Kieran Healy

Hard one to call. Teams closely matched. Game of two halves.

Just before lunch, I had the following conversation on the phone:

[Phone rings]
KH: Kieran Healy.
Woman: Oh, so you are a man.
KH: Uh, yes, I am.
Woman: This is [someone] at the editorial desk of the _New York Times_. We referred to you as a woman yesterday in a post on our _Opinionator_ blog. We’ll change it now.
KH: Oh, OK.
Woman: Thank you. Goodbye.
KH: Goodbye.

The Opinionator is behind the Times Select Paywall, so I haven’t seen the original reference or the corrected one. Someone else told me yesterday is was a quote from the “Brights post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/25/dim-bulbs/.

On present form it’d be hard to justify a bet against Argentina, but Germany have home advantage and are … well … Germany.

I should get a job as a pundit or something. Anyway, have at it.

_Update_: Penalties.

_Update_: Looks like “Kai was right.”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/29/germany-vs-argentina-open-thread/#comment-162090

Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matt Brashears’ “ASR Paper”:http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/June06ASRFeature.pdf on changes in core discussion networks has been getting a lot of play in the blogs and media. As is often the case with research like this, the commentary doesn’t really do justice to the paper. The summaries tend to be superficial and a lot of the commentary raises questions that the paper addresses, or proposes explanations it controls for. But “I liked this piece”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/28/opinion/meyer/main1762234.shtml from CBS’s Dick Meyer. He kicks around various ideas about the significance of the findings and their explanation in the generalizing mode you’d expect an Op-Ed commentator to adopt, but it’s also clear that he read and understood the paper. It’s probably the best journalistic discussion of the issue I’ve seen so far.

Say what you like about the free-marketeers, they certainly know how to ignore market forces, eschew profit and embrace subsidization when it suits them. I just got the 2006 “Liberty Fund”:http://www.libertyfund.org/ catalog in the post, and as usual I am having a hard time not buying a lot of their absurdly under-priced offerings. You can get the “complete Sraffa/Dobb edition of Ricardo”:http://www.libertyfund.org/details.asp?displayID=1876 (eleven volumes!) for about a hundred bucks, or $12 for individual volumes. (The true measure of value is in there _somewhere_.) For similar prices, there’s more “Gordon Tullock”:http://www.libertyfund.org/details.asp?displayID=1877 or “James Buchanan”:http://www.libertyfund.org/details.asp?displayID=1598 than any sane person would ever want to read. You can also get the whole “Glasgow Edition of Smith”:http://www.libertyfund.org/details.asp?displayID=1654 for seventy five dollars. Or sixteen hundred pages of “Armen Alchian”:http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/General/ALCHIAN.HTM for fifteen dollars. They’re also strong on Enlightenment types, with “Hume’s History of England”:http://www.libertyfund.org/details.asp?displayID=1659 on the cheap, and you can find any amount of reactionary commentary on the French Revolution, too.

On the other hand, you can get a lot of this stuff (the Ricardo, for instance) “for free and in PDF format”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/AuthorsAll.php at their Online Library of Liberty.

“Scott Eric Kaufman”:http://acephalous.typepad.com/ has a “bad case”:http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/06/finish_silar_we.html of “summer vertigo”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/07/summer-vertigo/.

_Update_: Argh. Sick as a parrot. Topic for discussion: How can the country which gave the world Giotto, Michelangelo, Leonardo DaVinci, Caravaggio, etc, produce such a supremely cynical, grind-it-out national football team?

_Update_: This is now the Italy vs Australia thread. Come on Australia!

Because the world cries out: WTF?? I count _fourteen_ yellow cards so far. This is looking pretty good for England.

Seems “the Brights”:http://www.the-brights.net/ is are back in the blogs. “Lindsay Beyerstein”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/Majikthise?m=51 provides an unconvincing defense. One of my first posts on CT was about The Brights and I’ve reproduced it below the fold. I don’t find it plausible that the “Bright” label should be offensive to religious believers, nor am I “uptight” (in Lindsay’s words) about it. Rather, while the term denotes a set of beliefs I’d broadly subscribe to, it connotes a bunch of dweebs in anoraks.
[click to continue…]

The English pundits are split between those who think the main enemy is Sven-Goran Eriksson and those who think it is the weather. Ecuador not so much. Counting references to the “searing heat” and “fierce humidity” could make for a drinking game of some kind. On the “BBC page”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2006/4991536.stm for the game we see the following already, an hour before kickoff:

bq. “”It can’t be ruled out that Sunday in Stuttgart could be the hottest day of the World Cup – it’s going to be a scorcher,” said ARD television weatherman Joerg Kachelmann. … captain David Beckham citing the heat as one of the factors behind their poor second-half performance … worrying news for England, with temperatures in Stuttgart potentially climbing to 35C during the game. … The weather forecast is proving worryingly accurate. … The sun is beating down relentlessly as the temperatures soar. … It’s unbelievably hot in Stuttgart as England fans arrive in their droves. … They have already been forced to endure fierce heat with the temperature already 32C and expected to get hotter by kick-off time. … *A glimmer of hope for England*: a few patches of cloud – *cirrocumulus if I’m not mistaken* – have suddenly appeared. England will pray they grow in number, and quickly.”

Cirrocumulus to the rescue! Sven, in fairness, isn’t making that excuse: “With concerns mounting over the impact the climbing temperatures could have on England’s prospects, coach Sven-Goran Erikson insists his side will not be preoccupied by the weather.” None of the pundits seem to have bothered to check how hot it gets in Ecuador. Obviously, pretty hot in places (the coast) seeing as its at the equator. But as every fule kno lots of Ecudaor is high up in the mountains. According to “this page”:http://www.climate-zone.com/climate/ecuador/fahrenheit/quito.htm (and also “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quito) the climate in Quito is pleasant, with high temperatures getting up to a not-very-scorching average maximum of 70F/19C. So I imagine the Ecuadorean counterpart to Gary Lineker is also saying “Phew, what a scorcher!”

Listening to the reports about the Miami “Seas of David” alleged terrorist cell, I couldn’t help returning to the thought: what did these jackasses really think they were doing? The fact that they were seeking to establish contact with Al Qaeda (rather than being part of that organization from the beginning) was one red flag. The rather mixed bag of plans was another. The odd cultish overtones yet another. “Jim Henley’s reading of the indictment”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2006/06/24/5234 suggests further grounds for suspecting that these guys were less evil terrorist geniuses and more greedy idiots.

Here’s an “important new paper”:http://www.asanet.org/galleries/default-file/June06ASRFeature.pdf by two former colleagues of mine (just departed for Duke) and one of our grad students here at Arizona. The paper compares the social network module of the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS) to the 1985 GSS, the last to include network questions. The key question of interest is this:

bq. From time to time, most people discuss important matters with other people. Looking back over the last six months—who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you? Just tell me their first names or initials.

The survey went on to probe the respondents about their relationship to the people they mentioned, and the relationship of these people to one another. The new findings are striking: since 1985, the number of people saying there is _no-one_ with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled, rising to about a quarter of the respondents. As McPherson et al say,

bq. The modal respondent now reports having no confidant; the modal respondent in 1985 had three confidants. Both kin and non-kin confidants were lost in the past two decades, but the greater decrease of non-kin ties leads to more confidant networks centered on spouses and parents, with fewer contacts through voluntary associations and neighborhoods. … Educational heterogeneity of social ties has decrease, racial heterogeneity has increased.

The predicted probability of social isolation is much higher the fewer years of education one has. Also. “Young (ages 18–39), white, educated (high school degree or more) men seem to have lost more discussion partners than other groups.”

The observed differences are pretty big, as these things go. Are they real? It may be that the 2004 respondents differed from the 1985 respondents in their interpretation the words “discuss” and “important.” (People might interpret “discuss” as face-to-face discussion, when they may also be pouring out their hearts on a blog somewhere, for instance.) Because of these issues, the authors spend a lot of time investigating the validity of the measure. More interestingly, it may be that we really are observing a shift in patterns of network affiliation. Feel free to speculate in the comments, but also take a look at the paper — it discusses several of the most plausible interpretations of the shift, in addition to documenting the findings.

I think the Referee in today’s Australia vs Croatia match, England’s Graham Poll, deserves his own thread. Witness the rugby-tackle by Simunic on Mark Viduka that “didn’t merit a penalty”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBqakmSOZw, for instance. Or the masterful way he forgot he had already booked Simunic when awarding him “his second yellow card”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tbVirxgR7o. Nothing like expert officiating from the home of the game. In the second clip, watch Simunic give the ref some backchat and then begin to walk toward the locker room. He then glances behind him and realizes that Poll has forgotten to send him off. So he got to stay on the field to collect a rare third yellow, and then be sent off _after_ the final whistle.

Wait, is this “Marginal Revolution”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ or something? Anyway, “consider the following”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5104252.stm story:

Dutch fans are being handed orange shorts to watch the Argentina World Cup match if they wear trousers promoting a beer which is not the official sponsor. Up to 1,000 fans had to watch Friday’s game against Ivory Coast in underpants after being denied entry because they were wearing the orange lederhosen.

Fifa said a bid at “ambush” marketing – free publicity at the expense of official sponsors – was not allowed. But Dutch brewery Bavaria defended its decision to give away the lederhosen. It said no sponsors had the right to tell fans what to wear. American firm Anheuser Busch, maker of Budweiser beer, is among 15 companies to have paid up to $50m (£27m, 40m euros) each for the right to be an official partner at this World Cup.

Fifa spokesman Tom Houseman told the BBC News website that staff at the Ivory Coast match had been briefed in advance to look out for the trousers with Bavaria slogans and logo. Officials were instructed not to ask fans to remove the lederhosen if they had only underwear underneath, he said. “The idea of hundreds of fans removing their trousers is always potentially amusing, and our suspicion is that trousers were chosen as an ambush tool specifically because of the publicity that fans taking them off would generate,” he said.

“As a goodwill gesture this evening, I have provided gate staff tonight with piles of spare pairs of plain orange shorts should anybody require them.” Mr Houseman added that individual fans wearing items not made by the official World Cup sponsors need not worry about being turned away. Bavaria has defended its decision to give away the orange lederhosen with purchases of its beer. “I understand that Fifa has sponsors but you cannot tell people to strip off their lederhosen and force them to watch a game in their underpants,” Bavaria chairman Peer Swinkels told Reuters news agency. “That is going too far.”

I think your intuitions on this one would predict a lot about your views on IP law.

Sorry, Chris. At least Stevie Gerrard played well.