Data? We Don't Need No Stinking Data.

July 13, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

There it was again, the phrase that makes me cringe. This time it was in a letter to the New York Times Magazine in response to a column by Rob Walker on a marketing strategy the Hyatt Hotel chain was using to increase customer loyalty. The hotel would give “random acts of generosity” (like picking up your bar tab) in hopes of generating gratitude.

Walker also cited some supporting research from a management journal. That was his mistake. The letter writer knew better.

Well, we finally know why the American economy is in trouble. The Journal of Marketing accepted an academic paper exploring whether gratitude kindles a feeling of obligation. Could anything be more patently obvious without any research? John Milton knew this 400 years ago: “The debt immense of endless gratitude.”
-- Bob House, Phoenix [emphasis added]

Mr. House did not use the customary phrase, “we don’t need research to tell us,” though he did say flatly that such research is not only unnecessary but harmful to the economy. Who needs data when you have Paradise Lost?

Week one in my course I tell students that even when an idea is obvious, we still need to get evidence to confirm it. I don’t mention gratitude, though I do cite other obvious facts, like the fact that far more people die in fires each year than by drowning, a fact well supported by logic and common sense, though unfortunately not by the evidence.

Sometimes speakers use “we don’t need statistics” after they’ve cited the statistics. More often, when someone says, “We don’t need statistics to tell us. . . .” it’s a pretty good bet that there are no data to support the statement, or worse, that the evidence supports an opposite conclusion. Here are a couple of samples from my files:

Does watching porn or listening rap make kids more promiscuous? Why waste time figuring out how to get data on the question? Just take it from Irving Kristol (William’s dad) from some years back writing in the Wall Street Journal:

is it not reasonable to think that there may also be such a connection between our popular culture and the plagues of sexual promiscuity among teenagers, teenage illegitimacy, and, yes, the increasing number of rapes committed by teenagers? Here again, we don’t really need social science to confirm what common sense and common observations tell us to be the case.
Can anyone really believe that soft porn in our Hollywood movies, hard porn in our cable movies, and violent porn in our “rap” music is without effect?

By “here again,” he apparently means that there are several other areas where we are better off not trying to get evidence.

Is the death penalty more of a deterrent than long prison terms? No point in doing all those regressions. Just take it from Charles Rice, a law professor at Notre Dame, writing in The New American

The best evidence that the death penalty has a uniquely deterrent impact . . . is not based on statistics but is rather based on common sense and experience. Death is an awesome and awful penalty, qualitatively different from a prison term . . . Common sense can sufficiently verify that the prospect of punishment by death does exert a restraining effect on some criminals who would otherwise commit a capital crime.

For what it’s worth, I did a quick Internet search. Here are the results.

• “We don’t need studies” - Google - 791; Bing - 605
• “We don’t need statistics” Google - 329, Bing - 262

Of course, we don’t really need statistics to tell us that these phrases are a refuge for those who have no evidence.

Are Drugs Still Trumps?

July 8, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

For decades, drug policy in the US was based on a kind of hysteria, with lawmakers trying to outdo one another in dreaming up harsher and harsher punishments. Slowly but surely, drug laws are becoming more rational. But there are still people who think they can win an argument by shouting “drugs!” in a crowded-prison debate. They toss “drugs” out like a high trump card to sweep everything else off the table.

A few days ago, the Times ran an article by reporter Erik Ekholm on the children of parents who are incarcerated. Ekholm cited research, by sociologists such as the redoubtable Sara Wakefield, showing that having a parent sent away to prison does not generally contribute greatly to a kid’s well-being.

In the spirit of fair and balanced journalism, Ekholm was required to give space to the lock-’em-up folks, so he gives us “Heather MacDonald, a legal expert at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group.”

“A large portion of fathers were imprisoned on violence or drug-trafficking charges,” she said. “What would be the effects on other children in the neighborhood if those men are out there?”

Note Ms. MacDonald’s equation of violence and “drug-trafficking,” as though the person selling crack or heroin to willing customers were indistinguishable from an armed robber. I guess Ms. MacDonald has been watching reruns of Al Pacino’s Scarface rather than reading Sudhir Vankatesh (or the Montclair SocioBlog).

Nor, apparently, has she been talking with conservative economists down the hall at the Manhattan Institute, for she also seems to think that locking up drug sellers reduces the total number of drug sellers in the neighborhood. This fantasy is not only contradicted by empirical research (and by common knowledge); it also runs counter to what would be predicted by principles free-market economics. Market forces bring new dealers to replace the ones the police have just swept off the street.

(Hat tip: Todd Krohn at The Power Elite and SocProf at Global Sociology.)

If You Don't Know, Guess - But Sound as Though You're Certain

July 6, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Does anybody really know why Palin resigned? Maybe Palin herself knows – and I emphasize the maybe. But that didn't stop the media from printing pure speculation almost as if it were solid fact. Here are some headlines typical of the first stories:

Palin prepping for a run for president?
(msnbc)
Palin hints at White House bid by quitting as governor of Alaska
(The Times - London)
News fuels rumors of a 2012 run
(Boston Globe)

Not much later, we got headlines like this:

Alaska's governor Sarah Palin to resign, dooming her presidential pipe dream.

(New York Daily News)
Sarah Palin’s Lame Duck Resignation Logic Eliminates a 2012 Run for President
(US News and World Report)

You might as well be reading blogs.

Civility or Mindless Compliance?

July 3, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Suppose you were about to walk into a campus building, and you saw this sign.


Would you take the door indicated? If you were headed for one door when you saw the sign, would you change your course, even if it meant adding a full three steps to your journey?

If so, according to the people at The Situationist, you are guilty of “gender conformity” and “mindless compliance.”

Here’s the full video. (Note: it’s silent. Don’t bother, as I did, trying to figure out what’s wrong with your computer’s sound.)

The Situationist lists “related” posts on the Zimbardo prison, the Milgram obedience experiments, and the Asch conformity experiments.

Why didn’t they link to something about civility?

Suppose you’re walking into a building, and a stranger says, “Excuse me, would you mind walking through this other door?” would you stop and demand that he explain the rationale for his request? Or would you say, “Sure,” and go on your way?

The experimenter, Sarah Lisenbe, frames this as a gender issue. But would the results have been different if the sign had indicated different doors for first-year students and sophomores and above? Or students and faculty?

The video ends with a sigh (a signed sigh). But it left me with a question: what about the people who saw the sign but deliberately ignored it? What kind of person would disregard such a simple request?

Yes, I know there’s a counter-argument – that mindless conformity to signs based on gender only serves to reinforce gender inequality. It’s like obeying the Jim Crow signs for colored and white drinking fountains. (Is it relevant that this video was apparently taken at Mississippi State?)
So I guess the question is this: do you see the sign as an intrinsic part of a system of sex segregation and male domination; or do you see it as another request, like a traffic arrow, that’s so minor you don’t even bother to wonder about its rationale?

Mainstream vs. Bloggers

July 1, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Socioblog is pleased that the New York Times picked up on yesterday’s blog post and ran with its own horror story about private health insurance (in this case, Aetna). The Times also quotes from Wendell Potter, the former Cigna exec who testified before Congress a week ago about private health care insurance.

Insured but Unprotected, and Driven Bankrupt by Health Crises - Series - NYTimes.com via kwout

How do the mainstream media decide what is news and what isn’t? The Times did not see fit to cover Potter’s testimony when it was news. But why was it not fit to print? Potter was a former insider telling several inconvenient truths about insurance companies. He was making accusations in point-blank terms. Yet when I searched Lexis-Nexis, I found only two newspapers that gave ink to the story – the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer. A few others (e.g., WSJ, Hartford Courant) had the story on line. The AP put Potter at the end of a short item (621 words) about insurers using a “flawed database.” No TV networks covered it.

But several blogs had the story.

The disparity reminded me of the old days and I.F. Stone’s Newsletter.* After he was blacklisted, and most Washington insiders avoided him, Stone made a virtue of necessity. While most reporters avoided the boring stuff of actual legislation and got their stories from government insiders, Stone made a careful reading of transcripts of Congressional hearings. When it came to foreign affairs, especially the Vietnam war, he didn’t much bother with the press briefings from the White House or Pentagon, but he did look closely at non-US sources like Agence France Presse. It was like finding out inconvenient truths by going through the garbage people threw out. It was out there and public, though most reporters ignored it, and it often didn't smell very good.

I know that a lot of dubious material floats around the blogosphere, but the medium has allowed a thousand I.F. Stones to blossom. (Well, maybe not a thousand, but there are dozens of good ones.)

* Update, July 2: I am, it turns out, far from alone noticing the resemblance. According to a recent article in the L.A. Times by Stone’s biographer D.D. Guttenplan, “many contemporary observers” have dubbed Stone “the first blogger.”

There may be at least one difference between Stone and contemporary bloggers. Stone was meticulous about copy. His daughter says that he once told her, “Typos are worse than fascism.”

Anecdotal Evidence on Health Care

June 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Opponents of government involvement in health care seem to have two strategies. One is name-calling – “socialism” and “European-style” are two of their favorites. The other is to repeat anecdotes to illustrate the horrors that people in Europe and Canada have suffered – delayed treatment, denial of treatment, and so on. There’s a third strategy – spending huge amounts of money in lobbying legislators directly – but that’s less visible.

The Obama Administration has asked Americans for their own stories about their experiences with the insurance industry. Stories have poured in by the thousands. You can read them here, read them and weep.

Some people report on their experiences with socialized European-style health care, and the US does not come off on the plus side (here, for example). Others compare experiences with private insurance against public plans in this country Again, the private system comes off as inferior.
I’ve blogged before (here and here) about the utter hollowness of the claims that socialized health care will mean that “bureaucrats” rather than doctors will be making decisions. In fact, the bureaucrats are already doing that. And a few of them have contributed their stories to the Obama website. Here’s one from Barbara in Barbara, Deer Island, FL

I worked for United Health Care in small group customer service. If a company was more than 5 days late in their monthly payments, United would "terminate" their coverage. When they were terminated the group administrator from the "termed" company would call me to reinstate their coverage. I would take their phone number, go to my supervisor's office and get a computer disk showing all small groups "loss ratios." If the company I was working with was in the high risk ratio, I was not to reinstate their coverage. This meant people in the hospital or scheduled for surgery would never nave coverage with any company because of pre-existing conditions if their coverage was less than 90 days. Sometimes a new group misses payments in the first few months before they get on a payment schedule. This is how United Would "weed out" the high claims group. Their actions were not illegal, but were IMMORAL!

That term “loss ratio” refers to the ratio of premiums that the insurance company pays out. When your insurance company pays a claim to your doctor or hospital, that’s a loss.

Barbara’s story was amplified recently in Congress. Wendell Potter, a former executive at Cigna, testified before the Commerce Committee.

"They look carefully to see if a sick policyholder may have omitted a minor illness, a pre-existing condition, when applying for coverage, and then they use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment."
(Potter’s full testimony, thanks to Ezra Klein, is here.)

Selling (Out) Public Transport

June 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

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



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

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

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

Taylorized Eating

June 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

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

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

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

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

Twenty-five Is Not a Random Number

June 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

States' Rights, and Wrongs

June 19, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Folkways and Laws

June 17, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Stateways cannot change folkways. Or can they?

Henry at Crooked Timber, who has apparently spent some time in the pubs of Ireland, says he never expected the Irish to obey the new anti-smoking law. But they did. Henry’s explanation is not that he underestimated the power of the law but that he overestimated the strength of the norms:

prevailing norms (that Irish people can smoke in pubs to their hearts’ content, and that others will just have to put up with it) were much more fragile than they appeared to be

In France too, and Italy, many people were sure that smokers would ignore new restrictions on indoor smoking, but the bans in those countries have been surprisingly effective.

The crucial point is not that social scientists misread the norms but that the smokers on the ground did. It’s a case of “pluralistic ignorance,” a phrase coined by Floyd Allport in the early 20th century to describe this misreading. Most people have doubts about the norm (in this case, the norm that smoking is O.K.), but each thinks that others support it, so each person publicly states support for the norm and keeps his doubts to himself, which only leads everyone to further misread just how weak the norm really is.

Attribution theory has a related explanation. When we see someone behave in a certain way, we are quick to attribute a whole set of motives and characteristics to the person. If someone is smoking, it must be because he wants to. He is a smoker. On top of that, if we see nonsmokers in a pub where there is smoking, and they are not objecting, we conclude that they have no objections. In both cases, we are using our observations of behavior to make simplistic assumptions about what’s in the minds of the people we observe.

If we thought about it for a couple of seconds, we’d realize that most people who smoke feel at least ambivalent about smoking. They’d like to quit and have probably tried to more than once. A ban on smoking indoors gives them one more external push to do what they want to do anyway.

Something similar happened when New York City passed a “pooper scooper” law thirty years ago. By the late 1970s in New York City, dog droppings in the public areas of the city – the parks, streets, and sidewalks – had reached a level that many people found disgusting. It was a shitty version of the tragedy of the commons. Each individual acted out of self-interest (walking away was more pleasant than scooping up the poop) with a result that made the city less pleasant for all.

Many people thought the new law would have no effect. They were applying a rational, economic analysis. True, there was a fine for not cleaning up. But the city had much heavier fines for running red lights, and still many New York drivers continued to treat stop lights more as a suggestion than as a command. Besides, it was very unlikely that a cop would be around at the precise moment a dog owner walked away leaving the incriminating evidence. The law was all but unenforceable. How could anyone seriously expect New Yorkers, of all people, to cooperate?


But much to the surprise of most people, including New Yorkers themselves, the law worked. Dog owners did clean up, even though they could easily have gotten away with violating the new law. But why? Here’s my guess: Even before the new law, dog owners had probably thought that cleaning up after their dogs was the right thing to do, but since everyone else was leaving the stuff on the sidewalk, nobody wanted to be the only schmuck in New York to be picking up dog shit. In the same way that the no-smoking laws worked because smokers wanted to quit, the dog law in New York worked because dog owners really did agree that they should be cleaning up after their dogs. But prior to the law, none of them would speak or act on that idea.

So it looks as though stateways can indeed change folkways, at least when the folks want to change.

Oceane Tide Rising and Falling

June 12, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the previous post on names, I said that the rapid rise and fall of Oceane in France paralleled the career of Madison in the US. But Madison is still hanging in there, still in the top 5, having descended only one or two places in the rankings. A better example might be Hannah (though Oceane doesn’t have Hannah’s history), or Ashley in the late 20th century.

(Click on the graph to see a larger version.)

Still, both these American names were less volatile than Oceane in France. In a single decade (1991-2000) the number of Oceanes increased by a factor of six. Six years later, it had fallen nearly by half.
(US graphs are from babynamewizard. More data on French names here.)

It's How You Finish

June 11, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Flaneuse at Graphic Sociology reprints a neat graph by Baptiste Coulmont showing trends in the endings of girls' names in France.

(Click on the graph to see a larger version.)

The final “e” has long been characteristic of French female names, though with some variation (the “ette” suffix is so 1930s). The most remarkable trend in recent decades is the rise of the final “a” to the point that it is now more common than the final “e.” The three top names in 2006 (the most recent year I could find data for), were Emma, Lea, and Clara. (I also noted that Oceane has now dropped out of the top ten. Apparently, in terms of fashion cycles, Oceane is to France what Madison is to the US.)

Final letters of boys’ names in the US have also seen a dramatic shift, as documented nearly two years ago by Laura Wattenberg at babynamewizard. The half century from 1906 to 1956 saw little change. D,E, S, N, and Y shared the closing spotlight, probably thanks to David, George, and James/Charles/Thomas, John and several Y names.

Final Letter of Boys' Names 1906

Final Letter of Boys' Names 1956

But by 2006, N had conquered the field and stood pretty much alone.

Final Letter of Boys' Names 2006

It won not by having a single blockbuster – only one of the top ten boys’ names, Ethan, had a final N – but with more of a long-tail effect. Of the names ranked 14th to 27th, nine of the fourteen ended in N. (The list is here).

Dialing, Dollars, and Doctors

June 10, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The only health care costs I was thinking about when I started calling orthopedists today were my own. That’s why my first question was to make sure that the doctor participated in my insurance plan. I was calling only orthopedists listed listed on my plan’s website. But the woman who finally answered the phone of my first choice told me No.

The personal is the political, and I started thinking of all those warnings from conservatives that if the government gets into health care, we won’t be able to choose our own doctors, and we’ll be subject to incompetent government bureaucracy. It took only one phone call to discover that under what I have now, I can’t choose my own doctor, and that, at least when it comes to keeping their website information current, the insurance company bureaucracy isn’t exactly a paragon of competence.

A public option might be just as good. And who knows – with Obama in office, maybe the music you have to listen to while you’re waiting will be better.

I expected to be put on hold, and I expected the music. But I wasn’t prepared for the ads over the music – a woman’s reassuring voice telling me about all the wonderful kinds of surgery now available. It wasn’t as blatant as those ads on the subway decades ago for Dr. Tush* and his hemorrhoid surgery. The on-hold message didn’t exactly say, “What would it take for me to put you today into this quick and sporty little arthroscopic hand surgery?” There was also the difference that while the straphanger-friendly proctologist was going for volume, the orthopedists were aiming at a smaller customer base but pushing their more expensive products. Still, it was clear that all these practitioners were paying close attention to the bottom line.

Then I remembered that just this morning, Ezra Klein blogging at WaPo had said something along similar lines – less personal, more political and economic.

Reforms to . . . the way doctors are paid would actually do much to change the drivers of health-care spending. . . . Most doctors are paid on a fee-for-service model. Every time they do something to you, they get money for it. That's a subtle incentive toward expensive overtreatment. Conversely, if we paid doctors exactly the same amount overall, but made that money a yearly salary rather than a reward for volume of treatment, doctors would lose an important incentive to provide more health-care services than we actually need.

Ezra also recommends Atul Gawande’s recent New Yorker article, which ought to be required reading for anybody who has anything to do with healthcare.

* Amazingly, I could not find anything about Dr. Tush on the Internet. I’m pretty sure he wound up in prison, but I don’t know whether for medical or financial malfeasance

Well You Needn't

June 7, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The primary school my son went to is moving, and there was a farewell tour of the old building. The walls were covered with the kids’ art and their class projects. I was looking at the classroom doors – guides to trends in names. Gone were Emily and Alexandra and of course Jason.
But this one stopped me in my tracks.


Thelonius!

“There’s Only One Aretha,” I remembered. It was the title of a chapter in Beyond Jennifer and Jason: An Enlightened Guide to Naming Your Baby, by far the best of the books my wife and I consulted back in the late 80s. (The title has since been updated: Beyond Jennifer & Jason, Madison & Montana: What to Name Your Baby Now.)

Don’t name your kid Aretha – that was the gist of the chapter – unless you want to doom her to a lifetime of predictable comments. There are some names that are unique. There’s only one of them, and it’s been taken.

Surely Thelonius must be such a name – even his son goes by T.S. Monk, Jr. But at least on the West Side, maybe it has broken out.

The Dog Corrupted My Homework

June 5, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Inside Higher Ed today reports on a company that sells corrupted files for students to submit in lieu of the paper they haven’t finished. “It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!”

A few readers at Ed (Inside Higher Ed and I are on a last name basis) offered ways to defeat such tactics.

I have several reactions..

• Formal rationality and substantive rationality: If you set up a bureaucratized, McDonaldized version of “education,” where forms are more important than substance, you should expect this cat-and-mouse game of students trying not to learn, and teachers trying to catch them.
  
  
• A day in the life. Corrupted-files.com promises students “several hours.” Maybe even a day or two. Will that time really make a difference in quality? Probably not. But students may have complicated lives, and my course is only one of its elements. And suppose that the extra day or two would make a difference in quality . . . .
  
  
• Do you want it Wednesday or do you want it good? It’s a standard line among sitcom writers. TV has to run on schedule, so the answer is usually Wednesday. Which is why TV is so often not good. But my course is not a sitcom (or is it?), and I would much rather have the work be good.
  
  
• WTF? RTF. I ask students to submit papers as Rich Text Format (.rtf) documents. I don’t know if this reduces the possibility for corruption. It does make the paper readable in other formats (like my beloved WordPerfect). And I once heard that a virus can be embedded in a Word document but not in a .rtf document.*

*And please no PowerPoint. As Lord Acton said of the effect of presentation software on thinking, “PowerPoint tends to corrupt. Absolute PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

Which Side (of the Newsstand) Are You On?

June 2, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Inflation or deflation – which is the greater cause for concern? Maybe your answer depends on your relation to the means of producing the New York Times – are you a writer or a reader?

On Friday, Paul Krugman wrote:

Suddenly it seems as if everyone is talking about inflation. . . .But does the big inflation scare make any sense? Basically, no . . .. Deflation, not inflation, is the clear and present danger.

When I went to buy the paper Monday to see Krugman’s next column, the newsstand price had risen by 33% – from $1.50 to $2.00. (The increase, equal to the price of New York’s other two dailies, means that the Times price is 300% that of the Daily News or Post.)

Murder in the Cathedral

May 31, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Operation Rescue issued the following statement regarding the assassination of Dr. George Tiller as he served as an usher at his Kansas church.

We are shocked at this morning's disturbing news that Mr. [sic]Tiller was gunned down. Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller's family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.

I like “shocked” with its inadvertent Casablanca allusion. For years they have been calling Dr. Tiller a murderer, a mass murderer. They wanted him “brought to justice” even though he had committed no crime. And now they are shocked, shocked, to find that one of their followers got the message.

In 1170, King Henry II, frustrated by Archbishop Thomas Becket’s refusal to cede any church jurisdiction to the crown, called out to his underling knights, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest.”* Four knights rode to Canterbury and killed Becket.

The next day, King Henry issued a proclamation. (My memory is hazy here. I think the lines below may be from T.S. Eliot’s version.)

At this disturbing news we are shocked, shocked,
That the Archbishop has been killed by swords.
We wanted on his head to bring down justice
But through peaceful means. We’re not to blame – trust us.

*That is the most famous version of the quote. More recent scholarship has Henry taunting the knights: “What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!”

White Is Not a Race

May 31, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and others on the far right are calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Before she was nominated, when Obama said that “empathy” was a quality he would look for in a Supreme Court justice, Republicans picked up the word and waved it like the red flag of danger. Even David Brooks, who enters stage right to play the role of the calm and thoughtful, but always reliable, conservative, suddenly remembered that “emotions are an inherent part of decision-making.” In his column yesterday, Brooks asks of Sotomayor,

Can she process multiple streams of emotion? Reason is weak and emotions are strong, but emotions can be balanced off each other. . . . Is she aware of the murky, flawed and semiprimitive nature of her own decision-making, and has she accounted for her own uncertainty? If we were logical creatures in a logical world, judges could create sweeping abstractions and then rigorously apply them. But because we’re emotional creatures in an idiosyncratic world, it’s prudent to have judges who are cautious, incrementalist and minimalist.

The role of emotion and the “semiprimitive” nature of decision-making – Brooks says that these affect all humans. It was a mere oversight that he never mentioned these factors in his writings about other justices or nominees. But faced with the nomination of Sotomayor, Brooks seems to be seeing he as Penelope Cruz as the hot-blooded Latina in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

These Republican reactions and arguments rest on the basic assumption that white male is the default setting. White is not a race, male is not a gender. Only blacks, Hispanics, and others have race. Only women and gays have gender. Because white males do not have race or gender, race and gender cannot affect their decisions or perceptions. But for a Latina, awash in race and gender, these qualities will distort her views. Therefore, she must prove that she can overcome race and gender – in other words, that she can think like a white male.

Situation Comedy

May 28, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“If there’s one second of spare time, and if you look away from him and lose eye contact, he immediately whips it out and starts looking at it,” she said.

“She” is Evvajean Mintz, speaking about her husband, Richard, a partner in a Boston law firm. His annoying bit of dinner-table behavior is the subject of an article in the food section of the yesterday’s New York Times. The “it” she is referring to, as you have no doubt guessed, is his Blackberry.*

Cellphones and Blackberries are the new normative battleground. The rules are far from clear. Adults think it’s rude to text at the dinner table; obviously many kids think otherwise. In fact, I wonder if there are any situations at all that these kids would redline for texting.

Most people think that you shouldn’t make cellphone calls in a theater – most, but not all, for the management has to remind people of the rule. But what about on public transportation? Some buses ban them; others don’t. Some commuter trains have cellphone cars the way they used to have smoking cars. How about sporting events? My sister-in-law complained about cell-phone users at the Yankee game.

Sometimes our reactions are personal and rational. We can’t enjoy the play or movie if we have to listen to competing cellphone conversations. We know that the kid who is busy with his Blackberry in class is not giving us his full attention. But more often our reactions are social. We are acting not as individuals but as members of society. We resent the texter or talker not out of self-interest but on behalf of the social situation. As Goffman says, we have a stake in the situation that we find ourselves in, and even though we may have absolutely no personal connection to others in that situation, we think that they too should show their commitment to it. The cellphone/Blackberry user is saying to all those present that despite her physical presence, she herself is not part of the situation. Her allegiance is to others elsewhere.

The Times reporter talked with danah boyd (or as the Times style sheet insists, Danah Boyd), who says that teenagers are

just doing what they’ve always done: hanging out with their friends.
The cellphone makes it possible to bring your social circle to the dinner table. “You don’t really have to disconnect,” she said.

That’s putting a smiley emoticon face on it. The teens are not bringing their social circle to the table. Instead, what the others at the table see is a teenager who has disconnected from interaction with them in favor of some distant, private, and invisible friend.

I don’t mind if the woman on the bus is reading the newspaper or listening to her iPod or talking to the person next to her. I don’t mind if the guy at the Yankee game is yelling out his assessment of the players’ abilities. But if they’re talking on their cellphones, that’s just not right.

----------------
*Seinfeld viewers may be reminded of a bit of dialogue from “The Stand-in” episode (1994). Elaine is explaining to Jerry what happened on a first date: “He took it out.” (Watch it here .)

That was then. But if it were now, and if the guy, just prior to a possible first kiss, had taken out his Blackberry and started thumbing it, Elaine might have similarly decided that she wanted nothing more to do with him.


Update: Randy at Potato Chipping has a nice post noting that the Times seems to be on a moral-panic campaign to turn texting into a social problem. The texting-at-table article is a sort of follow up to a more “serious” article that appeared in the health section a day or two earlier.

Young /Old Differences - Age or Generation?

May 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Some years ago, a colleague of my brother offered this example of mistaking generational differences for age differences. If you took a cross-section of the Miami population, you would conclude that when Miamians are young, they speak Spanish; as they get older, they switch to English. And when they get very old, they speak Yiddish.

I was thinking about this recently – not just because I’ve been in Florida for the past few days, but because of two articles in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. The first was about Southern schools that hold segregated proms even though the student body is integrated.

“Most of the students do want to have a prom together,” says Terra Fountain, a white 18-year-old who graduated from Montgomery County High School last year and is now living with her black boyfriend. “But it’s the white parents who say no. … They’re like, if you’re going with the black people, I’m not going to pay for it.”

The other was Matt Bai’s column on a similar difference in attitudes towards homosexuality.

The gist of the disagreement now isn’t partisan or theological as much as it is generational. Unlike their parents, younger Americans and those now transitioning into middle age have had openly gay friends and colleagues all their lives . . . . They’re less inclined to restrict the personal decisions of gay Americans.

At first, I thought the articles offered two parallel branches of the same trend – a generational shift towards liberalism on social issues. But when you have differences between young and old, there are two possible explanations – generation and age. If the difference is generational, then the kids of today will retain their liberal attitudes in the same way that they will probably retain their musical preferences. My guess is that Bai is correct and that today’s teens and twentysomethings will continue to support gay marriage.

But what about those segregated proms? It’s possible that the differences are a matter of aging, not of generation. If so, when today’s kids are older and have teenagers of their own, they may come to adopt their parents’ views. The separate black and white proms may continue even though nobody can justify them in terms of rationality or values. As one teenager quoted in the article says, “It’s how it’s always been. It’s just a tradition.”

Grannies with Bags

May 22, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Lee Sigelman at The Monkey Cage posted this video of an older woman waiting to cross the street and then showing her displeasure at the guy in the Mercedes who impatiently honks his horn.


More specifically, she whacks his bumper hard enough to trigger the air bag.

Sigelman posts it as a test: Your guess as to what the driver will do reveals your philosophy of human nature.

But for us ancients, it more likely brings to mind Gladys Ormphby, the handbag-wielding Laugh-in character played by Ruth Buzzi.


See several Gladys bits strung together here.

The Things We Carried

May 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The opening sequence in Lawrence Kasdan’s1983 film The Big Chill shows a now dispersed group of college friends packing their bags as they prepare to come together for a funeral. No dialogue, just “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” on the soundtrack.

As the film cuts from one suitcase to another, there’s a visual joke: into the bag of each person, man or woman, goes a hair dryer, each a different color. At the time, this single iconic object located these former SDS types in social space. Kasdan could have simply had a sign flashing YUPPIE in bright letters with an arrow pointing to the person’s head. The hair dryer thing was marginally more subtle.*

That was then. Now, it would be chargers.

We packed for a short trip this week, and there they were – chargers for cell phones, laptops, cameras, and iPods. There were a couple of others I wasn’t sure about, but we took them along just in case.



*The hair dryer also figured symbolically in the 1975 film Shampoo, whose central idea is to play against the effeminate-hairdresser stereotype. Warren Beatty as George the hair stylist zips around on his motorcycle to do the hair of (and simply do) beautiful women all over LA. He carries his hair dryer tucked in his belt like a gangster’s Magnum.

Do You See What I See?

May 19, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

President Obama took a lot of flak from conservatives when he mentioned “empathy” as one quality, among several others, that he would look for in a Supreme Court justice.

We need somebody who has the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, African American, gay, disabled and old.

For conservatives, empathy is irrelevant. They take an absolutist position: the facts are the facts, and the Constitution says what it says. The court should not bend that Constitution in order to accommodate the interests of teenage moms, African Americans, or anybody else.

But empathy is not just about the interpreting the Constitution.. It’s also about the facts. And, as Obama seems to recognize, a set of facts – what you see – depends on where you are looking from.

Here’s a video that has nothing to do with gays or blacks or teenage moms. It’s a high-speed chase, shot from inside a police cruiser, It isn’t from Cops. It’s from a 2007 Supreme Court case (Scott v. Harris, 127 S. Ct. 1769) .

Watch the video, then answer the two questions. (Warning: this ain’t Mario Kart. It ends with the Officer Scott using his police car to deliberately ram Harris’s Cadillac, which crashes at high speed into a light pole. Harris suffered a broken neck and was left a quadriplegic.)*



On a six-point scale, from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree:

• During the pursuit, Harris drove in a manner that put members of the public at great risk of death.
• During the pursuit, Harris drove in a manner that put the police at serious risk of death.

Harris’s lawsuit depended on the answers to these factual questions. For the Supreme Court justices, the video said it all. Justice Alito: “I looked at the videotape on this. It seemed to me that [Harris] created a tremendous risk [to] drivers on that road.” (Scalia got a laugh her by adding., “He created the scariest chase I ever saw since ‘The French Connection.’”

Justice Breyer says the tape flat out turned him around. “I was with you when I read . . . the opinion of the court below,” Justice Breyer related. “Then I look at that tape, and I have to say that when I looked at the tape, my reaction was somewhat similar to Justice Alito’s.”

But would everyone see it the same facts in this video? Well, yes and no, at least according to a Harvard Law Review article, “Whose Eyes Are You Going to Believe.” The authors, three law professors,** asked a sample of 1350 people – not Supreme Court justices – to view the tape. The overwhelming majority of people said that the chase put the public and police at risk. Three-fourths thought that the use of deadly force was justified, but only a slight majority felt that it was worth the risk.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

But the percentages varied among groups. Using mostly demographic variables, the authors created four types of juror – types they identify as Ron, Pat, Bernie, and Linda – who had vastly different responses to the questions. Only 36% of the Linda group felt that the use of deadly force was justified, compared with 87% of the Rons. As to who was at fault, 94% of the Rons but only 29% of the Lindas assigned the fault to Harris.

The paper has several other comparisons as well as correlation tables on specific demographic variables. It’s also the only law review article I’ve ever read that made me laugh out loud (well, chuckle), thanks to the way the authors present their typology (not that I spend much time searching for yocks in law journals). It’s also eminently readable and non-legalistic. Download it here.

The authors’ point is that people may watch the same tape, but they see different things,


* Respondents were also provided the following set of facts:

• The police clocked Harris driving 73 miles per hour on a highway in a 55 mile-per-hour zone at around 11 pm.
• The police decided to pursue Harris when Harris ignored the police car’s flashing lights and kept driving rather than pulling over.
• The chase lasted around seven minutes and covered eight to nine miles.
• The police determined from the license plate number that the vehicle had not been reported stolen.
• Officer Scott joined the chase after it started. He did not know why the other officers had originally tried to stop Harris.
• Scott knew that other police officers had blocked intersections leading to the highway but did not know if all of the intersections were blocked.
• Officer Scott deliberately used his police cruiser’s front bumper to hit the rear of Harris’s car[,] hoping to cause Harris’s car to spin out and come to a stop.
• Officer Scott knew there was a high risk that ramming the car in this manner could seriously injure or kill Harris.
• Harris lost control, crashed, and suffered severe injuries, including permanent paralysis from the neck down.

**Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman & Donald Braman

Congratulations

May 17, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

We had our convocation today.

Convocation is better than commencement. It looks pretty much the same – caps, gowns, and the rest – but it’s smaller, just for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Commencement is in a big sports arena miles away. Convocation is in our own amphitheater. At commencement, students rise and are recognized en masse. At convocation, each student is called by name and walks across the stage, getting handshakes or hugs from the faculty in his or her department. Plus, the speeches are usually shorter.

(Click on the picture for a larger view.)

The Dean’s Recognition Award this year went to Michelle Newton, a sociology student. The Dean noted Michelle’s many accomplishments – other honors and awards and a GPA of 3.99 (I checked my records to make sure I wasn’t the creep who gave her an A-minus.)

Michelle had also done a poster session at the university’s student research day, presenting her research on empathy and attitudes towards animal rights.


Needless to say, we were all delighted to have her as a student, and we’ll miss her greatly. Next year she starts law school on a full scholarship.

Congratulations to Michelle and all our graduates.

Crowds and Wisdom: The Social Construction of Bubbles

May 15, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’ve blogged before about my skepticism of the wisdom of crowds (here for example). I had been thinking about sports betting and line shifts. But I’d missed the 800-pound gorilla that could make the wisdom-of-crowds crowd run for the exits: bubbles. Bubbles like the one that got us into the current mess. The Obama administration is calling for more “transparency” for swaps and derivatives. But was opacity the problem? True, these instruments weren’t traded on an open market, but the people who did trade them weren’t keeping stuff secret. The problem with these instruments – instruments designed to manage risk – was that nobody really knew how risky they were. Worse, they thought they knew, and they greatly underestimated the risk. Why? Back in February, Felix Salmon, in an article in Wired, put the blame here: It’s the Gaussian copula, a simple (as these things go) formula for evaluating the risk of a derivative. Derivatives and swaps are complex combinations of risk elements, but those elements are not independent of one another. To figure out the true risk of a tranche of one of these instruments, you’d have to know the myriad of correlations among all the elements.

Falling house prices, affect a large number of people at once. . . . If . . . you default on your mortgage, there’s a higher probability [others] will default, too. That's called correlation—the degree to which one variable moves in line with another—and measuring it is an important part of determining how risky mortgage bonds are.

But defaults are relatively rare, so how could you assess the degree of correlation? Along comes David X. Li, a quant. The formula, the Gaussian copula, is his claim to fame (or now, infamy).*

Li's breakthrough was that instead of waiting to assemble enough historical data about actual defaults, which are rare in the real world, he used historical prices from the CDS market. . . .Li wrote a model that used price rather than real-world default data as a shortcut (making an implicit assumption that financial markets in general, and CDS markets in particular, can price default risk correctly). Using Li's copula approach meant that ratings agencies like Moody's—or anybody wanting to model the risk of a tranche—no longer needed to puzzle over the underlying securities. All they needed was that correlation number, and out would come a rating telling them how safe or risky the tranche was.

The copula uses price. But price, as graduates of Father Guido Sarducci’s Five-Minute University know, is a product of “supply ana demand.” Price, at least in the short run, is based not on some true underlying value. It’s based on what people think. It’s pure social construction. The construction fed on itself.

You could even take lower-rated tranches of other CDOs, put them in a pool, and tranche them—an instrument known as a CDO-squared, which at that point was so far removed from any actual underlying bond or loan or mortgage that no one really had a clue what it included. But it didn't matter. All you needed was Li's copula function.

The socially constructed reality of price eventually came up against the economic reality of value: the Wile E. Coyote moment.**

the real danger was created not because any given trader adopted it but because every trader did. In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust.

*As the article makes clear, Li is not to be blamed for the way the Wall Street predators misused his formula.

**Is there actually a Road Runner cartoon with such a moment? There must be, but I could not find it on YouTube.

Labor and Capital - The Tipping Point

May 13, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The struggles of organized labor may have had a change of venue since the days of copper mines and Joe Hill, but the melody lingers on. (Full story here.)

(Click on the picture for a larger view.)

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive and looking well.
Says he, “I’ve left the mines. I’m at
The Essex House Hotel.
The Essex House Hotel.”

“Jumeira’s cut the workers’ hours
They’re handing out pink slips,
And if you work the banquet room,
They stiff you on your tips.
Two million bucks in tips.”

“We beat them at the Waldorf
The St. Regis and the Hyatt.
If three-hour strikes are what we need
To win, we’re gonna try it.
We’re surely going to try it.”

“Joe Hill ain’t dead, by God,” says he,
“He hasn’t changed his ways.
He’s standing with the busboys
And the waiters schlepping trays
The waiters schlepping trays.”

“From Mariott to Sheraton
To Plaza Athenée,
Where workers strike, Joe Hill is there
To see they get their pay.
Their tips and hourly pay.”

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive and looking well
Right there beside the workers in
The Essex House Hotel
The Essex House Hotel.

Wouldn't You Really Rather Have a Professor?

May 13, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I was grading exams yesterday and missed the Inside Higher Ed story on the continued adjunctification of our world. The data come from an AFT report.





Unfortunately, the report does not give data on the number of courses taught by each category of employee, just the numbers of people in each category. We don’t know whether all those grad students in research universities were teaching a course or two on their own or whether they were TAs doing a discussion section.

The trend is clear, though less so at research universities than at public colleges: the full-time, tenured or tenure-track professor is becoming the Buick of academia. You can still find them, but they’re gradually being replaced by non-union-made models that are easier to maneuver and far less costly to buy and maintain.

Multiple Choice - What Is It Good For?

May 12, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Multiple-choice tests are
a. a convenience for students
b. a convenience for teachers
c. a quick way to test knowledge of facts
d. a travesty of education

It’s All of the above. Students often do prefer multiple-choice items. Less time and effort – circling a letter or blackening a Scantron box as a opposed to writing an essay.

For the teacher, they are easier to grade (the computer does it for you), and you don’t even have to compose your own test. Most textbooks come with prepackaged “test banks” of questions. The questions are often bad. They ask about unimportant things, and they often violate rules of good test construction. Some have more than one right answer

• A and C
• B and D
• A, B, and D but not C

Others have non-parallel choices:

It’s hotter in
a. the summer
b. the city.

It’s tempting for students and teachers to collude in this conspiracy and act as if some body of ideas and evidence, a set of complex thoughts, can be represented in a few dozen smudge marks. It reminds of the old Soviet factory workers’ joke: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

Once, many years back, as I began the intro to the unit on Freud, a student asked, “Hasn’t Freud been pretty much disproved?” I don’t remember what I answered, but later it occurred to me that perhaps what the student wanted was to reduce the entirety of Freudian thought to a single question: Freud – True or False. Answer: False.

There is a use for these items – as teaching tools. I used to make the test bank available to students so they could check on their reading of the textbook. But I would add that more important than getting the right answer was understanding why it was right, why the others were wrong, and why the question was at all important. What more general ideas did it relate to?

I’ve also used multiple choice quizzes as a teaching device in class. After I give the quiz, I don’t collect it but let the students get together in groups to figure out the right answers. It’s encouraging how thoroughly they will parse the answers, exploring the implications of each choice, going back and checking in the reading. These discussions also alert me to problems with the questions – ambiguous wording, more than one valid choice, etc. – so that I can correct them if I ever do decide to use them on a real exam.

I do use them – to accommodate student preferences and to avoid complaints about subjective grading. But for the most part, I dislike the idea of multiple-choice tests. I also find it ironic that the teachers who rely on them are also often the teachers who see education as preparing students for the real world. What in the world (the real world) will students ever be asked to do that resembles a multiple-choice test?

Sociology Blogging - Never Too Soon

May 8, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m thinking of assigning blogs as coursework next time around. Jenn Lena at Vanderbilt created a sort of group blog, My Sociological Imagination, with different teams of students posting each week. Students were also required to comment regularly on other’s posts. (The seven percent solution – 7% of the final grade for the blog post, 7% for comments.) Jenn says that the blog posts were better than what students in past semesters wrote when she gave the same assignments as papers. Maybe it was because students knew that their work was going to be read carefully by their classmates, not just the teacher. (Read Jenn’s evaluation here, specs for the assignment here – both useful.)

I was impressed by the Vanderbilt students. But if I do shift to blogs, it will probably be because of the kids in Mrs. Castelli’s class in a high school outside Chicago. I can’t remember how I happened on Mrs. Castelli’s blog, but it has links to her students’ blogs, so I browsed through them.

I’m guessing that blogging was optional since barely a dozen a kids in two periods have blogs, but the ones that did create their own blogs seem to have fun with them. A couple of the kids just seem to like writing as a kind of public performance. All the bloggers seemed to enjoy the visual aspect – playing around with the different Blogger formats and including pictures (one kid illustrates nearly every post, regardless of topic, with a picture of a sleek car). I think the most successful assignment was the one that apparently asked them to compare photos from two eras and look for changes in cultural ideals. The boys mostly chose athletes, the girls preferred models or actresses.

So, at least when it comes to blogging, the kids are all right. And maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, these kids have never known a world without the Internet. Putting your ideas about sociological concepts out there in a blog for the world to see isn’t much different from creating and customizing your page on MySpace or Facebook. Now if only they could learn to use their spell-checkers.