Kieran Healy

Thinking about getting a Ph.D? Try lying down until the feeling goes away. Didn’t work? Try (1) Tim Burke on how to tell whether you really want a Ph.D. (Short answer: probably not.) If you persist anyway and find yourself starting a program somewhere at the moment, then (2) Total Drek provides 22 Unhelpful Hints about making the best of it. They’re very good. And so are (3) My co-blogger Fabio Rojas’s Grad Skool Rulz.

Compare and contrast this:

With this:

Looks like everything in rugby has gotten more professional over the past 25 years. Bonus haka (vs Ireland) below the fold.

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The Rugby World Cup starts this weekend, with France vs Argentina tonight. I haven’t been able to keep up with the form this time. I think Ireland are looking slightly shaky in the run-up. They’re in the same pool as France and Argentina, so that’s going to be tough, with France having home-field advantage and Argentina being the dirtiest team in Europe. England are hoping for a revival. I would, ideally, like to see them semi-revived and then re-crushed, but I’ll settle for straightforward humiliating defeats. Thanks to their crap form they may have a helpful underdog status, however. As for the Southern Hemisphere, all the Kiwis I know are in their usual frame of mind, viz titanic self-confidence combined with a desperate fear that the All Blacks will choke yet again.

Ow, ow, ow. Comment 2 is also pretty funny. Actually, the whole thread is hilarious.

Superhero blogging is the province of other members of this collective. But here — via Dan Myers, outgoing chair of the Notre Dame sociology department — is Rory McVeigh, incoming chair of said department, welcoming new grad students to the program. Dan explains the hat in coldly rational terms. But I prefer to think we’re witnessing the birth of a new Supervillain: Doc Socc, whose origin story begins with the mild-mannered but brilliant young Rory being continually passed over when it was time to choose teams in grade school, and who subsequently used his genius to develop the FootieTron (pictured), a prosthetic attachment that enhanced his football skills a millionfold. Once he tried it on, however, an accidental burst of gamma radiation made the device meld with his brain and now Doc Socc is on a quest to make THE WORLD play soccer FOREVER in teams of HIS choosing. Muaahahahahahaha. Special powers: tactical planning, team organization, long throw, kills enemies from a distance with deadly-accurate soccerbomb passes, close up by hacking expertly at their ankles. Noted ability: when captured, convincingly feigns mortal injury (writhes on ground clutching leg or head) to generate diversion and/or sympathy. Then escapes.

I missed this earlier this week. No more MaxSpeak as of September 3rd. Boo. Max’s posts felt like a very pure form of blogging: his prose style had a way of temporarily wiring you in to his thought process as it was happening. Not many people can convey that feeling well, either because there’s too much post-processing (and it all gets polished up) or there’s not enough (and its incomprehensible). Max hit the sweet-spot a lot more than most. The results weren’t pretty, but they were usually dynamic, direct and right on target more often than not. Soon, the interwebs will be just a bit more boring.

For those inclined to think that a willingness to grind up real people’s lives in the pursuit of grand political causes is a distinctively left-wing vice, we present Mr Bill Kristol.

Via a slightly ticked-off Max Sawicky comes this ranking of economics blogs, in which (like MaxSpeak) Crooked Timber does not feature. The author remarks,

bq. Only genuine economics blogs are included. … [and later, in a comment] By genuine, I meant not spam blogs or useless stock tips blogs, and not blogs that claim to be about economics but are really about politics (there are quite a few of those).

Usually, in the U.S., the key test of whether one is a real economist is a simple credential: you must have a Ph.D in economics. Choice of substantive topic certainly can’t be the discriminating factor, as is made clear by the position of the Freakonomics blog at the very top of the list. But by my count, we have at least as many Economics Ph.Ds writing here at CT as several of the blogs on this Top 10 list, and more than at least one of them.

If I were a cynical person — which of course I am not — I might say that the dividing line between what’s “really” economics and what’s “really” politics is itself something of a political question. (As Abba Lerner remarked, an economic transaction is a solved political problem.) Perhaps we often see instances where _I_ hold policy positions informed by scientific economics whereas _you_ are a mere advocate, pushing a political line. There was a pretty entertaining example on Mankiw’s blog the other week.

Anyway, on the measure used, Crooked Timber would be fourth on the list, if only the likes of John or Daniel or Ingrid (whose Ph.D was supervised by someone or other) could be thought of as having an informed point of view about economics.

_Update_: Aaron, the list compiler, comments below and is maybe a bit nicer than this somewhat irritable post merits. I think it was the “genuine economics” comment that set me off.

Good stuff. Someone should hire this guy. (Via Unfogged.)

All this harshing on Michael Ignatieff for his ponderous, air-filled essay on Iraq reminded me of a characterization of him I’d read a few years ago. I couldn’t remember the source, only the phrase. But Google remembers:

bq. The staff of BBC2’s late Late Show used to have a little joke about one of its presenters, Michael Ignatieff. Everyone knows what an idiot savant is: someone who appears to be an idiot but in fact is a wise man. Well, Ignatieff was a savant idiot.

Yes, I know that’s not really what an idiot savant is, but you get the point.

Dani Rodrik argues that much disagreement in economics is between “first-best” economists and “second-best” economists. The former take Mark 1:14-15 as their text, and believe the Kingdom of God is at Hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. The second believe, with Proverbs 16:18 that pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Via “John Gruber”:http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/07/pixels-are-the-new-pies.html I see “Anil Dash”:http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/07/pixels-are-the-new-pies.html wondering about the trend toward “square blocks of color … being used to represent percentage-based statistics instead of the traditional pie chart.” Like this.

I’d seen the one on the left — from a “New York Times story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/magazine/29wwln-lede-t.html?ref=magazine about beliefs in the afterlife, and wondered about it, too. The white block in the middle of the Times graphic presumably represents “Don’t Knows” but it is not labeled. This is especially odd in the context of belief in the afterlife, as agnosticism is a recognized point of view and so not equivalent to “Don’t know” answers on other survey questions.

The main problem with this style of presentation is that it uses two dimensions to display unidimensional data. As the graphic on the right, especially, makes clear, the layout of the subcomponents of the graph is arbitrary. Maybe laying out responses on a line is impractical in a newspaper column. This is one reason pie charts are popular, but their problems are well known. (Word to the wise: don’t use them.)

“Mosaic plots”:http://rosuda.org/~unwin/Japan2003/UnwinISMTokyoNov03mosaic.pdf superficially resemble the ones pictured here, and they are sometimes used to very good effect. But the whole point of a mosaic plot is that it visually represents several categorical variables at once. It’s a picture of an n x n table, in other words, where the sizes of the blocks reflect the cell values in the table. “Here’s an example.”:http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~ihaka/120/Lectures/lecture17.pdf Even here you have to be careful interpreting the results. But the boxes above take this kind of picture but use it with only one variable, which doesn’t make any sense at all.

Tyler Cowen has a “secret” blog and he made a deal with his readers: pre-order my book and I’ll send you the URL. Don’t link to it, and don’t tell anyone. Inevitably, now, we have this request from this guy:

bq. DO YOU KNOW THE URL OF TYLER COWEN’S SECRET BLOG?? IF YES, PLEASE, SEND ITS URL TO CHRIS MASSE. ANONYMITY GUARANTEED. AND I PROMISE I WON’T PUBLISH IT.

YES I KNOW HE’S SHOUTING. I haven’t pre-ordered Tyler’s book, because pre-ordering things is for suckers. Nor have I been in touch with Tyler. So he didn’t send me the link. But I read Tyler’s secret blog, because it is trivially easy to find it using Google. It took me about 90 seconds when I looked for it. So now I have an interesting dilemma.

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Question: what is the latest — i.e., most recent — example you know of an academic’s first book where, in the acknowledgments, the author thanks his wife (or some other person’s wife, as in “the redoubtable Mrs Elizabeth Arbuthnot”) for typing and retyping the manuscript with great patience, forbearance, accuracy, and so on? The acknowledgments to academic books are a mini-institution with pretty clear rules that change only slowly over time and show a high degree of homogeneity, particularly for first books. Up until a certain point, the endlessly patient and also busily typing wife was a fixture in them. But no longer. How precisely, I wonder, can her extinction be dated?

My hypotheses are: (1) The typing wife disappeared earlier than the typing employee, but (1a), The typing employee has also now disappeared. (2) Things must have been in decline for a long time (typewriters are not exactly a new technology, and then women started going to graduate school on their own account), but the big drop-off comes some time in the 1980s, as cheap computers and word-processors arrive. I suspect specimens continued to appear into the 1990s, however. (3) The typing wife may have disappeared from acknowledgments faster than actual wives doing actual typing disappeared in practice. (4) I expect variance across fields due mostly for reasons of technological affinity. But I’m not sure how fine-grained this is.

As evidence for (2), as an undergraduate in 1993 not in possession of a computer, and not lucky enough to be attending a university with any decent computing facilities, I along with almost all others hand-wrote all my essays and regular coursework. But it was a requirement of both my honours theses that they be typed, so I had to marry pay someone to do that. The following year, though, I had saved up and bought a powerbook and typed my MA paper myself. So it seems reasonable to think that academic books published around this time might still have phantom typists working away – though maybe by then it was people who took a typewritten manuscript and retyped it on a wordprocessor. But I want specific examples. So the main question is, in whose set of acknowledgments is the most recent typing wife to be found?