Yessss

February 28, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston
I had dinner last weekend with a group of people that included the voice of the New York Knicks. Since 1994, he has been doing the play-by-play for every Knicks game. And I had no idea who he was.

Now I’m not a big Knicks fan, but you’d think I’d have at least heard of him. My friends and relatives who are Knicks fans didn’t know of him either, and here’s why: he broadcasts the games in Spanish. His name is Clemson Smith Muñiz

I didn’t even know there was a Spanish basketball broadcast, but as Clemson said, the Spanish-speaking people in this media market far outnumber the entire population of Utah. (I did not point out that those three or four million Hispanics – or the basketball fans among them – would probably be happier if they could follow the Jazz rather than the Knicks.)

He reminded me of something else, an obvious point about the relation between content and structure. Announcers work for the team, not the TV or radio station. I should know that, right? After all, at some point in every broadcast they tell you that the descriptions and accounts blah blah blah are the property of the team. So are the describers and accounters.

That makes it harder for announcers to make trenchant criticisms of the team (a restriction that in the Knicks’ case might make for a lot of dead air time.). But there are ways around it. “I learned this from Marv,” Clemson said, “You don’t say, ‘This guy’s terrible.’ You say, ‘He’s six-eleven and he has one rebound.’”

There’s also a cultural factor. “When you do the games in Spanish, you’re more emotional than when you do them in English.”

He does the radio broadcast, so he has to do a lot more description than what TV announcers give. Out loud I imagined a sequence ending with Crawford coming off the pick for the 18-foot jumper, ending with the classic Marv Alpert “Yessss.”

I asked if there were a Spanish equivalent of that “yesss.”

“Si, señor,” he said, “Si, señor.”

I want to hear that. So I’m going to have figure out how to do that SAP thing on the TV. Los Knicks, 6-22 on the road, go into Atlanta tomorrow night with a one-game winning streak. If only they had a schedule brought to you by the letter “M” (Milwaukee, Miami, Memphis, Minnesota).

Quarterlife - Hybrid TV

February 26, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

A new television show starts tonight – Quarterlife. The show started on the Internet back in November. I didn’t hear about it until early this month and started watching because it was a Zwick/Herskovitz show. They are the guys who created thirtysomething, My So-Called Life (fifteensomething), and Once and Again (fortysomething). This time it’s twentysomething. I’ve seen thirty-two episodes. They’re short – about seven minutes each, not counting the credits.
The show was created as a hybrid. Quarterlife is not only the name of the show, it’s also a MySpace-like site that the characters use, posting their vlogs and sending vmail. But the creators of the show also made the site real, so that fans can use it in the same way the characters do.
During the writers’ strike, more people took to getting their fiction on the Internet, and the strike was based on the assumption that this trend would continue. I wonder how the format will affect the shows. Will shows created for the Internet be different? Will shows look different if they are shot for two-inch iPods as well as 52-inch Sonys? Will the content be different? So far the show seems to me not up to the level of Zwick and Herskovitz’s earlier shows. I think that’s because the seven-minute format forces them to use heavy-handed plot manipulations where an hour format (45 minutes) allows things to develop in ways that seem more “natural.”

Beyond content, there’s the McCluhan question: what is the message of this medium? Right now, you can go the Website and see vlog entries from the characters. Were these created specifically as Internet content, or are they “deleted scenes” from the show? It doesn’t really matter. More interestingly, you can also see vlog entries from fans that are indistinguishable from the fictional vlogs. You can read the blog entries of the characters, and apparently you can send them a message, “add to friends,” etc. I haven’t tried it. I haven’t been able to get into writing to fictional characters since I stopped sending letters to Santa. But then again, I’m like so twentieth century.

The Kids Are All Right

February 23, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Poster presentations have long been a part of academic conferences. At the ESS today, in the Grand Ballroom, seventy undergraduates put up posters summarizing their work. Some of the posters were syntheses based on library research, but several of the students had done their own original work. These kids were better than all right, and there was a quite a diversity of method.


Sara Tomczuk (The College of New Jersey) has worked summers on Long Beach Island (“down the shore”). Motels, stores, and restaurants there bring girls from Eastern Europe to work, paying them far less than they would pay Americans. Sara interviewed some of these girls about the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of these arrangements.

* * * *

Erin Pollard (Ursinus) used official records and persistent telephoning to dig out information about the racial composition of private and public schools in five cities.

* * * *

Christa Vanet (Penn State, Abington) observed interactions between the homeless and the non-homeless.

* * * *

Tamaria Green and Regine Saintilien (The College of New Jersey) did a case study of a toxic waste dump slated to be located near a school. They got their information from the DEP, from their own attendance at a variety of meetings, even from Google-eye overhead photos of the area.

* * * *

Skye MacKay (University of New Hampshire) did a survey to find correlates of having been tested for HIV. Interesting, the largest beta was for age, not number of sexual partners.

* * * *

The graphics were often impressive, especially for those of us who remember the hand-drawn posters of the previous century. But even more encouraging was listening to so many students who were truly excited about their work – the process of research as well as the results.

A Roomful of Ethnographers

February 22, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

It was snowing on the Eastern Sociological Society meetings. Sociologists stood in the shelter of the Roosevelt Hotel.

Inside, in a small conference room, I found day two of the Miniconference on Tally’s Corner Forty Years Later. Ethnographers talking ethnography. They had some questions about what Liebow might have missed or how his interpretations might be incomplete. But all agreed the book is a classic, and they all had their well-thumbed copies.
Liebow was a tall white guy who hung around with black streetcorner men in Washington DC in the early 1960s. And he himself said that things had so changed by the end of that decade that the same project would have then been impossible.

And now? Most of people in that conference room today agreed that the major changes are crime and drugs. For the men in Tally’s Corner scuffling by with dead-end jobs, the streetcorner was a respite, a comfort, a haven for “identity reconstruction,” as Al Young put it. But now, the street is a place of anxiety, tension, and fear. Al quoted one of his informants on his way to a night shift job who was confronted by a few ten-year-olds on the bus.

“What are you ridin’?” asked one of the kids (what gang are you with?).

“I’m riding the Madison bus to work,” he said.

The kid hit him on the head with a beer bottle, and the man was so enraged that in a flash he had thrown the kid down and was on the verge of stabbing him with the 7-inch knife he carried for protection at that hour.

Reuben May, whose Living Through the Hoop is an ethnography of kids in a small Georgia city, had a similar take. Choices for these kids have narrowed. Either they’re inside the gym, or outside on the corner “slinging rock.”

(The panel: left to right, Reuben May, Deidre Royster, Katherine Newman, Al Young, Mitch Duneier.)

I’m sorry I missed Part I of this miniconference yesterday. I was told that Mitch Duneier reported on correspondence he’d come upon between Liebow and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose “Moynihan Report” came out after Liebow had done his research but before the publication of Tally’s Corner. The letters provide some backstory for both publications. And Herb Gans was in the conference room that day to add his own personal recollections of these men at that historic moment.

Unique Week

February 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I guess social scientists have a preference for generalization, for relationships among variables that travel well, that obtain in several settings. We’re puzzled by the unique. So I was struck by two blog posts this week.

Chris Uggen cites a column in Runner’s World magazine to the effect that when you take up long-distance running, your times improve steadily for the first seven to ten years; after that, it’s all downhill. Or is it uphill? Whatever, your times get slower. But – and here’s the interesting part– the curve applies no matter how old you are when you start. The forty-year-old who started running at age twenty is long past his peak, while the sexagenarian who started at fifty is in his prime.

Chris, who himself runs respectable marathons, speculates that this age-invariant pattern may be unique to running. (Well, not quite. He implies that the curve of frequency of sex in a relationship may also be age-invariant.)

Meanwhile, over at The Monkey Cage, Jennifer Hochschild has an interesting finding on skin tone among African Americans and Hispanics. It’s a variable that correlates with just about everything social, economic, and psychological But Jennifer is a political scientist, and she was interested in political correlates. And she couldn’t find them. She held the data upside-down and shook it vigorously, threatening worse if it didn’t give her what she wanted, all to no avail. “Perceptions of discrimination against oneself or one’s racial or ethnic group, strength of group identification, partisanship or ideology, organizational membership”– nothing correlated.

“We finally realized that it was the very lack of pattern that was the interesting finding.”

Her finding of no finding didn’t just violate the academic preference for pattern. It was also politically incorrect – so much so that one audience member at a conference called it “bullshit research.” Not nice, but it’s refreshing to know that academic conferences have hecklers. It makes us seem a shade less stodgy.

Contexts - Colors and Consciousness

February 17, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I can’t remember the blog where I came across these optical illusions (a sign that I'm reading too many blogs), but the link is here. Apparently these are well known even outside perception-biz circles – even the teenager-in-residence here had seen them – but they were new to me.
The two lettered squares, A and B, are actually the same shade of gray.
Here’s another.


The “blue” tiles on the top face of the left cube are the same color as the “yellow” tiles in the top of the right cube.

It’s hard to believe – after all, seeing is believing. But you can go here and see these and other illusions of color, brightness, and form along with masks that block out everything but the relevant squares. Unfortunately, it happens instantly, and all you can do is toggle back and forth between the masked version and the fully unmasked version. So it’s not so convincing.

Better to do it gradually.

I copied the top illusion into Paint and started using the Eraser. After a bit of erasing the shading difference was only slightly diminished. (Yes, I know my eraser technique is sloppy, but I never keep inside the lines either when I do my coloring books.)

But after only a bit more erasing, the illusion became clear.

(It’s harder to do with the cubes because the target squares are so small that you have to do a lot of very careful erasing. When you do, you see that both the apparently yellow and blue squares become gray.)

I’ve got to show this to my class on Monday, I thought.

“But what’s the sociological significance?” asked the voice on my right shoulder.

“To hell with significance,” said the voice on my left shoulder. “Just take a few minutes at the start of class – the time some people spend calling the roll – just to show them something interesting.”

Waste time with cool stuff, or teach sociology?

Then I realized that in fact there was a sociological message – contexts. Whatever intrinsic qualities things may have, we invest them with meaning (and color), and we derive that meaning (or color) from their contexts.

Cultural Literacy II — Lu Xun (魯迅), Meet Alfred Hitchcock, er, I Mean FDR)

February 15, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Recognize anyone in this picture?



Of course not, mostly because I can't figure out how to get Blogger to upload images of a decent size. But for the real thing, go here.

The artists are Chinese, so there are more Chinese figures in the picture than a Western version would have, like Ciu Jian (the father of Chinese rock 'n' roll, just in case you didn't know).

It also shows yet one more advantage of the Internet. In a print version, there would be that accompanying version of the picture with all the figures in outline form with a number within each figure. In this version, when you put your pointer on a figure, the name pops up, and if you click, you go the Wikipedia entry for that person.

But why Mike Tyson and not Ali? And why do they think Hitchcock and FDR are fungible?

Hat tip to Lee Sigelman at The Monkey Cage for this link.

"I'm Not a Racist or Sexist, But These Other People . . ."

February 13, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

After the New Hampshire Democratic primary, there was some talk of the Bradley Effect: the black candidate gets a smaller percentage of the actual vote than predicted in the polls. Apparently, norms of political correctness keep people from telling a stranger (i.e., the pollster) they’re not going to vote for the black guy; the privacy of the polling booth removes that social pressure.

You can come at this problem from a second angle by asking not just, “What do you think?” but “What do other people around here think?”

Do you think most people you know would vote for a presidential candidate who is black, or not?
		Would	Would Not	Unsure
		%	%	%
		65	21	14
Would you personally vote for a presidential candidate who is black, or not?
		Would	Would Not	Unsure
		%	%	%
		90	6	4

When you get a 25-point discrepancy like this (30 points in some polls), it’s hard to know which is more accurate.

The same effect holds for women candidates.

Do you think most people you know would vote for a presidential candidate who is a woman, or not?
		Would	Would Not	Unsure
		%	%	%
		56	34	10
Would you personally vote for a presidential candidate who is a woman, or not?
		Would	Would Not	Unsure
		%	%	%
		81	15	4

Note that 2 ½ times as many people (15% to 6%) said they wouldn’t vote for a woman as said they wouldn’t vote for a black. The same discrepancy holds for how they thought others would vote. About one in five thought their fellow Americans wouldn't vote for a black, but a third of the sample thought that their acquaintances wouldn't vote for a woman.

Data are from a CBS News/New York Times Poll. Jan. 9-12, 2008. N=995 registered voters nationwide.

Drugs and Class, Then and Now

February 11, 2008
Posted by Jay LivingstonI mentioned the 100-1 rule in my previous post (“My Crack Dealer”): selling five grams of crack brings a mandatory sentence of five years. To get that same sentence for selling cocaine, you’d have to sell 500 grams. Get caught selling 499 grams of coke and you’re still better off than the guy who sold five grams of crack.

The most favorable explanation for the disparity is that at the time – i.e., during the drug hysteria of late 20th century America – legislators believed crack to be one hundred times more powerful and dangerous than coke. A less flattering, though equally believable, explanation is racism. Crack users and dealers were predominantly black, coke users and dealers white. Perhaps legislators felt that black drug sellers were one hundred times more powerful and dangerous than white drug sellers.

Or it could be a matter of social class. It’s happened before. First, there’s a drug so expensive as to be reserved for the upper classes. Then manufacturers develop a cheap version of the drug, and it now becomes widely available to the lower classes. The media are full of stories of the personal and public devastation the drug is wreaking. The “good” citizens react and pass legislation that falls heavily on the drug of the poor, less so on the preferred drug of the rich.

That’s what happened during the gin crisis the gripped England in the 1730s. Up until then, only the wealthy, propertied classes could afford distilled spirits, mostly brandy. It’s not that they didn’t drink to excess – the phrase “drunk as a lord” dates back to the mid-1600s – but their drinking wasn’t a social problem.

Then came cheap gin and the democratization of drunkenness. The lower classes had the tuppence to get drunk as a lord. But they lacked the means to keep the drunkenness from becoming a problem. I suppose it didn’t really matter if the lords were too drunk to work; their wealth insulated them, their families, and the society against the drawbacks of drunkenness. Not so the inhabitants of Hogarth’s Gin Lane.

What followed were the gin laws of 1736, so discriminatory that they provoked riots. That may be the main place where the parallels between gin and crack diverge. It’s hard to imagine people taking to the streets over the 100-1 law. But then, lower-class Londoners did not have the vote, and the streets may have been their only avenue for political action. The gin laws were not very effective (back to the parallels with crack), but after fifteen or twenty years, the crisis had run its course, and lower-class drinking was no longer a threat to the integrity of society.

My Crack Dealer

February 9, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

His name was James Brown (no not that James Brown), and I never actually met him. I was called as a potential juror at his trial. I was reminded of this because of the current proposals in Congress to reduce sentencing disparities in drug cases. Under the current law the same sentence that applies to 500 grams of cocaine applies to only 5 grams of crack.

The proposed change would allow some people convicted of crack offenses to have a chance for parole. Of course, the Bush administration’s attorney general, Michael Mukasey, is in favor of continuing the 100-1 rule. Under the new legislation, he said , “1,600 convicted crack dealers, many of them violent gang members, will be eligible for immediate release into communities nationwide.”

You’d think that on the fear thing, the Bushies had gone to the well once too often by now. But still Mr. Mukasey tells us that if sentencing is made rational, your “community,” no matter where you are in the nation, may be at risk of violent gang members.

My crack dealer James Brown might well have been the kind of person Attorney General Mukasey was talking about. He was a black man in his late twenties; maybe he was a member of a violent gang.

But he was charged with selling one vial for crack for $5 to an undercover cop.

Maybe he was in fact a real bad guy, a drug kingpin, and the only thing the cops could get him on was this small offense.

“He’s been sitting in jail for the last five months,” his Legal Aid lawyer told me. “He can’t make $750 bail.” Some kingpin.

As it turned out, Brown got lucky – one juror refused to go for the guilty verdict and hung the jury.

So that was my crack dealer. My state spent thousands of dollars keeping this guy in jail for several months and putting him on trial – a guy who was making $5 crack sales on a street corner. And then they wanted to spend another $200,000 or more to keep him in prison.

Would they try him again? I called the prosecutor to find out. “Probably,” he said, “Most of the cases we try are small ones like this.” Didn’t he think that was a waste of taxpayers’ money? His answer was, in so many words, “I don’t make the policy around here.”

Neither did Mr. Mukasey create the policy, but the policy he and his boss are advocating is equally wasteful and equally discriminatory. But then, George W. Bush never smoked crack, he just snorted cocaine.

The Wisdom of Crowds IV (Superbowl LXII)

February 5, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

1. The Statistical Wisdom of Oddsmakers.

Andrew Gelman writes:

if you look up "football" in the index of Bayesian Data Analysis, you'll see that football point spreads are accurate to within a standard deviation of 14 points, with the discrepancy being approximately normally distributed. So, a 14-point underdog has something like a 15% chance of winning. It's funny how people don't get this sort of thing.

The Giants were a 12-point underdog. The money line was about 9:2 – very close to the line Andrew would have set given the point-spread. Do bookies all have well-thumbed copies of Bayesian Data Analysis on their bookshelves?

2. The NonWisdom of Oddsmakers, the Wisdom of Crowds.

The oddsmakers set the opening line at 13 ½, but not because they thought that represented the strengths of the teams. They thought that the “true” line should be 12 or 12 ½. They reasoned that a lot of unwise bettors – people who bet on only the Superbowl and don’t know much about football – would be bet New England. The Patriots after all were undefeated, the Team of the Century, and all the rest of the hype. These bettors, so the logic went, would bet the Pats even at the inflated line.

But from the start, the supposedly naive money came in on the Giants. The line came down, and people still bet the Giants. The bookies took a bath. It happens.

3. Local Color.

David Tyree, the Giant who made The Catch, is a graduate of Montclair High School.

For other posts in this blog on football, betting, and the wisdom of crowds, go here.

Cultural Literacy

February 2, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

College students know about Lolita, at least at the high-SAT campuses. Apparently the same cannot be said for the folks at Woolworth's in the UK. Until the flak hit the fan, they had been offering a bed-desk-cupboard unit for girls age six or so. Nothing wrong with that. Except the name of the unit was the Lolita Midsleeper Combi.


British mums in an online chatroom didn’t think it was such a good idea to give girls’ bedroom furniture the name of a sexually precocious fictional twelve-year-old. The Internet makes it much easier to organize this kind of protest, and Woolworth’s discontinued the item.
But how had it slipped through in the first place? According to the Times,

"What seems to have happened is the staff who run the Web site had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either," a spokesman told newspapers.
"We had to look it up on (online encyclopaedia) Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."

The Sun (“Fury at Woolies Lolita Girls Bed”) added

Woolies confirmed the bed had now been axed. A spokesman said: “We will be talking to the supplier with regard to how the branding came about.”

I’ll have to ask Claude the brand consultant about this.

Meanwhile, it’s not the first time pedo-ignorance has caused embarrassment in the UK. In its Christmas marketing, the website for Tesco, a large British retailer, had a Toys and Games section which offered Legos and Barbies and other stuff you’d expect. It also included a stripper pole, with the message, “Unleash the sex kitten inside ... soon you'll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars.”

After complaints, they moved the item to the “fitness” section.

Seeing Through the Clouds

January 31, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Tag clouds offer content analysis at a glance. Here, for example, is the cloud of Monday’s State of the Union speech.

The biggest tags are no surprise: America, Iraq, people, terrorists. Nor are hope and future, which fit with the often-noted American cultural traits of optimism and future orientation (besides, it might have been difficult for Bush to look backward and review the list of his accomplishments).

Two tags of about the same size as these got my interest: trust and world. Here, you have to look at the contexts, and you have to look at what does not appear in those contexts, to understand what they mean in the Bush perspective.

Trust is usually a reciprocal sentiment, and Bush might have stressed the trust that people must have in their government, particularly in time of war. Or he might have said something about his administration having kept the trust of the American people (or would that have been too much of a stretch even for Bush?).

Instead, the speech was all about the government trusting the people. In fact, lurking not very deep in the subtext is the idea that the government itself is not to be trusted, certainly to be trusted with money (all those earmarks). This trust-the-people theme is, of course, just a flattering way of saying that the government is not going to do much for the people. Instead, the Bush administration will trust us to take care of ourselves as best we can.

The Bush view of “the world” is similarly unreconstructed. American exceptionalism reigns. No “taking our place among the nations of the world” or “working together for a better world.” Instead, Bush looks at America and the world as though he were a fan at a football game: We’re number one, and they’re out to get us. Cooperation with other countries is not an option, unless, of course, they want to co-operate by doing what we tell them.

“We showed the world the power and resilience of American self-government.” Take that, world.

I haven’t seen any polls yet measuring popular response to the speech. But I wonder if this stuff still sells.

When the Average Isn't Average

January 29, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s George Bush in the State of the Union last night urging Congress to make his tax cuts permanent.

Unless the Congress acts, most of the tax relief we have delivered over the past 7 years will be taken away. Some in Washington argue that letting tax relief expire is not a tax increase. Try explaining that to 116 million American taxpayers who would see their taxes rise by an average of $1,800.

You can’t blame a guy for trying, and you can’t blame the general public for not appreciating why the “average” tax cut is not the same as the tax cut for the average person. But income and income tax distributions are so skewed that using the average is misleading. When Bill Gates walks into the room, the average income goes way up, but everyone in the room except Gates is now below average.

The Tax Policy Center has computed the tax savings for each income quintile. For the middle income quintile, those tax cuts meant a savings of, on average, $814. In other words, the median savings was less than half the mean that Bush mentioned.

The big winners in the tax cuts are those at the top. The savings for the top fifth averaged $7452. For the top 0.5%, the tax cuts have meant an annual savings of over $100,000.

Lolita or Zane?

January 27, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Books That Make You Dumb posts a chart showing the SAT scores of books.


Well, not the books themselves, and this isn't the entire chart. Scores are based on the average SAT scores of campuses where these books are listed on the Facebook campus network statistics. Interesting that books classified as erotica (pink on the chart) anchor both ends of the SAT scale. You can find the full chart and a better description of the method here.

You can also go from there to the list of schools and see what's popular on your campus. Harry Potter cuts across all types of schools. So do Grey's Anatomy (though for some reason it doesn't make the top ten at art schools like Cal Arts and RISD), Fight Club, Garden State, and Coldplay.

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen for the link to Books That Make You Dumb.

The Moving Edge

January 26, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Every so often I meet Claude the brand consultant for morning coffee at Zabar’s café right next to the main Zabar’s store. If café suggests a Parisian-style venue, think again. The place is small and purely functional. Fluorescent lights and formica counters. (The pictures here are from New York Magazine.) Last week, once again the audio system was piping out the Beethoven Violin Concerto –Zabar’s has twelve different kinds of lox but apparently only one CD – and it prompted Claude to inaugurate his own blog with a post about brands and background music. I guess you’re not supposed to be aware of the music. In some stores, mostly those for the younger crowd, the music is so loud you can’t help but notice. But usually the music provides an innocuous subliminal background. Like in the Macy’s in Sarasota, where I was returning some stuff a couple of days after Christmas.

I listened, actually listened, for a minute, and I recognized what was coming out of the speakers: Horace Silver’s 1953 recording of “Opus de Funk.” When that Blue Note album (with Art Blakey on drums) came out, it was for hip folks only (or were they still “hep” in the early 50s?*). I couldn’t imagine Macy’s shoppers in the era of Patti Page and Mantovani tolerating hard bop piano, even at a very low volume. But in 2007, nobody noticed.

Things change. The concertgoers of one era react with incomprehension or revulsion to avante-garde music, but those same sounds – dissonant, polyrhythmic, minimalist, or whatever – become, after a generation or two, the stuff of barely noticed movie soundtracks. John Lennon dreaded that when he got old, he might need money and wind up having to play Las Vegas, like some latter day version of Wayne Newton or Andy Williams. Hard to Imagine.

But what was once edgy becomes mainstream – so far from the edge that you can play it for South Florida shoppers at three in the afternoon and not ruffle a feather. It was no accident either. Yesterday, I called Macy’s here in New York about my bill, and what was the music playing while I was on hold? Horace Silver’s trio recording of “Que Pasa.” How long will it be till it’s Mötley Crüe?

*Dave Frishberg’s song “I’m Hip,” contains the line which should certainly be in Bartlett’s some day – “When it was hip to be hep, I was hep.”

YouPoll

January 23, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Internet is the great equalizer. It democratizes everything. Anybody can be an op-ed columnist (just get yourself a blog) or a video producer (YouTube). And now, anybody can be a survey researcher, thanks to Ask 500 People .

When you submit a question, Ask sends it out to a random sample of people at various website and tallies the first hundred responses. (I’m puzzled about the number in the site’s name, but it’s still in beta. It's also not clear how it selects the websites.)



Oh I know some nitpicking methodologist will probably complain about non-representative samples and inelegantly worded questions. (That didn’t stop me from looking at the results of several questions and wondering about them as though they were real findings.)

On the other hand, it’s quick and it’s free.

It might be useful in a methods class. When I was in grad school, fellow grad student Michael Schwartz (now at Stony Brook) would give students this assignment: “Design a questionnaire to show . . .” and he would specify some result. Part two of the assignment was: “Design a questionnaire to show just the opposite.” I don’t think Michael actually had his students try out their survey instruments – it would have been something of a chore. But with Ask 500 People, you can have your results in a few hours.

Hat tip to Polly for the link to Ask 500.

What the Army Knew in 1943

January 21, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I remember hearing a general on radio not long before the US invasion of Iraq. After the fall of Saddam, he said, “it’s not like everyone’s going to rush to the palace, join hands, and sing Kumbaya.”

Maybe he’d read this book, recently reissued by University of Chicago Press.



The pamphlet was handed out to GIs in World War II who were posted to Iraq. It’s very brief and written so that the typical dogface could understand it. The brilliant minds that gave us the rosy scenarios – chicken hawks like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby, et. al. – must have left it off their reading list. Too much cultural relativism, I guess.

Here are some excerpts:

There are also political differences in Iraq that have puzzled diplomats and statesmen. You won’t help matters by getting mixed up in them.

Differences? Sure there are differences. Differences of costume. Differences of food. . . . Different attitudes toward women. Differences galore.
But what of it? You weren’t going to Iraq to change the Iraqis. Just the opposite. We are fighting the war to preserve the principle of “live and let live.”

Lt. Col. John Nagl wrote an introduction for the current edition and refers to the “stunning understatement” in this sentence.

The Iraqis have some religious and tribal differences among themselves.

Nagl is a Rhodes Scholar with an Oxford Ph.D., an expert on counterinsurgency who served in Iraq in 2003-2004 and co-wrote the current manual for US COIN forces. If there’s any hope for anything resembling success in Iraq, it lies with people like Nagl. He just announced his retirement from the military.

King's Gambit, Bobby Fischer, Bed

January 19, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen, who knows a lot about chess, has a brief obit for Bobby Fischer. Last September, Tyler also wrote that King’s Gambit by Paul Hoffman is “one of the few great chess books.”

I am no judge of chess books, but when I think about the King’s Gambit, I think of the first time I bought a bed, and I think about the pressures of grad school. And of course I think about Bobby Fischer.

In my junior year of college, I needed a bed. I had decided to live off campus, and I wound up sharing an unfurnished two-bedroom apartment with another guy. I looked in the want ads and on bulletin boards (this was in the 1960s, long before the Internet), and found what I was looking for – a double bed (I was an optimist, and overweight), cheap. The man who answered the phone had a Spanish accent, and he lived in Cambridge, not too far away. I drove over.

He was Mexican, in his twenties, short and soft-spoken with sad brown eyes. He was a graduate student at Harvard, and because of the anxiety caused by grad school, he was having trouble sleeping. His tossing and turning was ruining his wife’s sleep too, so they were going to get separate beds. It was a bit pathetic, and I paid him his asking price (probably $35).

As I was on my way out of the apartment, I noticed a chess board set up. “Do you play chess?” I asked. Yes, he said and immediately asked if I’d like to play. I’m a terrible chess player, but he seemed so forlorn, I figured it was the least I could do. Besides, it wasn’t even a real chessboard but a checkerboard with red and black squares. So how good could he be?

I let him play white. He moved out his king’s pawn. I did likewise. It was the only move I knew. Then he did something I’d never seen before. He moved out his king’s bishop pawn. Not his queen’s pawn, not his knight – the only two second moves I recognized as legal. I don’t recall what move I made, but after about four more moves, it was clear that I had lost.
“What was that?” I asked.

“It’s the King’s Gambit,” he said, “it was popular in the 1890s but hasn’t been in much use since the 1920s. It develops a strong king’s side attack.” Or something like that.

He offered to play again. Still thinking that I was doing him a favor, I accepted. Again, he moved out his king’s bishop pawn on the second move. I stared at the board and then tried the same second move I always played, the one my father taught me. I pushed my queen’s pawn to the center.

“Ah,” he said, “the Falkbeer Countergambit.” He added a capsule history, and a few moves later my pieces, those that were still on the board, lay in a disastrous position.

Now I felt even worse. Here’s a poor guy, living in a foreign country, stressed out by grad school, unable to sleep in the same bed with his wife, suffering from insomnia. And not only was I responsible for his taking financial a loss on his bed, but I couldn’t even provide him with a decent game of chess.

And Bobby Fischer? He too lost a game playing black against the King’s Gambit. Boris Spassky was playing white. That was in 1960, and Fischer left the match in tears. He went back to the drawing board and developed the Fischer Defense – a defense which, he thought, would relegate the King’s Gambit to the dustbin of history.

It didn’t. The gambit is still played – Fischer himself played it as white at times – but nobody ever played it against Fischer in a tournament. And everybody (well, everybody who follows chess at all) knows what happened in his Reykjavik match against Spassky twelve years later.

Oakland and Baghdad

January 18, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Community policing is the close cousin of counterinsurgency -- at their core, they're about providing security for the people and addressing the root causes of violence in a holistic way.

That's Philip Carter at Intel Dump a week ago noting a RAND study of community policing in Oakland. (Carter knows a lot about the military and counterinsurgency. He was an advisor to the Iraqi police in 2005-2006, deployed with the 101st Airborne.)

In both community policing and counterinsurgency (at least as Carter envisions it), the cops or troops have to get beyond the adversarial frame of mind that seems to be so natural in those settings.

The parallel between the two is useful on both sides. People interested in community policing may have much to learn from counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq. But a look at the abstract of the RAND report on community policigy suggests what a monumental and maybe impossible task we face in Iraq.

The early evidence on the implementation of the Measure Y community-policing program is not altogether positive. Deployment of problem-solving officers, which is the cornerstone of the community-policing initiative, has been delayed because of a lack of available officers, and community participation has been inadequate.

Lack of officers who know how to relate to the community, a community that’s reluctant to participate in a program that’s supposed to reduce violence in their own community. And in Oakland, the people and the police speak the same language and share certain general values.

It doesn’t make you optimistic about Baghdad, Diyala, Fallujah, or the country as a whole.

The Other-Directed Candidate

January 16, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

When people pluck a word or phrase from a specialized area and bring it into widespread use, they often change the meaning. “Track record,” for example, in general speech means something very different from what it means to horseplayers.*

Sociology terms that have suffered this fate include “playing a role,” which now has a negative connotation (as Robert Park said long ago, we are all always playing some role) and “significant other,” which is now a gender-neutral term for someone you’re sexually involved with. That’s a far cry from its origins in symbolic interaction.

Here’s one I hadn’t heard before. Hillary Clinton on Meet the Press last Sunday said, “I’m very other-directed. I don’t like talking about myself.”

David Riesman coined the term other-directed nearly sixty years ago in The Lonely Crowd. He used it to describe what he saw as a new character type that had arisen in response to changes in society. The nineteenth century had been dominated by the “inner-directed” type, the person who remained rigidly true to a set of internal dictates regardless of the pressures of the social or physical environment. The upper-class Englishman on safari who, even in the jungle, wears a formal dinner jacket to dinner.

By contrast, the other-directed person is guided not by an internal gyroscope but by a kind of social radar. Other-directed people pick up signals from others, and – sensitive to these external demands, needs, and strategies – adjust their course accordingly.

Riesman did not intend his analysis as part of the critique of American “conformity” so popular at the time (books with titles like A Nation of Sheep), though that’s how it was taken. People viewed the terms as moral judgments: inner-directed good (the principled individualist), other-directed bad (the unprincipled conformist).

Obviously, what Hillary Clinton meant was that she was not much given to public introspection but instead directed her attention outward towards the problems of the world. But it’s interesting, given her “track record” on a variety of issues, to look at her statement from the perspective of Riesman’s original definition.

* The track record is the fastest time for a given distance at a given track. For example, the track record for the mile at Aqueduct is 1:32 2/5, set in 1989. What people mean in everyday speech when they say, “My track record on that issue . . .” is closer to what horseplayers refer to as “past performances” – the chart of the horse’s performance in past races.

As for “track record” as popularly used, in most cases the “track” could be dropped with no loss of meaning.

Research as Politics

January 15, 2008
Posted by Jay LivingstonBy now, I should be used to dishonest research by the politically motivated – the careful selection of time periods or samples so as to magnify effects. That sort of thing. But I’m not. Maybe Max Weber should have written a third essay – political scholarship as a vocation.*

I was browsing at Intel Dump, a reality-based blog about military affairs. Blogger-in-chief Philip Carter was ripping into the Sunday NY Times article on homicide among Iraq vets both for its method and its implied stereotype image of the crazed combat vet.

But in the comments – and Intel Dump gets a ton of comments – there was a reference to a Heritage Foundation study: The press release title was, “Post-9/11 Military Recruits Wealthier, Better Educated, Study Shows.” The lead was, “Wartime recruits who joined the United States military in 2004 and 2005 tended to be better educated and wealthier than their civilian peers.”

That didn’t sound right. It certainly did not square with news reports about Army recruiters shanghaiing near-imbeciles and schizophrenics in order to meet their quotas, or promising signing bonuses to tempt impoverished youths.

As the press release says,

This disproves the idea, expressed on Oct. 30 by Sen. John Kerry, that only those who fail in school end up in the military. “If you study hard, do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq,” the former presidential candidate told college students.**

The Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank, and highly political. Their view of the war in Iraq is basically, it’s all good. But how did they get the data to show the beneficial effects the war was having on recruitment?

I didn’t read every word of the report, but it appears that the author, Timothy Kane, uses a semantic trick to obscure an important distinction. Unless you pay close attention, you might forget that “the Army” is not the same as “the military” or “the armed forces.” The report focuses almost exclusively on “the military.”

But the branches of the military differ greatly in their involvement in Iraq and in their recruitment. The Air Force and Navy have suffered fewer than 125 fatalities and fewer than 250 casualties serious enough to require medical air transport. (The Heritage report didn’t mention these figures. I had to find them here [this link is broken, sop you're on your own in finding casualty figures on the separate branches of the military].) So Navy and Air Force recruitment has apparently been going along as usual.

The Army has suffered the heaviest losses – more than twenty times the combined Air Force and Navy figures – and it’s the Army that is having trouble recruiting and that in fact had lowered its standards. But of course you wouldn’t know that from reading the Heritage press release or even the full report. All the tables on education and income show only data for all military recruits; they do not break down the sample by service branch.

* For non-sociologists: Ninety years ago, Max Weber wrote two famous essays, “Scholarship as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation.”

**There is some question as to what Kerry meant by this remark. He later claimed that he meant to say “you get us stuck in Iraq” the way that President Bush, not an outstanding student, had done.

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.

I Must Be Getting Old

January 5, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The subject line of the e-mail was “sociology major.” The sender’s name was completely unfamiliar. Here’s the text in its entirety (I’ve changed the name):

hey mr livingston - i am a sociology major named raoul flynn - i am having a lil problem and i need your help with something - can i please make an apointment to come see you whenever you are free as soon as possible if ya can - thank you

It’s hard to say why I found this so off-putting – at least not without sounding stuffy and authoritarian. But as Ali G might put it, “Yo, respeck.”

Iowa: Self-fulfilling Prophecy

January 3, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why Iowa?

As Gail Collins says in today’s New York Times,

The identity of the next leader of the most powerful nation in the world is not supposed to depend on the opinion of one small state. Let alone the sliver of that state with the leisure and physical capacity to make a personal appearance tonight at a local caucus that begins at precisely 7 o’clock.

It’s not supposed to, but it does.

In part, it’s self-fulfilling prophesy, and the media play a central role. The media coverage makes the caucuses more important than they should be. The media stories focus far more on the horse-race aspect than on policy. They pay far more attention to who’s ahead and why than to substantive positions of the candidates. The result, like that of a horse race, is framed in the language of winners and losers. I’m sure there are good organizational, contextual reasons for media coverage being what it is, but the result is to magnify the importance of Iowa, with its 7 electoral votes, and New Hampshire with four.

Pennsylvania has three times as many electoral votes as Iowa; California has nearly 14 times as many as New Hampshire. But candidates aren’t spending collectively $14 for every person of voting age in those states. Spending per Iowa caucus-goer is closer to $300.

So all the news tonight and tomorrow will be about who won and who lost. Candidate X will not just be the person who got the most Iowa caucus votes; he or she will be “a winner.” Those who got fewer votes will be tarred as “losers.”

Those labels probably won’t directly affect the views of voters in other states. But they will affect how the media cover the candidates. And most important, the winner/loser distinction will affect the money people. As John Edwards (quoted in Collins’s column) says, “The winner of the Iowa caucus is going to have huge amounts of money pouring in.”

Because the media think Iowa is important, it in fact becomes important: self-fulfilling prophecy.

What would happen, I wonder, if the media paid as little attention to the Iowa caucuses as they do to the preferences of some other non-representative aggregate of a few thousand people? Or what if the candidates and media gave that other aggregate the attention they give the Iowa caucusers? How about the 60,000 people in my zip code? Hey dude, here’s my $300 of ad money?

Provost Humor

January 2, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

No, that subject line is not an error or oxymoron.

If you want to start the new year with a chuckle, try this at Inside Higher Ed. It's a testimonial for Henry Fenton, Assistant Provost at U of All People. In the first line, Fenton is identified as having been a sociology instructor, which is about the only reason I kept reading. But I'm glad I did.

I had never heard of the author David Galef, but the article bio has him at U of Mississippi. (Galef? Galef? Funny, you don't look Mississippian.) And IMDB has a David Galef acting in the 1971 movie "Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?" with Dustin Hoffman. That film was written by Herb Gardner, who may well have been an inspiration for Galef.

Resolutions, Self, and Society

January 1, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Resolutions seem so American. They reverberate with cultural themes like optimism, “active mastery” (sociologist Robin Williams’s term from the 1950s), hard work, and change.

I know that the custom of resolutions is now widespread. Google resolution nouvel an, and you get 386,000 hits (though I wonder how many of these are Canadian, not French). Even in Italy – hardly the place for a puritanical effort like resolutions – risoluzione nuovo anno returns 240,000 hits.

But these are dwarfed by the 6.6 million pages with “New Year’s Resolution.” (I know this is shoddy methodology, but even allowing for difference in base rates of language and Internet use, it seems like a huge difference.)

The idea of self-improvement in America goes back at least to Ben Franklin, and it blossomed in the late nineteenth century. But somewhere along the way, probably after World War II, the focus shifted from society to self. The resolutions we take for granted today – maybe the ones you and I made today – probably include things like working on some project, reading some number of books, fixing something in the house, and of course the most common, losing weight.

I will try to make myself better in any way I possible can with the help of my budget and babysitting money. I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got a new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.

That’s from a girl’s diary circa 1982, reprinted in The Body Project, by Joan Jacob Brumberg. The girl assumes – and her assumption is so much a part of our culture that we don’t really notice it or consider it remarkable – that making yourself more attractive makes you “better.” These resolutions about body go hand in hand these days with work on “personality” – be more outgoing, fun, etc.

Brumberg contrasts this with a diary excerpt from seventy years early, 1892.

Resolved, not to talk about myself or feelings. To think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversation and action. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.

Here what makes you better is not the expression of self but the restraint of self. I imagine this girl time-transported to the US today. I picture her telling people that she has resolved not to talk about her feelings. And I imagine her bafflement at the others’ reaction to what she thought was a virtue.