by Kieran Healy on October 7, 2003
Over at Slate, Steven Landsburg has a piece on the finding that the parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than the parents of sons:
bq. In the United States, the parents of a girl are nearly 5 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of a boy. The more daughters, the bigger the effect: The parents of three girls are almost 10 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of three boys.
The article goes through a number of mechanisms that might explain the difference, though none are entirely convincing. The language of the article is egalitarian, talking mainly about the preferences of parents. But two of the three hypotheses put forward suggest that the preferences of the father drive the outcome rather than those of the mother. More importantly, the emphasis on parental preferences is ultimately a bit restricting.
[click to continue…]
by Jon Mandle on October 6, 2003
The winners of the 2003 Ig Nobel Prizes were announced a few days ago. They are brought to you by the fine folks at the Annals of Improbable Research and they honor people whose achievements “cannot or should not be reproduced.” This year’s winners include: the inventors (discoverers?) of Murphy’s Law; the authors of a paper entitled “An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces”; the authors of a paper entitled
“Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans”; and the biologist who documented “the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck” (complete with link to photos!). You can watch the webcast of the awards ceremony here.
by Chris Bertram on October 6, 2003
Since so much of the blogospherical comment on media coverage of the Iraq war has focused on the BBC (sometimes justifiably, sometimes not), I was interested to read “this Asia Times report”:http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EJ04Ak01.html (via “Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/ ) which tells us that there is a strong correlation between getting your news from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox and having false beliefs about the war. That doesn’t show, of course, that people got their false beliefs from watching Fox, another possibility is that having a lots of false beliefs just predisposes people to tune into that channel. Here’s the end of the article:
bq. The study also debunked the notion that misperceptions were due mainly to the lack of exposure to news.
bq. Among Bush supporters, those who said they follow the news “very closely”, were found more likely to hold misperceptions. Those Bush supporters, on the other hand, who say they follow the news “somewhat closely” or “not closely at all” held fewer misperceptions.
bq. Conversely, those Democratic supporters who said they did not follow the news very closely were found to be twice as likely to hold misperceptions as those who said they did, according to PIPA.
by Chris Bertram on October 6, 2003
I tuned into the BBC’s Panorama last night, which consisted of an investigation into Camp Delta at Guantanamo and also the conditions under which detainees are held in Afghanistan itself. Whilst Panorama can be a sensationalist programme with a definite agenda, the specific allegations made can’t easily be wished away or dismissed as biased or malicious. Many of these are familiar to people, but I was sufficiently engaged by the broadcast to want to rehearse them here. I’m going from my memory of the programme, so I may have missed some details. The points raised included:
bq. That numbers of people have been detained in Guantanamo after being denounced by their enemies and business rivals as a means of settling petty scores. (When the baselessness of the charges against them became clear, they were simply dumped back in Afghanistan to pick up their lives as best they could.)
[click to continue…]
by Kieran Healy on October 6, 2003
For the first time since 1973, Israel has attacked targets in Syria. The attacks were in response to the most recent suicide bomb attack in Haifa. According to CNN, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. described the attack as a “measured defensive operation” aimed at destroying a training camp run by Islamic Jihad. Syria denies the camp was a terrorist base. It was certainly inside Syria, though — about 14 miles from Damascus. I don’t have much to say about this, other than to ask whether better-informed people than me think this is going to escalate Israeli-Palestinian conflict outside of Israel and the Occupied Territories.
by Daniel on October 5, 2003
Apologies for a post which will of necessity not be of interest to anyone who doesn’t follow UK politics, and will not necessarily be understood by anyone who doesn’t follow the media circus surrounding UK politics. But I’d just like to use the columns of Crooked Timber to send the following short message to people working in UK political journalism (I happen to know that at least two people in that circle read us).
If you think that you can prove that Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats, has an alcohol problem, you should say so and risk being sued. If you can’t prove it, you should shut up about the subject. But either way, please spare us the current round of innuendo, jokes and photographs of the man with a glass in his hand. It’s childish, it’s dishonest and it’s unfair to your readers (like me) who end up without a clue as to whether this is a piece of common knowledge within Westminster that’s being hushed up, or just a piece of fairly childish and malicious injokery. You’re the bloody British press, not popbitch.
Sorry about that. I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
by Tom on October 4, 2003
Norman Geras is running another of his music-related polls, this one on readers’ nominations for their top 15 jazz albums.
[click to continue…]
by Eszter Hargittai on October 4, 2003
by Kieran Healy on October 4, 2003
The New York Times reports that a number of firefighters have been receiving treatment for stress at a clinic located near the site of the World Trade Center and run along lines prescribed by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. The “detoxification program” has the Firefighters “take saunas, engage in physical workouts and swallow pills.” The precise composition of the pills is unclear. Tom Cruise has paid for many of the treatments.
Ah, Scientology. Was there ever a more entertaining belief system embedded in a more ruthless organization? (Apart from the obvious one, I mean.) And then there is L. Ron Hubbard himself — a man whose abilities and achievements were quite literally incredible. But don’t take my word for it.
[click to continue…]
by Eszter Hargittai on October 3, 2003
This post is about academic literature searches in particular. (I could write a whole dissertation about Web search in general.. wait.. I did.:)
In an attempt to consolidate advice for students about academic literature searches, a grad school peer of mine posted a helpful page of resources for tracking down literature of interest on various sociological topics. This made me wonder: what are people’s favorite resources for academic literature searches? It also relates to the discussion about bundling e-journals started by Chris the other day.
[click to continue…]
by Chris Bertram on October 3, 2003
Via the British philosophers listserv comes notice of a “Capitalism and Philosophy Lab” on the theme of “Libidinal Economics”. The programme is as follows:
bq. Mark Fisher will discuss Baudrillard’s “Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign”.
Nick Midgely will discuss Klossowski’s “Living Currency”
Luciana Parisi will discuss abstract sex and viral trading.
Commenters are invited to speculate (or even to write authoritatively) on the possible content of the third paper.
by Chris Bertram on October 3, 2003
A Guardian “profile of Al Franken”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1054951,00.html , comedian author of “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0525947647/junius-20 has this
bq. “Well, probably the people taken most seriously down the ages have not been satirists,” Franken concedes. “Marx – there wasn’t much funny in Marx, I don’t think. John Stuart Mill? Not a laugh. Hobbes? Humourless.
False, false, false, I’d say. (Actually, come to think of it false, true, false – though if anyone _can_ find an intentionally funny passage in Mill, I’ll take that back.) Marx’s humour is mainly of the dry and sarcastic kind. His wit and erudition saturates just about every page of Capital – A good example would be the end of vol. 1, ch. 6 on “The sale and purchase of labour power” (but as Glenn Reynolds likes to say say — “read the whole thing”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140445684/junius-20 ). As for Hobbes, I’d recommend the side-splitting final pages of “Leviathan”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140431950/junius-20 ch. XLVII, “Of the BENEFIT that proceedeth from such Darknesse, and to whom it accreweth” where Hobbes compares the church of Rome to the Kingdome of Fairies.
by Ted on October 3, 2003
by Henry Farrell on October 3, 2003
… ask Steven Lenzner and William Kristol in a recent “Public Interest”:http://www.thepublicinterest.com/current/article1.html puff-piece. It’s a good question, even if it begs a rude answer. Which Lenzner and Kristol don’t provide, of course; according to them, Strauss revived the Western tradition of reading and philosophizing, more or less single-handed. They describe Strauss’s style of close reading as focusing on how classical authors employ
bq. various types of meaningful silences, intentional ambiguity, dissimulation, the significance of centrally placed speeches, inexact repetitions of earlier statements, use or non-use of the first person singular, concealment of a work’s plan, and so forth.
All of which is legitimate, sez Strauss, because the Great Writers chose their words precisely and exactly, using ellipses and rhetorical evasions to convey hidden secrets to the wise, while concealing them from the rude and undiscriminating gaze of the grubbing multitudes. In short, the ancients were writing with a particular reader in mind, and that reader was Leo Strauss.
[click to continue…]
by Brian on October 3, 2003
Brad DeLong quotes Stephen Cohen on California’s Uttermost Westerness.
Everybody knows that you can’t go west from California. There is no place wester. If we go from California to New York, we go Back East. If we go from California to Tokyo, we go to the Far East. We cannot go west. There is no way to do it.
But Tokyo isn’t the only place you can fly from California. When I’m flying from LA or SF to Sydney I certainly feel like I’m going west, not to the East. I suppose if you really want to feel like you’re on the western edge of things, you’d not only fly to Sydney but keep on going to Perth. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone whose identity was as bound up with being Western as Western Australians.