Kieran Healy

“Tim Lambert”:http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/05/you_call_it_lying_cei_calls_it.php finds “Iain Murray”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTVlODk1YWJlMmRlMGY2ZmI4ZDI2MmNlODJhNjA2YmM engaged in a contemptible bit of smearing. Previously, the CEI “falsely claimed”:http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/05/cei_exaggerates_by_a_factor_of.php that Al Gore was producing 4,000,000 times as much CO2 as the average person in the course of his daily activities, given his heavy use of air travel. This estimate turns out to be way, way off. In addition, it now turns out that Gore is trying to make his promotional tour carbon neutral by purchasing carbon offsets, presumably from organizations like “TerraPass”:http://www.terrapass.com/. Murray’s response?

bq. Translation: I am rich enough to benefit from executive jets and Lincolns because I pay my indulgences. All you proles have to give up your cars, flights and air conditioning. The new aristocracy; there’s no other way to describe it.

Purchasing carbon offsets is of course a “market-based”:http://www.terrapass.com/faq.html#13 solution to the externalities associated with individual use of cars and air travel and so on. You’d think that the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Review would be in favor of that sort of thing. But if Gore is doing it, then it must be the purest form of aristocratic statist elitism.

Back in the day, Murray was the sort of person you could “have a reasonable disagreement with”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2002/09/19/crime-and-punishment-part-3/. But then he went to work for CEI and he went rapidly downhill. Because he had to follow the CEI line, he began to make “stupid mistakes”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/07/10/the-cost-of-emission-control/, “bad arguments”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/12/29/uncertain-science/ and “unsupportable smears”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/11/04/annals-of-premature-accusations/. His trajectory is a good illustration of the principle that being paid to follow a certain political line regardless of what the evidence says will turn you into a hack. Taking empty pot-shots at Al Gore is just the latest step down the ladder.

Seems like the Volokh Conspiracy is now “trolling itself”:http://www.volokh.com/posts/1148855758.shtml.

_Update_: I forgot, Adler is Juan Non-Volokh. All is explained. This “isn’t the first time”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/11/06/libertarian-litmus-test/ he’s shown an ability to home in on sentences he doesn’t like while avoiding interpretive charity, important contextualizing information or broader political questions.

Seeing as Pirates of the Caribbean II is coming out soon, I wonder whether it’s too late to get Johnny Depp back into the studio for a gratuitous falling-out-of-a-palm-tree scene, as a hat-tip to his character’s inspiration. Seems like an obvious option (I mean, _I_ thought of it). Though seeing as Richards had post-accident brain surgery recently, maybe the studio doesn’t want to risk it.

The comments in “my recent post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/23/incarceration-rates/ about U.S. incarceration rates got a little bad tempered: some people (I’m looking at you, jet) didn’t like the figure, because it included countries that are not exactly model states. Some followup below the fold.

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A “comment by Bitch PhD”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2006/05/go-tell-norbiz-happy-fucking.html reminded me that this week I’ll have been blogging for four years. I’m not sure what to think about that, so let’s look at some data. Here is a time-series of the number of posts per month on “my blog”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog from its “inauspicious beginning”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2002/05/21/the-hello-world-entry/ in May 2002 to the present. (Since CT started, I’ve just posted the same material to my own blog, so the trend represents all my posts.)

*Update*: More trendline goodness added below.

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My brain asplode.

Via “Chris Uggen”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/2006/05/us-incarceration-at-midyear-2005.html, some new “Bureau of Justice Statistics”:http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/press/pjim05pr.htm for incarceration in the United States as of mid-2005. Imprisonment rose by 1.6 percent on the pervious year, and jail populations rose by 4.7 percent, for a total of just over 2.1 million people behind bars. The total population in prison has gone up by almost 600,000 since 1995.

Women make up 12.7 percent of jail inmates. Nearly 6 in 10 offenders in local jails are racial or ethnic minorities. In mid-2005, the BJS reports that “nearly 4.7 percent of black males were in prison or jail, compared to 1.9 percent of Hispanic males, and 0.7 percent of white males. Among males in their late 20s, nearly 12 percent of black males, compared to 3.9 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males, were incarcerated.” State by state, “Louisiana and Georgia led the nation in percentage of their state residents incarcerated (with more than 1 percent of their state residents in prison or jail at midyear 2005). Maine and Minnesota had the lowest rates of incarceration (with 0.3 percent or less of their state residents incarcerated).”

(You can get this figure as a PDF file if you like.)

Comparative context is provided by Roy Walmsley’s “World Prison Population List”:http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/rel/icps/world-prison-population-list-2005.pdf. The U.S. has an overall incarceration rate of 738 per 100,000 people, the highest in the world. Belarus, Russia and Bermuda (!) come next, distantly trailing with rates in the 530s. Fifty eight percent of countries have incarceration rates below 150 per 100,000. There is a lot of heterogeneity within continents. I left China out of the figure above — its incarceration rate is 118, but this only includes 1.55 million sentenced prisoners, not trial detainees or those in “administrative detention.”

Munster 23 — Biarritz 19.

_Later_: Here is “Stringer’s try.”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hMdc_RCyJg Superb.

Friday fun: You’ll remember the “Sony Bravia Ad”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bb8P7dfjVw&search=bravia from a while back, with all the bouncing balls, melancholy José González music and sunny San Francisco streets. Well, Swansea is not San Francisco, and fruit doesn’t bounce all that well, but “apart from that it’s pretty close”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjHzS_twDVY. Local, uh, residents “spoke out in protest.”:http://www.swansea-res.org.uk/news.html (Note also the news of Fr Vincent’s departure at the bottom of that page.) Elsewhere there’s also “this”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl5Nv2hOkYE (somewhat less interesting) and “this effort”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjOgFRMobMk.

Wil Shipley, who writes the excellent “Delicious Monster”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/11/13/delicious-monster/ (BibTeX export and nice integration with “LibraryThing”:http://www.librarything.com/ in the next version, please please please) had his identity stolen recently. The story is the by-now standard one of “frustration and anger”:http://wilshipley.com/blog/2006/05/etheft-etrade.html, and is as yet unresolved. As Kevin Drum “has been saying”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0512.drum.html for some time, the law in this area is basically broken: the companies need to be responsible for fradulent accounts, just as banks and not customers are responsible if money gets robbed from the local branch’s safe.

Wil’s case is typical. He’s absorbing all the costs of getting his money back out of a frozen E-Trade account, because E-Trade could care less and has no incentive to bother helping him out. Until the law is changed, of course, Wil still has to deal with this himself. One of his commenters makes the following interesting suggestion about dealing with the company over the phone:

bq. Even more important, never hang up. Most call center personel are expressly forbidden from hanging up on you. Simply stay on the line until they think of a new solution.

Sounds plausible. My brother runs a call center that handles the North American traffic for a financial services company. I’ll have to ask him whether this is true. Howie Becker tells a similar story about dealing with recalcitrant call center staff. He had learned from a relative that, at his airline, difficult-to-manage customers were labeled “irates.” First the representative would try to fix the problem, but if the caller persisted they would get bumped up to a supervisor. The representative would tell the supervisor, “I have an irate here”, short for “irate customer.” Becker decides he might as well cut straight to the supervisor, so he calls the airline and says “Hi, I’m Howie Becker and I am an irate. Can you help me with this ticket?” The representative sputters, “How did you know that word?!”

I would like some “Koranic Tuna”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4995100.stm with my “BVM Toast”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4034787.stm, thanks. If I could talk Krishna into manifesting himself in some wasabi, lunch might get taken care of.

Tim Burke “reads through”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=201 the “ACTA”:http://www.goacta.org/ report, “‘How Many Ward Churchills'”:http://www.goacta.org/whats_new/How%20Many%20Ward%20Churchills.pdf, which — so far as I can see from skimming it — makes very strong claims (“Ward Churchill is Everywhere”; “professors are using their classrooms to push political agendas in the name of teaching students to think critically”) mainly on the basis of inferences from course descriptions that they’ve found on the web. ( Naturally, they find some doozies. Big deal. College is full of funny people with weird ideas, haven’t you heard?) There’s little effort on the part of the report to ascertain whether the course descriptions they’ve found are representative, or to quantify what proportion of courses they constitute, or assess whether there’s been any change over time. Moreover, the report obviously can’t address how the material they find so objectionable is actually covered in classrooms. Worst of all, ACTA blithely claim that “professors like Churchill are systematically promoted by colleges and universities across the country at the expense of academic standards and integrity.” The University of Colorado’s “investigation into Churchill’s work”:http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/churchill/churchillreport051606.html, unanimously found evidence of fabrication, falsification and plagiarism. It seems that ACTA are happy to insinuate that if a faculty member has political views ACTA dislikes, then their work may be fraudulent and they have probably been promoted with little regard for academic standards. That’s quite a smear.

None of this stops ACTA from “claiming”:http://www.goactablog.org/blog/archives/2006/05/#a000174 the report is “documenting in exhaustive detail the kinds of course offerings that are becoming increasingly representative of today’s college curriculum.” Last time I checked, “exhaustive” was not a synonym for “impressionistic”, but who knows what they’re teaching conservative kids at home these days? Tim “has more detailed criticism”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=201. The bottom line is that this seems like one more iteration of the symbiotic relationship between organizations like ACTA and the likes of Ward Churchill. Those guys need each other.

For the sake of it, “here’s the syllabus”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/teaching/soc300-syllabus-f04.pdf for my undergraduate course on classical sociological theory. Oh no! Marx! And a French guy!

“Yet another flaw”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/us/12vote.html?ex=1305086400&en=5b3554a76aad524a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss has been discovered in Diebold’s electronic voting machines. Company spokesman David Bear presents the watertight case for the defence:

bq. “For there to be a problem here, you’re basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software,” he said. “I don’t believe these evil elections people exist.”

This guy should get some kind of prize. America is the country that gave us the word “ratfucking”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking, where party operatives “jam the phone lines”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/phonejamming.php of their opponents on election day, and where people say they want to die in Chicago so they can remain politically active.

The NSA “has assembled”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm a gigantic database of telephone calls in the United States, with the help of all of the major telecommunications providers (except Qwest). The database is not of voice recordings, but of calls made. It constitutes data on a huge network of ties between people who call each other. In recent years, sociology and related fields have seen a lot of development in dynamic modeling of social networks, and in fast algorithms for analyzing large, sparse graphs. Entities with this kind of structure include things like the Internet, or AOL’s instant messenger network, and the universe of telephone calls within the United States. Some of the papers in “this edited volume”:http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309089522/html/, published by the National Academy of Science, give a sense of what people are doing. (The volume was co-edited by my colleague “Ron Breiger”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~breiger/.) For instance, you can read about “Data Mining on Large Graphs”:http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309089522/html/265.html, “Identifying International Networks”:http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309089522/html/345.html, the “Key Player Problem”:http://darwin.nap.edu/openbook/0309089522/html/241.html, and the use of “MTML models to study adversarial networks.”:http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309089522/html/324.html I think it’s fair to say that techniques of this sort are of significant interest to the intelligence community.

Social scientists, in the normal course of things, are severely limited in the amount of good data they can collect on networks of this sort. The “Internet Movie Database”:http://www.imdb.com has proved a very useful source of data for developing theory and methods in this area because it’s comprehensive and publicly available. Other researchers have set out to collect very large datasets describing some network structure together with the attributes of the people in it. A recent paper by “by Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan Watts”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5757/88, for example, analyzes all the emails sent over the course of a year by 43,000 students, faculty and staff at a large private university. But the traffic analyzed in that paper is just a drop in the ocean of the real flow of communication that travels by voice and email every day.

Social network analysts — in fact, any social scientist who works with quantitative data — often dream of ideal datasets. The kind of thing we would collect if money, time and ethics did not constrain us. When we daydream like this, our thoughts tend toward harmless megalomania: maximally comprehensive data on the whole population of interest, in real-time, with vast computing power to analyze it, and no constraints on updating or extending it. “And a pony”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html, too. At the limit, something like “Borges’ map”:https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/0/f2d03252295e0d0585256e120009adab?OpenDocument is what we want, a perfect, one-to-one scale representation of the world.

Scientists and spies are not so different. The intelligence community’s drive to find the truth, to uncover the real structure of things, is similar to what motivates natural or social scientists. For that reason, I can easily understand why the people at the NSA would have been drawn to build a database like the one they have assembled. The little megalomaniac that lives inside any data-collecting scientist (“More detail! More variables! More coverage!”) thrills at the thought of what you could do with a database like that. Think of the possiblities! What’s frightening is that the NSA is much less constrained than the rest of us by money, or resources, or — it seems — the law. To them, Borges’ map must seem less like a daydream and more like a design challenge. In Kossinets and Watts’ study, the population of just one university generated more than 14 million emails. That gives you a sense of how enormous the NSA’s database of call records must be. In the social sciences, Institutional Review Boards set rules about what you can do to people when you’re researching them. Social scientists often grumble about IRBs and their stupid regulations, but they exist for a good reason. To be blunt, scientists are happy to do just about anything in the pursuit of better knowledge, unless there are rules that say otherwise. The same is true of the government, and the people it employs to spy on our behalf. They only want to find things out, too. But just as in science, that’s not the only value that matters.