I’ve been in Japan for the last few days, at a conference on Logic, Game Theory and Social Choice where, among other things, we’ve had some interesting discussions on electoral mechanisms. Meanwhile, Japan appears to be on the verge of tipping out the almost-permanent LDP government.

But, as a (non-Japanese speaking) visitor, I can hardly tell there was an election on. I’ve seen no rallies or badges, only a handful of posters and one loudspeaker truck, with a decidedly non-strident woman’s voice issuing what may have been a political message. The English language media I have access to (Asahi Shimbun and so on) has been giving the election about the level of coverage I’d expect for a boring state election at home. I’ll give some very ill-informed thoughts over the fold, but can readers say anything from their own knowledge, or point to useful sources?

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I spoke at a seminar on UN peace-keeping a couple of weeks ago. Here is the text of my paper:

I lived in Afghanistan for a year and a half in 2003/2004 and returned there twice in 2008: the first time to do some research for the Overseas Development Institute on how humanitarian agencies were dealing with the deteriorating security situation and the second time for an evaluation of the Italian government’s justice sector reforms. I have written a Guide to Afghan Property Law and a chapter on Afghanistan in a book on UN peace-keeping missions, with particular reference to the restoration of housing, land and property rights. My own book on humanitarian interventions also has a chapter on Afghanistan.

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“Scott”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee256 has a great short piece at _IHE_ on Gambetta’s book on communication among criminals, which _inter alia_ summarizes Gambetta’s theory of the signalling benefits of incompetence in Italian academia.

bq. Gambetta argues that something similar takes place among the _baroni_ (barons) who oversee the selection committees involved in Italian academic promotions. While some fields are more meritocratic than others, he says, the struggle for advancement involves a great deal of horse trading. “The barons operate on the basis of a pact of reciprocity, which requires a lot of trust, for debts are repaid years later. …The most powerful figures in this system, says Gambetta, tend to be the least intellectually distinguished. … “… and this is what is the most intriguing, they do not try to hide their weakness. One has the impression that they almost flaunt it in personal contacts.” … Gambetta argues that the cheerful incompetence of the _baroni_ is akin to the mafioso’s way of signaling that he can be “trusted” within his narrowly predatory limits.

bq. “Being incompetent and displaying it,” he writes, “conveys the message _I will not run away, for I have no strong legs to run anywhere else._ In a corrupt academic market, being good at and interested in one’s own research, by contrast, signal a potential for a career independent of corrupt reciprocity…. In the Italian academic world, the kakistocrats are those who best assure others by displaying, through lack of competence and lack of interest in research, that they will comply with the pacts.”

Via Cosma, comes the following article:

Since the publication of Robert K. Merton’s theory of cumulative advantage in science (Matthew Effect), several empirical studies have tried to measure its presence at the level of papers, individual researchers, institutions or countries. However, these studies seldom control for the intrinsic “quality” of papers or of researchers–“better” (however defined) papers or researchers could receive higher citation rates because they are indeed of better quality. Using an original method for controlling the intrinsic value of papers–identical duplicate papers published in different journals with different impact factors–this paper shows that the journal in which papers are published have a strong influence on their citation rates, as duplicate papers published in high impact journals obtain, on average, twice as much citations as their identical counterparts published in journals with lower impact factors. The intrinsic value of a paper is thus not the only reason a given paper gets cited or not; there is a specific Matthew effect attached to journals and this gives to paper published there an added value over and above their intrinsic quality.

The full paper has some more detail. Duplicates are defined as those papers published in different journals but which nevertheless have the same title, the same first author, and the same number of cited references. With this definition the authors find 4,532 pairs of duplicates in the Web of Science database across the sciences and social sciences. (This is a pretty striking finding in itself.) Remember that the impact factor of a journal is meant to be a (weighted) product of the number of citations to articles in that journal — i.e., a journal’s prestige is a function of the quality of the articles appearing in it. But here we see that, for the same papers, the impact factor of the journal affects the citation rate of the paper. The mechanism is straightforward, but it’s neat to see it shown this way.

(Appropriately enough, I have posted this at both Crooked Timber and OrgTheory. We’ll see which one gets the links and comments.)

Andrew Gelman and John Sides have a “very good piece”:http://bostonreview.net/BR34.5/ndf_election.php at the _Boston Review_ on the reasons why journalists and pundits got so much about the 2008 presidential election wrong, with responses by Rick Perlstein, Mark Schmitt and others. In their response to the response, John and Andrew say:

bq. Will these efforts get political scientists invited to Joe Scarborough’s kaffeeklatsch? Probably not. The media ecology fetishizes novelty in reporting and certainty in commentary. And yet the academic study of elections shows that what is certain is almost never new, and what is new is almost never certain. We might only bore Fox & Friends with our scholarly qualifications and caveats, or simply look foolish trying to present our research in soundbites. [click to continue…]

Another section of the Great Moderation chapter from my book. I’m getting a lot of value from the comments, both favorable and critical, so please keep them coming.

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I am reading two great books about Brazil at the moment. Teresa Caldeira’s City of walls: crime segregation and citizenship and Sarah Hautzinger’s Violence in the city of women: police and batterers in Bahia, Brazil.

The latter book tells the story of Brazil’s all-women police stations. Hautzinger spent some time living in a favela to research it and she remembers in her encounters with foreign journalists:

It became clear that they had hoped I would regale them with bloodcurdling brutalizing horrors, confirming their expectations of the exotic barbarity of Latin American men and the overall gravity of gender-based violence in Brazil that could necessitate all-female police stations. . . . This work approaches violence’s significance for gendered power relations as being far more complex than has been commonly recognized and advocates distinguishing between contrasting dynamics of violence as well as how they fit into global, national and regional historical processes. . . . Preventing violence requires more than punishment. . . . . Moreover criminalization-centered responses are inadvertently elitist, benefiting white and middle class women at the expense of poor and working class women and women of color who are more reluctant to involve police because of perceived bias.

Caldeira’s book is more difficult to summarize, but is basically about the impact that the rise in violent crime has had on Brazilian society as a whole. The following quote gives some idea of her approach:

The talk of crime promotes a symbolic reorganization of a world disrupted both by the increase in crime and by a series of processes that have profoundly affected Brazilian society in the last few decades. These processes include political democratization and persistent high inflation, economic recession, and the exhaustion of a model of development based on nationalism, import substitution, protectionism and state-sponsored economic development. Crime offers the imagery with which to express feelings of loss and social decay generated by these other processes and to legitimate the reaction adopted by many residents: private security to ensure isolation, enclosure and distancing from those considered dangerous
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My paternal grandmother, who was born in 1908 and died in 1988, used to have this collection of three postcards (?) up on her wall. I recently saw it at my parents’ place and requested that I take it with me so I could put it up in my home. It reminds me of my grandmother whom I loved dearly (and whom, as you can probably tell from the above dates, I knew for all too brief a part of my life). On the back, my grandmother wrote: Graz 1926-27. There is also some hard-to-read handwriting on the front that you can see on the image. Only recently did I stop to look at the pictures individually. For me, their entire meaning comes from my memories associated with them as a whole.

I like this Flickr set of album covers reimagined as Pelican paperbacks:

Also, I have an invented a test. First, view this image. Now check under the fold for the answer. [click to continue…]

Here’s something I didn’t post about last week because CT was so intermittent that I just didn’t get around to it. Megan McArdle responded to my critiques of her. Well, responded might be too strong. Reacted. She spends so much time speculating deeply about my apparently quite shallow motives that she doesn’t really get around to considering my argument. [click to continue…]

I think I sort-of knew many of the facts that Elijah Wald recounts “in this piece in the Financial Times”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/eeca345e-8de1-11de-93df-00144feabdc0.html . Still, knowing and putting-together are two different things. You couldn’t listen to 78s as “background music” because even with an auto-changer, you’d have to get up every 15 minutes – hence the importance of radio if you wanted a soundtrack to other activities. Why did jazz singers such as Billie Holiday record such a wide repertoire of “standards”? They were packaging the hit songs of their day for a particular audience (with other singers styling for other market segments). Wald’s account also makes sense of other matters that seem incomprehensible to modern music fans. Wald doesn’t discuss this, but we are often surprised that great singers of the past died in poverty and obscurity and are buried in unmarked graves (Bessie Smith, for example). But Wald’s emphasis on the contemporary importance of the song rather than the singer helps to explain how this could have happened. We might prize the iconic performances of the time, but back then there were lots of jobbing singers churning out multiple versions. Interesting enough to make me order a copy of Wald’s new book, _How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll_.

Well with Australia 133 for 8 and 199 behind at tea on the second day, I’m a bit late starting this. If I’d posted last night it would have been to berate a mediocre England – what a difference a day makes. Is Broad the new Flintoff? Can Australia yet pull it back? Comment away.

“Felix Salmon”:http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/08/19/the-economics-of-tattoos/ yesterday on the economics of tattoos:

Drewbie left me a comment this morning talking about people interviewing for jobs and not getting them, just because they had visible tattoos. I can well believe it. But at the same time, precisely because of this discrimination, I tend to both expect and receive much better service from people with visible tattoos. … Businesses with tattooed employees are signalling to me that they have better service, and as a result I’m more likely to try them out.

By coincidence, I’m reading Diego Gambetta’s new book, _Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate_ (Powells, Amazon, B&N), which has a lot to say about signalling via tattoos and other forms of visible self-mutilation. Gambetta argues that criminals often cover themselves with tattoos precisely because they ruin the criminals’ prospects to go straight; they allow the criminals to signal “that defection would be not so much unprofitable as impossible.”

Self-binding can also take the form of self-branding as found, for instance, in South African prisons:

bq. Erefaan’s face is covered in tattoos. “Spit on my grave” is tattooed across his forehead; “I hate you, Mum” etched on his left cheek. The tattoos are an expression of loyalty. The men cut the emblems of their allegiance into their skin. The Number [the name of the hierarchical system in Pollsmoor prison] demands not only that you pledge your oath verbally, but that you are marked, indelibly, for life. Facial tattoos are the ultimate abandonment of all hope for a life outside.

Neal Stephenson, in _Snow Crash_, proposed an America in which the collapse of government led communities to brand criminals faces’ with brief descriptions of their criminal tendencies, so that others in different communities would know to give them wide berth. Gambetta’s logic suggests that branding, whether voluntary or involuntary, could sometimes be in the criminal’s self interest – it serves as a costly signal of type. More generally, I’m enjoying the book a lot – the best bit so far is Gambetta’s lovely theory of incompetence as a signalling mechanism in Italian academia. Recommended.

Another longish extract from my book project. Corrections and suggestions of all kinds are welcome. I’m also thinking it might be good to have a website where it’s possible to look at, and comment on, all the draft chapters, but I suspect people prefer the atmosphere of a comments thread. Any thoughts on this?

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