May 2005

Some physicists have come out with a paper on the Eurovision song contest. Of course, we at CT like to be ahead of the curve and thanks to Kieran’s ingenuity reported similar findings over a year ago. So much for this being “new research”.

There has been much excitement about and focus on social networks in the past few years ranging from social networking sites to several high-profile books on the topic.

Interestingly, much of the buzz about recent work covers research by physicists. It’s curious how physicists have expanded their research agenda to cover social phenomena. I thought their realm was the physical world. Of course, since social phenomena are extremely complex to study, as a social scientist, I certainly welcome the extra efforts put into this field of inquiry.

What is less welcomed is watching people reinvent the wheel. Sure, partly it’s an ego thing. But more importantly, it’s unfortunate if the overall goal is scientific progress. Much of the recent work in this area by physicists has completely ignored decades worth of work by social scientists. If we really do live in such a networked world where information is so easy to access, how have these researchers managed to miss all the existing relevant scholarship? Recently Kieran pointed me to an informative graph published by Lin Freeman in his recent book on The Development of Social Network Analysis:

People whose overall work focuses on social networks are represented by white dots, physicists by black ones, others by grey circles. As is clear on the image, the worlds exist in isolation from each other. It would be interesting to see year-of-publication attached to the nodes to see the progression of work.

I have been meaning to write about all of this for a while, but John Scott from the Univ. Essex addressed these issues quite well in some notes he sent to INSNA‘s SOCNET mailing list a few months ago so I will just reproduce those here. (I do so with permission.)

[click to continue…]

Tony Banks is to become a peer. And Chris Smith. It’s a long way from the GLC. Check out the list here.

Estelle Morris too, presumably forgiven for setting the appalling precedent of taking responsibility for errors committed under her watch. And Gillian Shephard, the only Education Secretary in the past ten years I’ve heard nice things about from all sides.

“Savage Minds”:http://savageminds.org/2005/05/16/the-anarchist-in-the-academy/ posts on the decision of Yale’s Department of Anthropology not to renew David Graeber’s contract, and suggests that the “real tipping point was his involvement with campus politics” and more specifically his support for “one of the organizers of a graduate student unionizing drive.” The source for this appears to be “Graeber himself”:http://www.counterpunch.org/frank05132005.html. Now I’ve no way of knowing whether Graeber’s own account tells the whole story, and the other side don’t seem to be talking. But either which way, the decision to let Graeber go is illustrative of a wider problem; as Jennet Kirkpatrick and Ian Robinson “put it”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/wi05/kirkpatrick.htm, non-tenure track faculty are fighting for the right “to be fired, but only with just cause.” It’s demonstrably risky for non-tenure track faculty to make waves, even when there’s strong justification for so doing; their reappointment (or lack of same) is at the pleasure of the Department, and they’ve no recourse (or right to know why) if they’re let go.

Update: See also this story at “Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/05/18/yale where Marshall Sahlins says that Graeber’s “scholarship was at the level he would have had tenure at any normal university.” See also this “petition”:http://www.petitiononline.com/dgraeber/ in support of Graeber.

The AUT boycott was put before our local association today (for the motion I co-sponsored see “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/09/questions-and-answers-re-the-aut-boycott/ — and scroll down). The debate was passionate but respectful. Everyone on both sides agreed that the AUT had botched things procedurally. The pro-boycott lobby didn’t address the details of the Haifa or Bar-Ilan cases at all but made a generic anti-Israel case centred around an analogy with apartheid. In the end the vote was decisive, a pro-boycott amendment was defeated by 41 votes to 18 and my anti-boycott motion passed by 40 votes to 16. Somewhat disappointingly, a number of people then left and a vote was taken that effectively commits the Bristol delegation to splitting their vote to reflect the proportions of opinion (rather than swinging all our votes at Council against the boycott). This adds Bristol to the list of associations that opposed the boycott.

I’ve done some fairly elaborate googling on this, and have found out much more than I want to know about Ted Nugent, but haven’t found what I want. I remember many years ago reading a story about the custody arrangements after one of his divorces; he and his ex-spouse agreed that instead of the kids moving back and forth between them, they would move in and out of the house in which their children were permanent residents. This is the nicest thing I’ve ever heard about Ted Nugent, including his music. Unfortunately, whatever references there are on the internet are hard to find because they are obscured by disputes over Ted’s tendency to produce further children (as well as sawing his leg off). I found one reference to it in a comment on a blog, but would rather cite something more authoritative when I write about this. Can anyone point me to an authoritative account fo Ted Nugent’s innovative custody arrangements.

Eric Muller “reports”:http://www.isthatlegal.org/archive/2005/05/nine_months_lat.html that Peter Irons and Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga have “extracted a retraction and apology”:http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002489.htm from Michelle Malkin, after she smeared them in her book and on her blog last year. At least in some of its parts, the self-correcting blogosphere still needs the threat of legal action to kick it into gear.

Yesterday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released its latest research report, this one on health information-seeking online. The study finds that 80% of users have searched for some type of health information online (it’s worth noting here that “health information” is defined broadly by including searches for diet and exercise or fitness in this category). Regarding material pertaining to a specific disease or medical problem, the survey of 537 users found that two-thirds have used the Internet as a resource.

One of the topics of interest to me in my research is seeing how different types of Internet access may result in different types of Web uses. The report shows that while 87% of those with a broadband connection at home sought some health information online, only 72% of those with a home dial-up connection did so as well. Also, Internet veterans (in this case people who’ve been online for six or more years) are considerably more likely to have engaged in such activity (86%) than those who have 2-3 years of online experience (66%).

Of course, we would need more information about all these users to draw any conclusions regarding the independent effects of certain factors. People who went online later and who don’t have high-speed connections at home may differ from others in various ways (e.g. lower income, lower education), which may then be related to their propensity to search for health information in the first place. Nonetheless, these relationships are interesting to observe. They support my arguments about the potential implications of connectivity quality and experience for types of uses.

The author of the report is Susannah Fox, Pew’s resident expert on the topic. She has been working in this area for several years and has put out other related reports in the past, e.g. one dealing with prescription drugs online and another looking at how users decide whether to trust online information when it comes to health matters.

A couple of Australian legal academics have caused a stir by publicising an article they’ve written (so far unpublished), advocating the legalisation of torture (details and links here). Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke present a rehash of arguments put forward by Alan Dershowitz, centred on our old and much-refuted friend, the ticking bomb scenario. Their main contribution is to bite the bullet where Dershowitz was not, advocating the torture of innocent people who are suspected of having useful information.

The really startling thing about all this is that, until a few months ago, Bagaric, the senior author, was a member of the Refugee Review Tribunal, part of the apparatus used by the Howard government to implement its highly restrictive policies on refugees. In this context, he had to judge numerous cases in which refugees claimed to be fleeing torture, but never thought it relevant to recuse himself on the basis that he was on the side of the torturers.

The blogospheric reaction has been predictable (at least if you share my priors). Although Bagaric was previously regarded as a mild lefty (he’s advocated higher taxes, for example), anti-war bloggers were uniformly horrified by his and Clarke’s views. By contrast, with less than a handful of exceptions, the pro-war side of the sphere either supported Bagaric and Clarke, defended their right to speak while avoiding the substantive issues, or kept on blogging about Newsweek.

This is a bit disappointing, but it provides a useful lesson. Next time you read one of these guys talking about Saddam and his crimes, remember it’s just a factional brawl within the pro-torture party. If Saddam had stuck to fighting wars against Iran, and torturing Iraqis, instead of invading Kuwait, he’d still be “an SOB, but our SOB”, just like Karimov in Uzbekistan.

Matt Yglesias writes about “philosophical zombies”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/05/zombie_attack.html which reminds me to mention that this particularly refined class of undead gets a nod in Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky. It’s a nice example of a genre trope getting picked up by the academy, spun around, then yanked back into the popular culture with its references skewed. The few moments in the last couple of days which I haven’t spent grading, I’ve been reading Stross’s The Family Trade, a novel contribution to the somewhat exiguous genre of economic fantasy. Sort of like Roger Zelazny’s _Amber_ but with real feudalism – illiterate peasants, aristocrats who are obsessed with their fishing and mining rights (even if they don’t know much about what fishing and mining actually involve in practice), and a spunky heroine determined to reform the gung-ho mercantilism of her family business. It’s all enormous fun. I don’t usually buy books in hardback, but I couldn’t wait for a year to order a copy of the sequel, which is coming out in June. Good stuff.

I knew they’d make a film of it when I first heard it, one of a few thousand apparently, in my teenage bedroom just outside Slough (ironically, as it turns out, for where would Martin Freeman be without Slough?). So I waited. And waited. And waited. 27 years or thereabouts. There have been months (years, perhaps) in which I haven’t thought about it, and when it finally opened I thought, “well, I can wait a few weeks more”. So yesterday I took my 8 year old and her friend. My hopes were not high — I didn’t even care whether it would be good, I was just fulfilling the wish I had 27 years ago. It couldn’t possibly match the radio series, I knew that, not least because Peter Jones is dead and Simon Jones is…over the hill.

I’m not going to review it: I’m already behind the curve.
[click to continue…]

“Savage Minds”:http://savageminds.org/ is an elegantly-designed new blog run by six anthropologists. Its roster includes Alex Golub, whose site I used to read more often in the days before blogs, and who once “wrote a post”:http://alex.golub.name/log/?p=28 containing the following story:

bq. Met with my advisor the other day to go over a conference paper I gave him that would eventually be turned into a chapter. He said that it was ‘better than ok’, which is the most positive comment I’ve ever gotten from him. Much better than when I was writing my MA, when he’d give me back drafts with comments like “don’t ever give anything of this quality to me again ever”.

I sometimes relate this anecdote to graduate students in order to preempt any passive-aggressive whining about my comments on their work being insufficiently kind and appreciative.

From the APSA:

“The American Political Science Association, through action by its Council and its Committee on Professional Ethics, Rights, and Freedoms, supports the views expressed in the May 3, 2005 statement by the AAUP against academic boycotts. We join in condemning the resolutions of the AUT that damage academic freedom and we call for their repeal.”

I am waiting for the American Sociological Association to follow with a similar statement. According to Jeff Weintraub, the ASA Council has taken the matter under consideration, but no outcome so far.

UPDATE: The Middle East Studies Association joins in: “We strongly urge the Association to withdraw or rescind this resolution to boycott these universities and blacklist their faculty at the very earliest opportunity.”

John Sutherland “splutters indignantly”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1484604,00.html in _The Guardian_ that Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics, hides “hard-core Reagonism [sic] and Thatcherism” under a mask of playfulness. His evidence for this? First, that Levitt is an economist:

bq. Fun as it is to read, Levitt’s vision of the human condition is cold. The solution to every problem, whether political, moral, social or spiritual, is economics. The human animal is a rational-choice machine, driven by incentives and self-interest.

Second, that Reagan’s tax-cuts were “highly freakonomical” because they were counter-intuitive.

bq. Cut the taxes for the rich, and the poor will benefit. How? Because of trickle-down. And the government will pull in more revenue. Why? Compliance: people don’t mind paying taxes, they mind paying excessive taxes. History has proved Freaky Ron wrong on the first count and perhaps right on the second.

Now fulminating opinion-pieces should perhaps be held to a lower standard of truth than serious journalism. But even so, this is still an exceptionally silly article. First, even if Levitt’s view of the human condition is cold and based on economics, this is by no means evidence that he’s a right-wing jihadist. If Sutherland really wants to see the argument that “the solution to every problem, whether political, moral, social or spiritual, is economics” developed at length, he only needs to go back and read Marx’s _Capital_. Second, Reaganite economics didn’t have much of anything to do with the kinds of arguments that Levitt is putting forward. Indeed, in an important way, they’re antithetical to the kind of social science that Levitt is trying to do. _Contra_ Sutherland, the intellectual justification for Reagan’s tax cuts was, insofar as it was anything, the Laffer curve. To state it politely, the idea behind this curve was not driven by data. Levitt’s work, in contrast, isn’t scrawled down “on the back of a restaurant napkin”:http://www.wanniski.com/showarticle.asp?articleid=2965 ; it’s driven by what the data show. This, I suspect, is why Levitt has some harsh words for John Lott in the book – cooking your numbers is a mortal sin.

I’ve read _Freakonomics_ pretty carefully (you’ll be seeing more on this topic before the end of the week). My guess is that Levitt is somewhere to the right of the political center, but it’s only a guess. His broad political orientation is impossible to discern from his writing on economics. Sutherland’s article is completely off the mark, and is, in a certain way, anti-intellectual. He identifies a particular style of thought that he doesn’t like, and then damns it on the basis of its purported link to a right wing political agenda. And in so doing, he seems to argue that the examination of incentives and what they tell us about how to make policy is fundamentally morally problematic. That’s a far reaching claim, and, I believe, one that is deeply misconceived. Sutherland is usually a good book reviewer, but he’s gotten this one very badly wrong indeed.

(Thanks to Chris for the link).

What’s that sound? Why, it’s the world’s smallest violin playing quietly in the background as the NYT “counsels the neediest cases:”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/business/yourmoney/15advi.html

bq. Q. You’re a single worker without children, and your company is very family-friendly. Many colleagues with children take advantage of flextime to attend soccer games or school plays. You feel that you’re constantly picking up the slack because you don’t have family commitments to provide an excuse to leave at 5 p.m. Is this just part of paying your dues, or should you speak up?

A: My heart bleeds for ya, buddy. Speak up! You are the Rosa Parks of corporate America.

bq. Q. What should you do if you feel that you’re being exploited?

Go to bathroom, stick your head in the toilet bowl and flush. There. Things should now be back in perspective.

bq. Q. Won’t declining cast you as a poor team player?

No, because if you’re feeling gypped cheated over all the advantages that co-workers with children enjoy, chances are everyone already thinks you’re a langer.