Whose Speech, Which Religion?

May 8, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Does a justice’s view of the First Amendment’s “establishment clause” depend on which religion is being established? 

The First Amendment doesn’t specify any religions as more or less establishable. It just says no establishment.

This week, five conservative justices on the Supreme Court voted to allow a town council in Greece, NY to open their meetings with Christian prayers. These referred to “our Christian faith,” Jesus Christ, and the Resurrection. The justices ruled that these Christian prayers were in perfect accord with the First Amendment.  Needless to say, the five justice majority was all Christain (Catholic in fact). The two Jews and two other Catholics dissented. (The Court has no Protestants.)

 I wonder what the decision would have been if the town had had a Muslim majority that opened each meeting with “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet,” and the local Christians filed the First Amendment suit.

We don’t know, but on Wednesday, the Times (here) published some data from a study by Lee Epstein of decisions on another First Amendment issue – freedom of speech.  In general, the liberal justices were more likely to hold for freedom of speech, conservative justices were for regulation. But the content of the speech mattered. When the speech was conservative, the conservative justices suddenly saw the virtues of civil liberties arguments. The effect also held for the liberal justices but was much weaker.

* p < .05
(Click on the chart for larger view)

Look at Scalia and Thomas (Nino and Silent Clarence). When the speech in question is liberal, they come down on the side of free speech in maybe one case in five.  But when the speech is conservative, they take the speakers’ side in nearly two-thirds of the cases.  They are three times more likely to rule for a conservative speaker than for a liberal speaker. 

The effect for Alito and Roberts is even stronger; they are four or five times more likely to support free speech for conservatives than for liberals. The number of cases is small – 27 and 24, respectively, compared with 104 for Thomas and 161 for Scalia – but the differences are still statistically significant.

As for a comparison with the hypothetical Muslim town council and its prayers, a similar study would be impossible because there is no variation. The religion being established is always Christianity.  Still, given the evidence on speech cases, those five justices might become downright Jeffersonian in their views of church and state. Scalia would don his originalist cape and claim that “no establishment” means just what it says and that this prayer, that just happens to be Islamic, is in violation of the First Amendment. Pay no attention to that Christian prayer we green-lighted in that other case last year.

How might Scalia respond to the evidence of the justice’s bias in speech cases?  Probably the way he responded to evidence of racial bias in death penalty cases – to dismiss it as irrelevant. In McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), he agreed with the argument that social science evidence about Black-White differences in these cases was irrelevant. McCleskey would have to prove bias in his particular case – an impossible hurdle to clear.  Of course, if social science data supported a position that Scalia agreed with, he just might make a belated, if temporary, discovery of the virtues of sociological findings.

Up the Down Axis

May 2, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Kaiser Fung posted this graph on JunkCharts The question is: after Florida passed a Stand Your Ground Law in 2005, did gun deaths increase or decrease?

To get the right answer, you have to look closely and notice that the y-axis is upside-down. Zero is at the top, 800 at the bottom.

The Reuters designer who created the graph was not intending to deceive (she tweeted her rationale here), and maybe she wanted to show that more red blood was spilled. But, regardless of intent the inverted Y-axis requires extra effort on the part of the viewer, and even after we have figured out what’s going on and we know cognitively that gun deaths increase, that picture of the descending line may still have some effect. Our brains figure out one thing, but our eyes tell us the opposite. 

UPDATE, May 3:  The alleged Fox graph below was a hoax.  No doubt my own views of Fox news made me fall for it.  But having no archive of Fox broadcasts, I could not very well fact check it.  In addition, the graph was convincingly done; the hoaxter is identified by WaPo as master Twitter provocateur @darth.  More importantly, Fox's history of misleading graphs (as compiled here) made this one easy to believe.  The moral of the story is twofold: check your source; check the axis.

Here’s another example of the inverted y-axis. Given the source, Fox News, I would guess that the deception was more intentional.

If Fox viewers stopped to think about the content, they would know that the enrollment in Obamacare – 8 million people – exceeded CBO estimates. But bizarro world of Fox, where down is up and up is down, the visual message the chart is clear: Obamacare is headed south.

(HT: Laura Kramer)

UPDATE:  For a compendium of misleading Fox graphics go here.  Media Matters watches Fox so that you don't have to.  Then they extract the funny stuff, like these graphs.

Torture and Killing as Virtue

April 28, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a 2008 post I wrote (here)

Sarah Palin was standing up for torture, and the Republicans cheered. It was then I finally realized: these people actually like torture.

She’s back, and things haven’t changed in six years except that the wingnuts have become more explicit in their exaltation of torture. It’s now a sacrament.  As Palin told the NRA

If I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists. [here at about the 7:20 mark]

The gunslingers of course cheered on cue. So far, not many Christians have voiced objection or even wondered what Jesus would do or who He would torture.

The reaction marches side by side with the “righteous slaughter”* fantasy, most recently enacted by the people who brought out their guns in defense of Cliven Bundy’s “right” to free government handouts. (The part about using women as shields didn’t quite fit with the machismo, but hey, nobody’s perfect.)  In the fantasy, it doesn’t matter whether you are the torturer or the torturee. The point is to test one’s manliness. 

Those who have experience with torture – even conservative Republican’s like John McCain – rarely entertain these romantic and cavalier notions. I wonder how many of the “citizen soldiers” who rushed with their guns to defend Bundy** had been real soldiers who had been shot at and who had seen battlefield death.

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* My post with that title (here) was about the attempts to view George Zimmerman as a hero for his having killed Trayvon Martin. Unfortunately, his virtuous deed does not seem to have had the ennobling effect on Zimmerman that some might have hoped for.

** Like Zimmerman, Bundy soon turned out not to be the hero that his champions (Sean Hannity, et al.) thought they had.

Meta-Op-eds (Phoning It In)

April 25, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s not much of a coincidence, these two columns today from the Times’s regular Friday guys.  Besides, the headline writer may have been doing it deliberately. (Why do they put Brooks on the left of the page and Krugman on the right? That’s just confusing.)

The larger coincidence is that neither of these columns is about Piketty or Capital in the Twenty-First Century. They are the columnists reactions to reactions to the book. Very meta. 

Krugman’s main point is that “conservatives are terrified” and do not have any data to refute Piketty’s thesis about inequality and capital accumulation.  Instead, says Krugman, they resort to name-calling, as though calling Piketty a Marxist meant that we should all ignore everything he said.  (Krugman, to be fair, has written columns and blog posts about the substance of the Piketty book. )

As for Brooks,  he lays down his usual psycho-cultural snark on liberal intellectuals – their envy and resentment.

 It really doesn’t help that you have to spend your days kissing up to the oligarchs and their foundations to finance your research, exhibition or favorite cause. . . .
Well, of course, this book is going to set off a fervor that some have likened to Beatlemania.

A 700-page work of economics and economic history as the equivalent of “Love Me Do.”

The Times pays, I would guess, at least $2500 for these 800-word columns.  And I’m sure that columnists, like all of us, have their off days when they’re too busy or uninspired to write something of substance.  But for my $2.50 on Friday, I’d like more than just a challenging crossword puzzle.  Yes, I know that these are “opinion” pieces, but opinion without evidence doesn’t go very far.  (And please, don’t bother making any comments about Maureen Dowd. I already agree.)

Reach Out

April 23, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

An article about a bread recipe in the Times today (here) has this sentence:

This recipe runs 38 pages in the cookbook “Tartine Bread”; when I began to I began to streamline it into the version you see here, I reached out to Mr. Robertson.

What struck me wasn’t the 38 pages.  (“Making the dough is also a two-day process. Resist the temptation to rush any of the steps” – assured me that I would definitely not be making this bread.) It was “reached out.”

We don’t call people, we don’t write to them, we don’t try to get in touch with them.  We reach out.  I get memos from the university urging me to reach out to students who are not doing well.  In response to a question about hiring, the dean tells me to reach out to someone in HR. New Jersey has a Reach Out and Read program.

To find other examples I reached out to Lexis-Nexis, limiting my search to today.  The Washington Times says the DoD “has come a long way to reach out to suffering soldiers.” This Times story  has the subhead “New York Police Reach Out on Twitter but Receive a Slap in the Face.” WaPo, writing about the choice of people to throw out the first ball at yesterday’s RedSox - Yankees game says, “we hope they didn't reach out to fellow Cabinet member John Kerry,” who threw one in the dirt back in  2004. 

Newsday has a picture from the same game

The caption" “David Ortiz reaches out and extends Fenway greeting to former Red Sox teammate Jacoby Ellsbury.”  Big Papi is literally reaching out, but the phrase implies something more. 

Others might not notice, but to my aged ears, all this reaching out sounds strange.  And in fact,  “reach out” is fairly recent.

(Click on a chart for a larger view.)

What did people do up until the mid-sixties, before they could reach out to others? Yes, they “contacted” them, but that too goes back only fifty years. 

How did speakers of English try to communicate with others for those centuries before 1960? “Reach out” does not appear at all in Shakespeare (1564-1616, Happy Birthday, Will). Nor, I would guess, in Nabokov (1899-1977, Happy Birthday, Volodya)

What happened in the sixties that started us reaching out so much? Was it the general touchy-feely sensibility?  (AT&T urged us to “Reach out and touch someone” by running up our long-distance charges,* but that ad campaign didn’t begin till 1979.) I look at that curve with its turning point in 1966, and until a better explanation comes along, I go with the Four Tops. 



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* Long distance is now a dim artifact now considered immoral. In this “Kids React to Technlogy” video , when the unseen adult explains about long distance charges, one kid says, “They shouldn’t do that.” Only one of the kids guesses what long distance was. On the other hand, the dial tone and busy signal are a complete mystery.

** At Seder last week, a ninth grade girl received as a gift a YA book with the title, “I’ll Be There.” The sederians of an older generation on seeing this were moved to a brief unison rendition of what we could remember of “Reach Out (I’ll Be There).”  (We didn’t do very well on “Dayenu” either.)  Even at that, we got it wrong. It turns out that the book title referred to a different Motown song, the one by Michael Jackson.

Know Your Sample

April 22, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston


Tim Huelskamp is a Congressman representing the Kansas first district. He’s a conservative Republican, and a pugnacious one (or is that a redundancy). Civility, at least in his tweets, is not his long suit. He refers to “King Obama” and invariably refers to the Affordable Care Act as “ObamaScare.” Pretty clever, huh?

He’s also not a very careful reader.  Either that or he does not understand the first thing about sampling. Tonight he tweeted.

(Click on a graphic for a larger view.)

Since polls also show that Americans support gay marriage, I clicked on the link.  The report is brief in the extreme. It gives data on only two questions and has this introduction.

The outrage might come from liberals. More likely it will come from people who think that members of the US Congress ought to be able to read.

Or maybe in Huelskamp’s view, only Republicans count as Americans.

Never Apologize, Never Explain

April 19, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

In their research on celebrity apologies, Karen Cerulo and Janet Ruane found that the most effective apologies are simple admissions of fault. “I did it. It was wrong. I won’t do it again.”  Forget about excuses, explanations, and denials.  Yesterday’s post gave two recent examples – an effective apology (James Franco), and a less effective denial (Jenny McCarthy). 

Unfortunately, Cerulo and Ruane did not include those celebrities who simply ignored the reported misdeeds, celebrities who followed the advice of John Wayne in “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” – “Never apologize and never explain – it’s a sign of weakness.”

That was almost exactly the strategy adopted by Zygmunt Bauman, distinguished sociologist, author of several dozen books. 

 

A graduate student at Cambridge, Peter Walsh, was reading one of Bauman’s recent books, Does the Richness of the Few Benefit Us All? and wondered why Bauman was not using more recent data. So he started checking out some of Bauman’s sources, only to discover not only that the distinguished sociologist had plagiarized but that he hadn’t been very careful about the validity of his sources.

He appears to have found [online] evidence to support his claims and stopped there. . . .  He hasn’t shown any desire to check the facts, statistics and quotes in his sources, and that is fairly elementary.

Rather than apologize or explain, Bauman went first for the denial – a carefully limited denial:

 [I] never once failed to acknowledge the authorship of the ideas or concepts that I deployed, or that inspired the ones I coined.

The accusation was not that he plagiarized ideas and concepts but passages from Wikipedia and other sources.

Then he pulled rank.  He got all huffy and supercilious, suggesting that his accusers were pitiful pedants and that the rules of plagiarism were, at least as concerned him, wrongheaded.

All the same, while admiring the pedantry of the authors of the Harvard Guide to Using Sources, and acknowledging their gallant defence of the private ownership of knowledge, I failed in those 60-odd years to spot the influence of the obedience to technical procedural rules of quotations on the quality (reliability, effectiveness and above all social importance) of scholarship: the two issues that Mr Walsh obviously confuses.
As his co-worker in the service of knowledge, I can only pity him.

Which is a fancy way of saying, “Following the rules about plagiarism does not improve the quality of your work.” The corollary is “My work is so great that I don’t have to follow the rules.”

We can’t know the general reaction to Bauman’s statements. The Times Higher Education article (here) has only five comments, but all of them are negative. One characterizes Bauman’s response as “really despicable.”

Sorry ’Bout That

April 18, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Were celebrity apologies much in the news this past week or so? Or is it just that Karen Cerulo’s talk at our AKD evening turned my antennae to pick up more of them?

The morning after Karen’s talk, James Franco was on “Kelly and Michael” talking about his too-well publicized Instagram exchange with a 17-year old girl he was trying to pick up.

 Franco got it right:

I’m embarrassed.  I guess I’m just a model about how social media’s tricky. It’s a way people meet each other today, but what I’ve learned is you don’t know who’s on the other end. I used bad judgment and I learned my lesson.

Almost no excuses. Mostly: I was wrong, and it won’t happen again. Gossip sites didn’t buy the media-naivete excuse, but they approved of the apology.

You have to give James some credit for going on TV and completely owning up to his mistakes. He got tripped up for sure, but he wasn’t afraid to admit it and we think he’s extremely brave for doing that. (HollywoodLife.com)

Then there was Jenny McCarthy. McCarthy has been outspoken in questioning vaccines, suggesting that they are dangerous and can cause autism. 

If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the f*cking measles.

In other words, better to refuse vaccination and get measles than to get the vaccination and risk autism. Same thing for the polio vaccine.

But lately the news has been carrying stories about outbreaks of measles, mumps, and other diseases because of the increased numbers of parents who refuse to allow their children to be vaccinated.

This is a tough one for McCarthy. Can she apologize and say that her activism is partly responsible for the return of these childhood diseases?  “I’m sorry and it won’t happen again” would mean giving up her position that vaccines can cause serious harm.  Instead, she claims (here)  that she never suggested that parents refuse vaccination.

I am not “anti-vaccine.” . . .  I’ve never told anyone to not vaccinate.

This might be technically true (though several of her statements have recently disappeared from Websites that used to display them). Saying, “If you vaccinate, you are risking autism,” is not exactly the same as “Don’t vaccinate.” But this distinction will be lost on most people.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of any poll data on public reaction to McCarthy, but I suspect that like other denials of what everyone knows (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”), it will not win many followers to her side.

Polarization in Small Groups and in Politics

April 13, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

In class last week, I tried replicating the “risky shift” experiments that date back to the 1950s. Groups discussed problems that pitted caution against risk. For example, down by three points on the last play of a football game, should you kick a field goal and settle for a tie, or try a play that might win but also risks a loss?* In the original studies, not only were group decisions riskier than individual decisions, but discussion persuaded more people towards risk than towards caution.

Later research showed that the risky shift was one instance of a more general effect – group polarization: When members of a group share a value, and they discuss something related to that value, group opinion will shift further out towards the pole on that dimension.

I hadn’t thought that the concept had much use outside of small groups, but now I wonder if something similar happens in politics.  “North Carolina Shows Strains with G.O.P.” says today’s Times (here) on page one.

 the divisions that are gripping the party nationally are playing out powerfully, expensively and often very messily.  And after haunting losses in 2012 in which far-right Senate candidates prevailed in primaries only to collapse in the general election, the Republican establishment is determined to stifle the more radical challengers.

Those divisions were always there. As someone pointed out even in the victorious Bush years, the party was an uneasy coalition of The Predators (pro big business), The Taliban ( religious and cultural conservatives), and NeoCons (foreign policy hawks). Now add the more populist, libertarian Tea Party, who accuse the others of being RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).

Republican primaries are basically group discussions among those who share conservative values. As in the small-group studies, participants are aware that others are evaluating them on their positions, so they move towards the valued end of that dimension. Those already further out provide an anchor – or perhaps a magnet – to pull the others further in that direction.**

Other things being equal, we might expect positions to get more extreme of the course of the primary season.  But of course, other things are not equal.  The difference between group discussion and politics is that in the small group experiments, all participants had an equal ability to voice their ideas to the group. In politics, thanks to the Supremes, the question is not just what someone wants to say; it’s who has the money to have his message heard most frequently. 

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* In those days, college football had not overtime. The game ended after the fourth quarter.

** The question in the experiments asked, “What is the lowest probabiblity that you would accept in order to go for the win rather than the tie?”  The person who went in choosing a 5-in-10 option might have thought himself reasonably risky. But when he got in the group, he found that others would be willing to take a 3-in-10 or even 1-in-10 chance.  His original position no longer seemed so in tune with the tacit value on risk, and he might shift to a riskier alternative.

AKD 2014

April 8, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston
This year, twenty-four students joined AKD, the sociology honor society. 

David Aveta Paul-Anthony Baez Ian Callahan Megan Catanzaro Yajaira Cruz Khadijah Davis Chelsea Durocher Ailiceth Espinal Jacob Forman Ariana Glogower Dawn Gruschow Lauren Heavner

Patrick Hughes David Koubek Jennifer Miller Jessica Munoz Kalie Norko Kiersten Parks Renee Pikowski Rebecca Rodgers Monica Rodriguez Noel Rozier Rey Sentina Maria Vallejo

Our speaker was Karen Cerulo of Rutgers, who talked about her latest paper (co-written with Montclair’s Janet Ruane), “Confessions of the Rich and Famous.”*

“Big Brother is Watching You” quality of the background image is misleading. It’s we who are watching the public figures as they offer apologies, and how we judge them depends on the rhetorical strategy of the apology.  When the “Bridgegate” story broke, Governor Christie first mocked those who said his administration might have been involved. When he finally did apologize, he began with a sentence of apology to the people of New Jersey and Fort Lee. But his next sentence shifted the focus to himself : “I am embarrassed and humiliated by the conduct of some of the people on my team.”**

Bad strategy.

Apologies are built on different components – victim, offender, act, context. What distinguishes one apology from another is not just the selection of components but their sequential structure. We hear a different story depending on how the segments are arranged, as Cerulo/Ruane discovered when they looked at public opinion polls for estimates of which strategies were most effective.

The short answer is: apologize, don’t explain.  It’s about the victim, it’s not about you except for your mortification and remorse. Gov. Christie was claiming that he was the victim – his staff had “embarrassed and humiliated” him.  New Jerseyites did not care, just as basketball fans in Cleveland did not care if LeBron explained why moving to Miami was good for LeBron (“But I knew this opportunity was once in a lifetime.”)

This research was limited to celebrities, but you have to wonder if apologies among us mere mortals work the same way.

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*In introducing the speaker, it occurred to me that for many in the audience the title of the paper would have absolutely no ring of familiarity. 

** The sample of 183 celebrity apologies went only through 2012 and thus missed the Christie statement.

The End of Society as We Know It (or, as they knew it)

April 5, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the unit on social class, I sometimes show an excerpt from the 2001 PBS show “People Like Us: Social Class in America.”  Here’s a brief clip.



One semester, it dawned on me that for some of the words and images in this 35-second excerpt, my students haven’t a clue. 

“Those people on horses – does anyone know what that is?” Usually not. When I tell them, they are often incredulous that there could actually be such a thing as a fox hunt.  And it takes place only a twenty-minute drive from the Morristown Mall.

The man in the clip is identified as a “society columnist.” Few of my students have any idea what society here means.

The society columnist says that sometimes your social class is based on “if your mother came out at the Infirmary Ball in New York City.”  Coming out? Being presented to society at a debutante ball?  It might as well be a Kwakiutl potlatch.

The distance is not just one of class but of generation. These upper-class rituals seem to be going out of style. Even kids born in the 90s – even wealthy kids – may find them an anachronism.  Do newspapers still have “society columnists”? When I Googled that phrase, most of the hits seemed to be obituaries. This headline from 2006 is typical.

Washington Star Society Columnist Betty Beale, 94

Miss Beale and the Washington Star are no longer with us. Her profession seems to be headed for a similar fate.  As for being presented at a ball, we know precisely when that took a dive thanks to Google’s Wedding Crunchers. It’s basically their n-grams function, but the database is wedding announcements in the New York Times.*

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Being presented at a ball started its rapid decline in 1998. Five years later, it had disappeared. Even if you had been presented at a ball, it was not something you wanted to include in your Times announcement.

What new distinctions have arisen in place of balls? I don’t know, but Wedding Crunchers might be a great resource for clues.

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*HT: Andrew Gelman. There’s much more to be gleaned from Wedding Crunchers. The default page shows changes in bride ages (26 - 33). In 1993, the most frequent age was 26. Last year, 26 ranked seventh out of eight. Things change, even for the elite.

Snickers and the Last Laugh

April 1, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Advertisements echo with many reverberations and overtones. Different people hear different things, and with all the multiple meanings, it’s not always clear which is most important. 

Lisa Wade posted this Snickers ad from Australia at Sociological Images (here). Its intended message of course is “Buy Snickers.” But its other message is more controversial, and Lisa and many of the commenters (more than 100 at last count) were understandably upset.

The construction workers (played by actors) shout at the women in the street (not actors). “Hey,” yells a builder, and the woman looks up defensively. But then instead of the usual sexist catcalls, the men shout things like,

I appreciate your appearance is just one aspect of who you are

and

You know what I’d like to see? A society in which the objectification of women makes way for gender neutral interaction free from assumptions and expectations.

The women’s defensiveness softens.  They look back at the men. One woman, the surprise and delight evident in her smile, mouths, “Thank you.”

But, as the ad warned us at the very beginning, these men are “not themselves.”

Hunger has transformed them. The ad repeats the same idea at the end.

Here’s Lisa’s conclusion:

The twist ending is a genuine “fuck you” to the actual women who happened to walk by and become a part of the commercial. . . . I bet seeing the commercial would feel like a betrayal. These women were (likely) given the impression that it was about respecting women, but instead it was about making fun of the idea that women deserve respect.

I suspect that Lisa too feels betrayed.  She has bought her last Snickers bar.

It may be unwise to disagree with one’s editor, especially when the editor is a woman who studies sex and gender, and the issue at hand is sexism.  But my take is more optimistic. 

In an earlier generation, this ad would have been impossible. The catcalls of construction workers were something taken for granted and not questioned, almost as though they were an unchangeable part of nature.* They might be unpleasant, but so is what a bear does in the woods.

This ad recognizes that those attitudes and behaviors are a conscious choice and that all men, including builders, can choose a more evolved way of thinking and acting.  The ad further shows that when they do make that choice, women are genuinely appreciative. “C’mon mates,” the ad is saying, “do you want a woman to turn away and quickly walk on, telling you in effect to fuck off? Or would you rather say something that makes her smile back at you?”  The choice is yours.

The surface meaning of the ad’s ending is , “April Fools. We’re just kidding about not being sexists.” But that's a small matter. Not so far beneath that surface, progressive ideas are having the last laugh, for more important than what the end of the ad says is what the rest of the ad shows – that ignorant and offensive sexism is a choice, and that real women respond positively to men who choose its opposite.

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*Several of the comments at Sociological Images complained that the ad was “classist” for its reliance on this old working-class stereotype. 

Prophetic Umpires

March 30, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

“It ain’t nothin’ till I call it,” said umpire Bill Klem. And if he called it a strike, a strike it was.  As Klem knew, the umpire has something resembling papal infallibility.  That was then. Klem worked behind the plate from 1905 to 1942 and holds the record for throwing players and managers out of the game (the infallibility thing is sometimes a bit much for players to take).  Now, thanks to modern technology, we can know just which calls the umpires miss.

Here’s Matt Holliday taking a called third strike.

Holliday’s body language speaks clearly, and his reaction is understandable. The pitch was wide, even wider than the first two pitches, both of which the umpire miscalled as strikes.* 

The PITCHf/x technology that makes this graphic possible, whatever its value or threat to umpires, has been a boon for sabremetricians  and social scientists.  The big data provided can tell us not just the number of bad calls but the factors that make a bad call more or less likely.  In the New York Times today (here), Brayden King and Jerry Kim report on their study of roughly 780,000 pitches in the 2008-09 season. Umpires erred on about 1 in every 7 pitches – 47,000 pitches over the plate that were called balls, and nearly 69,000 like those three to Matt Holliday.

Here are some of the other findings that King and Kim  report in today’s article.

•  Umpires gave a slight edge to the home team pitchers, calling 13.3% of their pitches outside the zone as strikes.  Visitors got 12.6%.
• The count mattered
•     At 0-0, the error rate was 14.7%.
•     At 3-0, 18.6% of pitches outside the zone were called as strikes
•     At 0-2, only 7.3% of pitches outside the zone were called as strikes
• All-star pitchers were more likely than others to get favorable calls . . .
• . . . Especially if the pitcher had a reputation as a location pitcher.
• The importance of the situation (tie game, bottom of the ninth) made no difference in bad calls.

It seems that expectation accounts for a lot of these findings. It’s not that what you see is what you get. It’s that what you expect is what you see. We expect good All-star pitchers to throw more accurately, especially control freaks like Greg Maddux.**  We also expect that a pitcher who is way ahead in the count will throw a waste pitch and that on the 3-0, he’ll put it over the plate.  My guess is that umpires share these expectations. The difference is that the umps can turn their expectations into self-fulfilling prophecies.

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* I took the graphics from fangraphs

**The pitcher in the clips is Tyler Clippard, a pretty good closer for the Nationals. He was selected as an All-star once, not nearly enough to meet the King-Kim criterion level of five.

Women’s Magazines – Colors and Numbers

March 29, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

First there was Barbara Stanwyck

And then Kelly LeBrock . . .

. . .  movie history repeating itself, the second time as farce.

According to current evolutionary psychology thinking, the prevalence of women in red is not an accident.  The title of this 2013 article says it all: “Women Use Red in Order to Attract Mates.” Just like Ray Charles said.
i


I was thinking about this the other day as I walked past the newsstands in Port Authority, and not just because of Philip Cohen’s off-the-cuff research study  lending support. 

(Click on the photo for a larger view. The photo is a composite 

of shots from three different magazine racks. )

The trouble was that on all these magazines in the women’s section, only one of the covers had a lady in red (New You, which is apparently aimed at women with a bit of anxiety about getting older).

The covers also made me think about the idea sometimes put forward by the evol-psych crowd (and sometimes by presidents of Harvard) that women do not have an affinity for math.  Maybe so, but while the women’s magazine racks this month had almost no red, they had a lot of numbers.

• Seventeen – 328 Fun Hair Ideas
• More - 12 Rules to Follow and 4 to Skip
• Style Watch - 728 Spring Looks You’ll Love
• Lucky - 25 Best Bags of Spring
• Bazaar – 437 New Looks for Now
• Elle - 300 Instant Outfit Ideas,
•     80+ Tips from the World’s Top Makeup, Hair, & Skin Pros
•     the 14 Books Every Woman Must Read
• Cosmopolitan – 168 Ways to Kick More Ass
• Teen Vogue – 273 Looks at Any Price
• Oprah - 20 Questions Every Woman Should Ask Herself Today!
• In Style - 378 Amazing Spring Accessories
• Vogue - 648 pages of Spring Fashion
• Glamour - 99 Best Bags & Shoes Now
• Cosmopolitan Latina - 87 Power Moves
• New You – 250+ Springtime beauty solutions, sexy workouts & dietary musts

I’ve commented on this years ago (here and here). Back then, it was not unusual for a magazine to have more than one number on the cover.  The curious thing is that numbers themselves seem to be a fashion mag fashion.  They go in and out of style.  For a while, numbers almost completely disappeared from the covers of women’s magazines.  But at least for Spring 2014, the numbers are back. 

If the SocioBlog had a cover, it might say

14 Magazines for Spring with Numbers on the Cover

Blessed Are the Assault Rifles

March 24, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Righteous Slaughter” was the title I gave a post (here) about the ideas of some people on the gunslinging right. It referred to their glorification of killing so long as the killing could be justified. At the time, I thought that “righteous” might be stretching it just a little since the term implies that the slaughter has a holy, Biblical inspiration and benediction.

Silly me.  Fox News today set me straight.



As the spineless lefties at the Daily News were quick to point out in their lede, the prize this house of worship was offering was

 a high-powered assault rifle similar to the one used to slaughter 26 innocent people at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Nor is this upstate New York church unique. While it was raffling off one piddling assault rifle, Lone Oak First Baptist Church in Kentucky was doing 25 times that amount of God’s work.

roughly 1,300 people crammed into the church hall for a steak dinner and pep talk by gun expert Chuck McAlister, who was hired by Kentucky’s Southern Baptists to grow membership. Twenty-five guns were raffled off during the dinner

The New York church is trying its best to catch up – as the headline says, another church-sanctified AR-15 will go to some lucky Christian tonight.

John 11:35

Families for Deceptive Statistics

March 22, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

If you live in New York City and have a working television set, you’ve seen those heart-wrenching ads accusing Mayor DeBlasio of “taking away the hopes and dreams” of 194 middle school children.  The meanie mayor did this by allowing 14 of 17 charter schools to get free space in public schools.  Unfortunately, at least one of the three that didn’t meet the criteria* is run by Eva Moskowitz, who is closely connected with some heavy hitters.** Hence the multi-million dollar saturation ad campaign.

The ads come from an organization called Families for Excellent Schools. It was bad enough that they took over my television. Now they’ve turned up, unbidden and unfollowed, in my Twitter feed. 

Wow – 79% want to “protect or expand.”  Looks like four out of five New Yorkers are strongly pro-charter.  But just to be sure, I followed the link and arrived at a Quinnipiac poll (here).  It’s Quinnipiac, so I assume that the sampling and questions are OK.  Here’s the relevant item:

30. As you may know, charter schools are operated by private or non-profit organizations. The schools are paid for with public funds and do not charge tuition. Do you think the mayor should increase the number of charter schools, decrease the number of charter schools, or keep the number of charter schools the same?

And here are the results (I’ve left out the demographic breakdowns which you can find by following the link above).

	Total	Kid in PS
Increase	40	45
Decrease	14	14
Keep the same	39	35
DK/NA	7	6

Notice that the word in the tweet, “protect,” was not one of the choices. The trick is obvious: lump the 39% who said “Keep the same” with the 40% who said the 39% who said “Increase,” and voila – 79%.  But the trick works both ways.  Using the same logic, charter opponents could add the “Keep the same” group to the 14% “Decrease” group and say

Poll finds majority of New Yorkers wants to halt growth of charter schools, 53 - 40.   Among those with kids in public school, they outnumber proponents of charter expansion 49 - 45.

Would that be deceptive? Maybe, but certainly no more so than “protect or expand.”

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* Diane Ravitch (here) has more on the criteria for “co-location” of charters in public schools.

** “Jeremiah Kittredge, the executive director of Families for Excellent Schools, said the strength of the movement comes from the bottom.” (From a story on WNYC radio.) Hmm. Do you pay for a multi-million dollar TV ad campaign with money from the bottom?  It turns out that Families for Excellent schools gets its money from ordinary bottom folks like the Walton family and probably a bunch of billionaire hedge-funders and CEOs, though we can’t be sure: “Kittredge declined to discuss his organization’s funding.”

Less for Your Money

March 21, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

What to do about snow days? That was one of the last items on the agenda at the half-day-long meeting of all department chairs. In coming semesters, we’ll probably get more weird weather, so what kind of advance arrangements should make?  Schedule more pre-exam-period reading days that can be converted to class days? Have teachers tockpile a few online classes?

“I don’t know about anyone else,” said one chair, trying to sound puzzled, “but so far none of my students have complained about the two missed classes.”  (OK, it was me.) There was laughter, though not an entirely easy laughter.

I continued:

I had two immediate mental associations when the topic came up. One was my brother. Long ago, I was talking to him about this problem or something similar He took out a blank piece of paper.  “Suppose this is your field, sociology.” Then he drew a square that took up less than half the page.. “And this is how much you know.”

“And this,” he drew a smaller square inside that one, “is what you can cover in a semester.”  It was beginning to look like an Albers print but without color.

“And this,” a still smaller square “is what your students can learn.”

I didn’t have to state the obvious implication:  as long as the what-they-can-learn square was considerably smaller than the what-you-can-cover square, what difference would a couple of snow days make?

“My other association,” I said, “was to Father Guido Sarducci.”

I was surprised by the number of people who seemed to get the reference.* At least they laughed.  And one woman I spoke with later (chair of Nutrition Sciences) did a very credible version of Fr. Sarducci’s accent.  She added that our business was one of the very few where the customers often wanted less for their money.

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* The bit became famous after Don Novello did it on SNL in the early 1970s. This version is from 1980, still early enough that the audience gets the Mickey Mouse Club reference.

 

Motivation and Incentives - Are the Rich and Poor Different?

March 19, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Economic policies often rest on assumptions about human motivation. 

Rep. Ryan (Republican of Wisconsin): 

The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity — of self-determination.

Fox News has been hitting the theme of “Entitlement Nation” lately. The Conservative case against things like Food Stamps, Medicare, welfare, unemployment benefits, etc. rests on some easily understood principles of motivation and economics.

1.    Giving money or things to a person creates dependency and saps the desire to work. That’s bad for the person and bad for the country
2.    A person working for money is good for the person and the country.
3.    We want to encourage work
4.    We do not want to encourage dependency
5.    Taxing something discourages it. 

Now that you’ve mastered these, here’s the test question:

1. According to Conservatives, which should be taxed more heavily:
    a.    money a person earns by working
    b.    money a person receives without working, for example because someone else died and left it in their will

If you said “b,” you’d better go back to Conservative class. A good Conservative believes that the money a person gets without working for it should not be taxed at all.*  

Not all such money, of course.  Lottery tickets are bought disproportionately by lower-income people.  If a person gets income by winning the PowerBall or some other lottery, the Federal government taxes the money as income. Conservatives do not object.  But if a person gets income by winning the rich-parent lottery, Conservatives think he or she should not pay any taxes.

What Conservatives are saying to you is this: working for your money is not as good as  inheriting it.** This message seems to contradict the principles listed above. But, as Jon Stewart recently pointed out (here), Conservatives apply those principles of economics and motivational psychology only to the poor, not to wealthy individuals or corporations.

Me, I’m with Rep. Ryan on this one. I think that the children of the wealthy would not at all mind paying considerable taxes on their inheritance. What abolishing inheritance taxes offers people is a full stomach (not to mention a full bank account, stock portfolio, a full house or two, etc.) but an empty soul. To repeat the Wisdom from Wisconsin: “People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity — of self-determination.”

Unfortunately, Conservatives want to take away that dignity and self-determination
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* Conservatives like to call the inheritance tax the “death tax” as though a person is being taxed for dying. But it’s not the deceased who is being taxed. It’s the lucky people who are given the money.

** Conservatives also favor lower taxes on other ways of getting money that are available mostly the wealthy and involve little or no work – gambling on stocks and more complicated derivatives for example.