Free Samples

June 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Google has nGrams for quick content analysis of words and phrases in “lots of books.”  Google also has Correlate which allows you to trace search strings across time and place and to discover correlations between search strings. 

Facebook too makes information on their users available, though their motive is not so selfless as Google’s.  The do it so that advertisers can narrow their target.  Planet Money had a story recently about a pizza joint in New Orleans that used FB’s data to select the target audience for its ads.

Their first idea was to target the friends of people who already liked Pizza Delicious on Facebook. But that wound up targeting 74 percent of people in New Orleans on Facebook — 224,000 people. They needed something narrower.

The Pizza Delicious guys really wanted to find people jonesing for real New York pizza. So they tried to target people who had other New York likes — the Jets, the Knicks, Notorious B.I.G. Making the New York connection cut the reach of the ad down to 15,000.

Seemed perfect. But 12 hours later, Michael called us. “It was all zeroes across the board,”  he said. Facebook doesn't make money till people click on the ad. If nobody clicks, Facebook turns the ad off. They'd struck out.

So they changed the target to New Orleans fans of Italian food: mozzarella, gnocchi, espresso. This time they were targeting 30,000 people.

Those ads went viral. They got twice the usual number of click-throughs, on average. The ad showed up more than 700,000 times. Basically, everyone in New Orleans on Facebook saw it. Twice.

To get the access to the data, you don’t really have to be an advertiser; you just have to play one on Facebook.  Neal Caren at UNC tells you how.  He used Facebook to compare rates of same-sex and hetero preferences across age groups and states.  His instructional post is here.

(HT: Philip Cohen)

Whose Kids Are All Right?

June 22, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Miscellaneous thoughts on the Regnerus study.

1.    Oranges and apples.  This study is not about the effects of gay marriage.  Opponents of gay marriage trying to cram it into that cubbyhole apparently have not read the title: “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study.” [emphasis added]

Who are these “parents who have same-sex relationships”?  They are not gay couples (there were only two of those in the sample, both female).  The image I get is the closeted homosexual trying to do the right thing, maybe even “cure” himself, by getting married.  The cure doesn’t work and he is now in an unhappy, unfulfilling marriage, but he stays because of the kids.  Eventually, he gives in to his desires, has a “same-sex relationship,” and maybe leaves his family.  

Is this scenario common in Regnerus’s sample?  I don’t know.  But to make gay parent vs. straight parent comparisons on the basis of the sample with only two gay couples is to compare these unhappily married oranges with Ozzie-and-Harriet apples.  As Regnerus’s defenders delicately put it, “This is not an ideal comparison.”

2.    Secondary deviance.  Edwin Lemert coined this term to refer to deviance that arises as a reaction to the social or legal stigma that comes with the primary deviance.   The crime is primary, the coverup is secondary.  The coverup occurs only because the original act is criminal.  The same applies to non-criminal forms of deviance and to social sanctions rather than legal ones.

Again, the Regnerus defense team: “This instability may well be an artifact of the social stigma and marginalization that often faced gay and lesbian couples during the time (extending back to the 1970s, in some cases) that many of these young adults came of age.” 

3.    Rights and Research.  As Ilana Yurkiewicz at Scientific American says, even if good, relevant research on the topic of gay marriage (which the Regnerus study is not) showed that kids from gay marriages do worse than kids from straight marriages, that’s no reason to deny people the right to marry.

Research has already found such differences between other categories of people – poor vs rich, for example.  Should we deny poor people the right to marry because their kids are less likely to do well in school or more likely to have run-ins with the law?  I would not be surprised if back in the mid-20th century, research would have shown (or perhaps did show) that the children of interracial marriages did not do as well on several variables as did Ozzie-and-Harriet or Cosby-show offspring.  Would that have been a valid reason to uphold laws banning interracial marriage?

4.    Etc.  Philip Cohen is much more qualified than I am to offer criticisms and comments on the study.  You should read his as yet unpublished op-ed.

Rules of the Club

June 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Alex Stone was expelled from the Society of American Magicians.  In 2008, Stone wrote an article for Harper’s

The Magic Olympics:  With tricks explained!

Explaining tricks to the public is a no-no.  The first rule of magic is: you don’t talk about magic, at least not to laymen.* 

In this article, you blatantly exposed the secret, not only of your act but the acts of several other magicians as well.  By doing so, you have acted in opposition to the SAM’s Code of Ethics and Oath . . .We hereby ask for your resignation . . . .

But it’s not quite so simple.

Magicians make a strange deal with their audiences.  They do everything they can to convince the audience of something that is not true – that they have the power to makes things appear, disappear, levitate, or change form, that they have to power to predict the future and read minds.  Yet while they claim to have these powers, they must also convey the idea that they do not have these powers and that what they are doing is “just a trick.”

The key clause in the tacit contract between performer and audience is voluntary deception – “fooling.”  We in the audience know that we are being fooled.  We know that the coin did not really appear out of thin air, that the girl was not actually sawed in half and then restored.  The magician has fooled us into seeing it that way.**

Performers who claim actual supernatural powers, who refuse to acknowledge that they are fooling us, are no longer protected by the professional rule against exposing secrets.   Magicians like The Amazing Randi or Penn and Teller take great pleasure in exposing psychics and healers who are using standard magic-act techniques (often not very skillfully).

But what about this?



The video is from “America’s Got Talent,” but Kevin James performed it at the Magic Olympics that Stone wrote about for Harper’s.

A website devoted to optical illusions had this to say:

Kevin James . . . sawing a man in half has to be one of the best magic optical illusions I have seen in a long time. . . . At first I thought this could be done with animatronics. . . . The part that astonished me was once the patient was stapled back together he jumped up in the air and walked off stage; this is currently not possible by todays robotics. . . . . It is beyond me as of how this trick was pulled off.

Stone too was baffled when he saw this illusion at the Magic Olympics in Stockholm.  Things soon became clearer.

I board a small plane back to the States. Several of the artists and competitors are on the flight, all looking as haggard as I do, and feel. . .  . ln the first row sits the illusionist of last night's sawed-in-half routine, a meaty, florid man with triangular eyebrows and thin red lips. His trick has been gnawing at me since I saw it. No boxes. No mirrors. How? Now, suddenly, I understand. Sitting next to him, in the aisle seat, is a slender, dark-skinned man who looks normal in all respects save one: his body terminates just below the waist. No legs. No hips. Nothing.

The “America’s Got Talent” clip is edited.  The tables are wheeled offstage and back on in order to switch the half-man for a full one (the one who springs up from the table at the end).*** But the baffling stage of the routine (baffling if you hadn’t seen the guy on the airplane seat) is the sawed-in-half part. 

Maybe that is what allowed Stone to expose the secret of the trick.  The magician was not fooling us.  The man really was, in effect, sawed in half.  It isn’t magic (“Can I, too, buy a half-man at my local magic store?” Stone asks).  So exposing the secret is perhaps not such a clear violation of the norms. 

 (Stone’s new book Fooling Houdini is reviewed in the Times today, here.)
--------------------------

* This is the term magicians often use to refer to non-magicians.

** Stage actors and audiences make the same deal.  For example, the Times critic complained about Philip Seymour Hoffman in Death of a Salesman: “as a complete flesh-and-blood being, this Willy seems to emerge only fitfully.”  But suppose that Willy did emerge fully as “a complete flesh-and-blood being” and that we wept at his death.  After the final curtain, Hoffman would come out, we would applaud, and he would bow  – a ritual that says in effect that he was just fooling us.  He was not really a salesman, and he did not really die eight times a week.

***  (A video of the full 5-minute routine is here.)

Me and Him Say It That Way

June 19, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Planet Money had an excellent podcast  about the natural experiment that Oregon created when it could allow only 10,000 additional people onto Medicaid.  Many thousands more qualified but had to be turned away, thus providing a control group for researcher Katherine Baicker.  The study showed that Medicaid does work.  People on Medicaid were healthier and happier than those who were turned away from the program.

That result did not surprise me.  But one sentence from reporter Alex Blumberg did. 

It is the perfect control group that Katherine Baicker had been waiting for her entire career.  Her and her team got in touch with Oregon and went about designing a study . . .  [it comes at about 3:25 in the podcast]

Not to go all prescriptivist or anything, but “her and her team got in touch”??

I’m not sure what other stories I might have heard by Blumberg.  But him and his team are getting pretty casual with English grammar.  Are them and other reporters also the kind to say “she told Alex and I about her research”? 

I’m from the generation that was taught to use the same pronoun in a compound form that you would use if it stood alone.  If you wouldn’t say, “Her got in touch with Oregon,” then don’t say, “Her and her team got in touch with Oregon.” Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for “she told Alex and I.”  But us and our kind are out of step.

Hat tip to The Language Log for the New Yorker cartoon, which is from 2010.  But the “between you and I” world is hardly new.  It has had a resurgence in the last 20 years, but as the Log’s Arnold Zwicky pointed out (here)

it’s safe to say that the rise of “between you and I” in Late Modern English goes back at least 150 or 160 years, not 20.

He wrote that in 2005, well before the birth of Google Ngrams, which now provide further support for his history of  “between you and I.”

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)