hang out with these kids.” Similarly, when Syed cited the strength of weak ties, one of the most frequently cited articles and phrases, he added, “that’s another way of saying ‘networking.’”

And since we had a roomful of sociology majors, we also used the occasion to salute our wonderful secretary Susan O’Neil, who is retiring at the end of this semester. She has done so much for all of us – faculty and students.

Here is the complete list of inductees. Not all of them could be there for the ceremony.

Taulant Asani Cheyenne Borkowski Christina Castillo Scarlett Cruz David Falleni Dion Glover Kevin Ha Shanna-Gay Lewin

Tara Mahady Briana Matthews Valerie Neuhaus Claudia Rodriguez Erika Rodriguez Taylor Smith Jessica Soares Janet Vichkulwrapan Johnathan Zipf

NCAA — Hoops and Hopes

April 3, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

March Madness ends tomorrow night when the student-athletes from the University of North Carolina match up against the student-athletes from Villanova. I’m being ironic about the “student” part, UNC providing one of the most recent and egregious cases. These players are different from most other students. When they were making their choices about higher education, scholarliness had little to do with it. The crucial variables was the quality of the basketball team.

When I ask my students why they came to college, the answer is usually, “To get an education.” When I ask why they would want an education, the answer is, “So I can get a good job.” When I ask what makes a job good, the first response is “money.” My students are student-earners.

How much will they earn? Take a look at the scorecard – the Obama administration’s recently created College Scorecard  (here). It shows median yearly earnings ten years after a student first enrolls. Here’s how the NCAA final four stack up.

(Click on a chart for a larger view.)

Villanova wins handily. But it’s a small private school. Its students come from better-off families, and when its graduates look for jobs nearby, the salary scale is going to be much higher than in Oklahoma. We need something like the Sabermetrics WPA (win probablity added). Fortunately, over at Brookings, Siddharth Kulkarni and Jonathan Rothwell rated the teams in the NCAA bracket on a sort of $PA that adjusts for family income, location, test scores, and other factors that might affect the income of graduates.

Now the NCAA final four look not so evenly matched,and UNC, only a 2½-point underdog on the floor tomorrow night, trails Villanova in the earnings-added tournament by a considerable margin.

College basketball is not life. It’s not even earnings ten years after freshman year. Kulkarni and Rothwell played through the brackets as drawn for the basketball tournament, using the earnings scores rather than basketball scores.  Only Villanova made it to the final four in both tournaments.

These four were not necessarily the highest-rated schools. Southern University, for example, scored a 95 – higher than Utah’s 94 – but the luck of the draw put them up against Duke in the Sweet Sixteen round. Here is the entire tournament.

------------------

The Kulkarni-Rothwell article is here with links to the scores of lots of schools, both 2-year and 4-year.  Not all schools appear in the interactive function. If your school does not appear there, download the spreadsheet data and go to column CW.

Still Telling It Like It Is?

March 30, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

If Donald Trump’s star begins to fade or even plummets from the firmament, his statements today about abortion may be the turning point. Trump said abortion should be banned and that “there should be some form of punishment” for women who get abortions. A few hours later he issued a statement saying that he would criminalize only the people who performed the abortion, not the women.

The political problem is not that he is offending women – he’s been offending them all through the successful months of his candidacy. It’s that he risks being seen as a politician. For most of Trump’s hard core constituency, his appeal has not been his stand on the issues, except perhaps immigration. What they like in Trump is his seeming indifference to what others think. Trump is the un-politician, he’s the guy who “tells it like it is.”

Exit pollsters at the South Carolina primary in February asked people about the qualities of the six candidates. On the question, “Which candidate shares my values?” Cruz was the winner. But on “Which candidate tells it like it is?” The difference between Trump and all the others was overwhelming. (source here.)

“Telling it like it is” is not the same thing as being factual. Accuracy does not seem to matter much to Trump voters. Instead, the phrase means speaking your mind without regard to political correctness or political impact. It’s the Trump supporters’ version of “speaking truth to power.” Even Trump’s denigrating what Republicans had been hailing as John McCain’s war heroism cost him no votes. Trump was saying what he thought even though it might violate conservative canons of political correctness.

The South Carolina sentiments are reflected in a  Gallup poll in January that asked Republicans what they thought would be the best thing about a Trump presidency. Nearly a quarter of the responses fit into the tell-it-like-it-is category. Trump “says what he feels” and “does not back down.”

(Click on the image for a slightly larger view.)

Today Trump was different. He put forward a position whose purpose seemed to be its political appeal rather than the expression of what he feels. Then three hours later, he backed down.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, okay, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump said just two months ago. He may have been right. But today by changing his position in order to win votes and then changing it back for the same reason he just might be shooting down his own campaign.*

---------------------

* I realize that this guess about Trump voters directly contradicts what I said about a particular Trump supporter, Alex Chalgren, in an recent post (here). It’s possible that most of Trump’s backers will find similar ways to resolve the dissonance. But there’s a difference. First, what happened today concerns character, not policy. Second, unlike Alex Chalgren, most of Trump voters and potential voters have not made their support of him so public. 

Based – Off and On

March 26, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

“This is based off of self-interest . . . .” wrote one student. Another wrote, “It’s an idea based off others from past years.” 

This construction sounded wrong to my ears. What happened to “based on”? Was this some local North New Jersey variant, like the New Yorkers’ waiting on line when everyone else in the US waits in line? But then I saw it in The Guardian last week:

Kang and her colleagues sent out 1,600 fabricated resumes, based off of real candidates, to employers in 16 different metropolitan areas in the US.

Lexis-Nexis turned up a few others just since the start of the year, and it wasn’t just New Jersey, or even the US.

• “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl “ is based off of the book by Jesse Andrews, (Berkshire Eagle) “We should set a baseline, and that's what the salaries should be based off.” (Chicago Daily Herald)
• . . .little should be read into the upcoming Capital One Cup game based off this result. (Manchester Evening News, UK)
• . . . schools estimated the number of children in their zone based off a ballot sent out in September (Manawatu Standard, New Zealand)

“Busy prepositions, always on the go,” said “Schoolhouse Rock.”* But it seems to me that prepositions are remarkably stable – those New Yorkers are still waiting on line, even though “on line” has added a much different and widely used meaning.

How did we get “based off” and “based off of”? How did this diffusion happen? It’s not like some fashion in clothing. It’s not created in Language Central and sent out amid a big publicity campaign. Nor did any celebrities start using it. Nor is it like the words that people are fully aware of and consciously choose, the phrases that are groovy for a minute or two and then become old hat, or those that are totally awesome and become part of the language and that nobody has an issue with.

My Lexis-Nexis search for “based off” turned up about 300 hits for 2016. (Lexis-Nexis does not consider “of” to be worthy of counting, so adding it to a word or phrase – “based off of” – is useless.) In the same period for 2010, the count was 100. In 2000, zero.

The Google nGrams database of books tells a similar story of the rapid rise of “based off of.” Of course, it is, by several orders of magnitude, still dwarfed by “based on.” But this graph, with “based off of multiplied by 100,000, shows its recent and rapid rise.

The change is probably generational. Older speakers like me will cling to “based on”; but “based off” or “based off of” will be the choice of an increasing number of younger people. It won’t catch up to “based on” immediately. It’s not the faddish kind of change that will happen in a couple of days. Or do I mean “in a couple days”?

------------------------
* The song is here. It was written by jazz pianist/composer Bob Dorough, and he performs it with trumpeter Jack Sheldon. Other jazzers, notably Dave Frishberg and Blossom Dearie, contributed to “Schoolhouse Rock” as writers and performers. Busy jazz musicians.