Kieran Healy

I missed this bit of DC think-tank inside-baseball yesterday. Matt Yglesias wrote something critical about Third Way:

Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit.

Shortly thereafter, GlaDOS Jennifer Palmieri of the Center for American progress appeared from behind the scenes and posted to Matt’s blog:

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects … and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

Whoops. We are throwing a party in honor of your tremendous success. Please place the device on the ground, then lie on your stomach with your arms at your sides. A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for your party.

Things now seem to have returned to normal, with “weak tea” metaphors substituting for that stuff about “timid incrementalist bullshit.”

As you may know, Stephen Fry, John Cleese, The Cassini Probe, Britney Spears, Shaq, 10 Downing St and, more tenuously, Darth Vader and the Fucking Pope are all on Twitter. But who is responsible for crookedtimber? Not me. The fact that the one person CT follows is a blocked account makes me suspicious.

By the way, if you neither like nor understand Twitter, that’s perfectly OK: no-one is making you follow anyone.

Pride and Prejudice, the FaceBook feed.

This article is mostly about the Bush Administration’s rush to put a new workplace unsafety rule in place:

The Labor Department is racing to complete a new rule, strenuously opposed by President-elect Barack Obama, that would make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed on the job. The rule, which has strong support from business groups, says that in assessing the risk from a particular substance, federal agencies should gather and analyze “industry-by-industry evidence” of employees’ exposure to it during their working lives. The proposal would, in many cases, add a step to the lengthy process of developing standards to protect workers’ health.

Because we all know businesses oppose cumbersome federal regulations, right? Except when they can be made maximally cumbersome, and thus wholly ineffective. But the best part of the article is later:

The Labor Department rule is among many that federal agencies are poised to issue before Mr. Bush turns over the White House to Mr. Obama. One rule would allow coal companies to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop mining operations into nearby streams and valleys. Another, issued last week by the Health and Human Services Department, gives states sweeping authority to charge higher co-payments for doctor’s visits, hospital care and prescription drugs provided to low-income people under Medicaid. The department is working on another rule to protect health care workers who refuse to perform abortions or other procedures on religious or moral grounds.

Other rules under review include an OSHA rule that CEOs be allowed to kick a small child, kitten or puppy at least once per day or after particularly stressful meetings; a DoE directive encouraging nuclear power stations to seize public school playgrounds for temporary waste processing; and the permenantizing of a Department of the Interior Program allowing pilots of fire-fighting aircraft to practice drops in the off season in built-up areas using otherwise idle stocks of waste engine oil, sewage or medical waste as needed.

There’s an article on the Netflix Prize in the Times today. You know, where Netflix made half of its ratings data available to people and offered a million bucks to anyone who could write a recommendation algorithm that would do some specified percent better than Netflix’s own. What tripped me up was this sentence about one of the more successful teams:

The first major breakthrough came less than a month into the competition. A team named Simon Funk vaulted from nowhere into the No. 4 position, improving upon Cinematch by 3.88 percent in one fell swoop. Its secret was a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition. It isn’t new; mathematicians have used it for years to make sense of prodigious chunks of information. But Netflix never thought to try it on movies.

Can this possibly be true? I’d have thought that just about the most obvious way to look for some kind of structure in data like this would be to do a principal components analysis, and PCA is (more or less) just the SVD of a data matrix. PCA is a quite straightforward technique (evidence for this includes the fact that I know about and use it myself). It’s powerful, but it’s not like it’s some kind of slightly obscure method that isn’t ever applied to data of this kind. And there’s a whole family of related and more sophisticated approaches you could use instead. If you’d asked me about the prize before I read this article, I would naively have said “Well, it’s this effort to get people to help Netflix do better than I guess anyone could using something like bog-standard PCA.”

Maybe the article just got written up in a way that misrepresents the contribution of the team who introduced the method to the data. Or maybe I am misunderstanding something. I guess I should page Cosma and see what he thinks.

Soc Blogger Jeremy Freese won this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition, where the goal is to write a text-based puzzle game in the tradition of stuff like Infocom classics. The premise of Jeremy’s game, Violet, is summarized by the Chronicle of Higher Education:

It’s noon and you’ve still got 1,000 words to type. That might not seem like much, but it’s been months since you’ve last worked on your dissertation and distractions are plentiful. To make matters worse, your girlfriend, Violet, says she’s out the door and flying back to Australia if you don’t finish the paper by the end of the day.

What’s your next move?

This is the premise for Violet, a text-based computer game in which a graduate student is the main character. As the student, you must fight through countless distractions and solve a number of puzzles to finish the paper in time to save your relationship. The story is told by Violet, who allows you to examine objects in your office and ask for hints.

Here is a review. Naturally, a sequel must now be in the works. Who should the protagonist be? What situation should they face? Obvious possibilities include a disaffected English professor teaching somewhere in a state beginning and ending a vowel, whose only creative outlet is bitter, overwritten Chronicle columns; a busily networking scholar-blogger desperate to finagle an invitation to appear on Bloggingheads.tv; or perhaps the crisis of a senior faculty member whose long history of abusive pseudonymous commenting is suddenly and inadvertently exposed.

I’m so far behind on this one. Here’s a figure based on a table Eric sent me.

There is a PDF version. There is also a 4-category version (with a PDF too), that breaks out farm workers from the main category.

“Classmates.com User Sues; Schoolmates Weren’t Really Looking for Him“, reports Wired:

When Classmates.com told user Anthony Michaels last Christmas Eve that his former school chums were trying to contact him, he pulled out his wallet and upgraded to the premium membership that would let him contact long-lost fifth-grade dodge-ball buddies and see if his secret crush from high school had looked him up online. But once he’d parted with the $15, Michaels learned the shocking truth: No one he knew was trying to contact him at all. Classmates.com’s come-on was a lie, and he’d been scammed. … “Upon logging into his Gold Membership profile in order to view the classmate contacts … Plaintiff discovered that in fact, no former classmate of his had tried to contact him or view his profile,” the complaint reads. “Of those www.classmates.com users who were characterized … as members who viewed Plaintiff’s profile, none were former classmates of Plaintiff or persons familiar with or known to Plaintiff for that matter.”

(Via.)

Via Cosma, Canadian historian Rob MacDougall on a characteristic American tendency to see radical social change as the inevitable expression of values expressed and promises made at the country’s inception:

“We’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” said Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. … King went on: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note … a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

And here Sancho [Panza] or Sacvan [Bercovitch] whispers to the guy standing next to him, “Were they? Really? If we went back in time and asked the architects of the republic–Jefferson and Madison and Washington and the rest–did you mean for this to apply to your slaves too, would they agree? … Because it would have saved a lot of trouble if they’d spelled all this out in 1789.”

The black belt rhetorical jiu jitsu of the “I Have A Dream” speech is that King pulls it off. He convinced the better part of a nation that dismantling segregation was not so scary, not so radical, but really what they’d all meant to do all along. They just hadn’t gotten around to it, like the laundry I need to sort, or those slaves Jefferson never quite got to freeing. … And this is an old and hallowed American trick. On July 4th, 1852, Frederick Douglass blistered the ears of his white audience with prophesy … Douglass reveals that, “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” the Constitution is in fact “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” He embraces and celebrates the Constitution as a bulwark against slavery. … At Seneca Falls in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton cribbed Jefferson’s words for her Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, the intimation being that “of course” the patriarchs of 1776 must have intended equal rights for women. … And so on and so on down through history, with every kind of American reformer looking backward to move forward, couching their goals as nothing more radical than America’s alleged founding ideals.

[click to continue…]

Via John Gruber.

Andrew Gelman with a first pass at analyzing the election data.

This figure illustrates point 5 below—the election was more of a partisan swing than a redrawing of the electoral map. Andrew’s impressions:

1. The election was pretty close. Obama won by about 5% of the vote, consistent with the latest polls and consistent with his forecast vote based on forecasts based on the economy. … 3. The gap between young and old has increased–a lot: But there was no massive turnout among young voters. According to the exit polls, 18% of the voters this time were under 30, as compared to 17% of voters in 2004. (By comparison, 22% of voting-age Americans are under 30.)

4. By ethnicity: Barack Obama won 96% of African Americans, 68% of Latinos, 64% of Asians, and 44% of whites. In 2004, Kerry won 89% of African Americans, 55% of Latinos, 56% of Asians, and 41% of whites. So Obama gained the most among ethnic minorities.

5. The red/blue map was not redrawn; it was more of a national partisan swing.

Though it may have seemed impossibly far off in our hazy youth, these days we fondly look back at the turn of the 21st century and think that was when the world was new and fresh and everything seemed possible. Or searchable, anyway. For one month only, here is Google’s index, c. 2001. It shows that we were present individually though not collectively. Besides nostalgia for this distant past, consider the results of searches such as “housing bubble” or “subprime mortgage lending” or “counterparty risk.”

Let me be clear. As I say, inaction is not an option. We have got to shore up our economy. This is crisis moment for America, really the rest of the world also, looking to see what the impacts will be if America were to choose not to shore up what has happened on Wall Street because of the – the ultimate adverse effects on Main Street and then how that affects this globalization that we’re a part of, in our world. So, the rest of the world really is looking at John McCain, the leadership that he’s going to provide through this, and if those provisions in the proposal can be implemented and make this proposal better, make it make more sense to taxpayers, then again, John McCain is going to prove his leadership. … But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping the – it’s got to be all about job creation too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reigning in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity not as a competitive, scary thing, but one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

Thank you, and on to your Debate Thread.