You only have to hang around the world of social science research- or policy-related blogging for a few hours before you come across someone willing to snottily inform you, or some other luckless interlocutor, that although the finding of this or that paper may appeal to you, nevertheless don’t you know that Correlation Is Not Causation. Often this seems to be the only thing they know about statistics.

I grudgingly admit that it’s a plausible-sounding rule, and in the textbooks and stuff. But, to be honest, I read it too many times in various posts and comments threads the other day, and in my raging pique I found myself thinking that the next time it happened I would say, “That’s completely backwards: in fact, causation is just correlation” and fling a copy of Hume’s first Enquiry at their head. Or at the screen, I suppose, but that image is less satisfying, because now who’s the crank on the internet, etc.

This Halloween when we take the kids Trick-or-Treating, I will dress up as Correlation, as befits a social scientist. My wife will of course be Causation.

A short appreciation by Phil Jupitus available for a short time here.

For newcomers, here are renditions of You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, Life on Mars (beautiful, actually), and, for the many Dick Barton fans out there, the Devil’s Gallop. I can’t find Anarchy in the UK, I’m afraid, you’ll have to see them live for that.

The eternal trench warfare between teachers and students over exams and other forms of assessment has long been a popular topic here at CT (unsurprisingly, viewed mostly from the teacher’s side of the barbed wire).

Having been on both sides at different times, I’m an observer of the process these days, since my research fellowship doesn’t involve running any courses (though I give a fair number of guest lectures in various subjects). Back in the 60s and 70s, when I was a student, the whole system of examinations and marks was one of the big targets of radical critique; even if relatively minor in the great scheme of things, exams loomed large in our lives, and seemed like a symbol of much that was wrong with society.

That kind of debate seems to have disappeared entirely. While a variety of alternatives to exams have been tried, the pressure to cut costs has driven universities (in Australia at any rate) back to heavy reliance on exams, and, within that, to heavy use of multiple choice and short-answer tests. But the real question is why universities spend so much time and effort on marks and grading, with the consequence of continuous low-level war between teachers and students.

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Megan McArdle asks,

Why don’t babysitters make much money?

And answers,

Supply and demand. Supply side: it’s not skilled labor. It make take talent (like the patience of a saint), but the actual skills of doing laundry, spooning formula into one’s mouth, and changing a diaper are not hard to learn.

Taking care of the rugrats might not be brain surgery, although it does raise some interesting questions — not pursued in the post — about how much, net of skill considerations, you should be willing to pay someone not to drop, starve or otherwise neglect your child. But really I just wanted to say that if Megan is ever in need of a child-care provider, I hope she’ll take care to pick someone skilled enough not to be in the habit of spoon-feeding themselves formula. Or, indeed, of spoon-feeding it to the baby.

When I saw that the Mickey Tax¹ issue had been taken up by “Atrios”:http://www.eschatonblog.com/2008_06_22_archive.html#7116689960490247198 and “Kos”:http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/19/132923/717, I guessed that it wouldn’t be long before I started seeing some pushback. A former student of mine did “some research”:http://www.ipdi.org/UploadedFiles/PoliticalInfluenceofBlogs.pdf a couple of years ago that suggests that Kos is the most widely read blog on the Hill, with a fair readership among Republicans (who want to see what’s coming down the pike) as well as Democrats, and I’d imagine that Markos’ fulminations got some attention in the right places. Sure enough, I got an email last night from a flack at the Travel Industry Association (the lobby group that’s been most heavily involved in pushing the Mickey Tax), offering to set me right on my various misconceptions about this Act. I replied that I would be happy to receive any proposed corrections/new information, but reserved the right to publish them on this blog. I haven’t gotten any response and don’t expect one, but will update this post if I’m wrong.

In the meantime, I’d like to take advantage of CT’s cross-national readership, and encourage those of you who live in visa-waiver countries to hassle your politicians, and write to your newspapers about the Mickey Tax. This, unlike the Iraqi translators appeal, is not a life or death issue, but it _will_ lead to substantial amounts of money ($200 million) being transferred from tourists’ pockets to an outrageous boondoggle fund unless it gets stopped.

I _particularly_ encourage you to use the terms ‘Mickey Tax’ or (Markos’s coinage) ‘Disney Tax’ in your communications. I imagine that the fervor of the Disney corporation for this particular rip-off would be dampened if incoming tourists to the US came to understand the political origins of the fee, and were able to draw the relevant conclusions about where to spend, or not to spend, their hardwon money once they had gotten in. The terms ‘Mickey Tax’ and ‘Disney Tax’ seem to me to draw these causal connections in a straightforward and useful way. Of course, Irish people in particular may think that the Mickey Tax is even more outrageous than it is, but that doesn’t necessarily seem to me to be a bad thing.

¹ Term a trademark of This Blog, although I’m grateful to Atrios for seeing that it made for a better title than throwaway aside.

So I got up this morning and, reading the pages of the venerable “Atlantic Monthly” over coffee, learned that – some hours earlier – my young daughters, ages 6 and 4, half a world away, had said something amusing.

Ain’t it just the 21st Century, though?

(In my defense: I figured Belle was going to be way too busy to update the blog, so I didn’t check there first, before firing up Talking Points Memo and Matthew Yglesias – always my first reads. I did check iChat, but Belle wasn’t on.)

In fact, this is more a case of small world than future world, since Belle and I know Matthew Y. Anyway. What strange and futuristic experience have you had recently?

This ArsTechnica write-up of some recent research of mine has received numerous votes on the recommendation site Digg in the last few hours. I wonder if it will make the front page of Digg, although as a Twitter contact of mine noted, since it’s not a top-10 list (nor, if I might add, does it cover Google or Apple), that may be unlikely.

The post reports on a study in which we found that male college students are more likely than their female counterparts to share creative content online even though both men and women in the sample are equally likely to create such content. However, when controlling for online skill, the gender differences in posting go away.

Gina Walejko and I published the paper “The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age” this Spring in the journal Information, Communication and Society. We examine the extent to which college students share creative content online and whether we can identify any systematic differences by user background. In particular, we looked at whether students create and share the following types of material: poetry/fiction, artistic photography, music, and video (both completely own and remixed in the case of the latter two), including both private and public sharing. [click to continue…]

Some good reads. The Locus Award winners have been announced.

Michael Chabon won for Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I thought it was ok – fun – a bit of a disappointment after Kavalier and Clay. What did you think? OK, I’ll write a short review to finish this post out. Now, on down the list.

Terry Pratchett, Making Money. Very funny, as usual, but sort of by-the-numbers.

I haven’t read Miéville’s Un Lun Dun or Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box. (Put them on the to-read list.)

Cory Doctorow’s “After The Siege” is magnificent. It’s a harrowing tale. It will definitely give you that ghastly, crazy, infowar siege of neverland feeling. I listened to it as a podcast, read by the author himself. I see that someone else has re-recorded it. Throw it on the iPod.

“Witch’s Headstone”, by Neil Gaiman. Haven’t read it.

“A Small Room in Koboldtown”, by Michael Swanwick. You can download it as a free PDF. (And here’s a podcast.) I guess I’m a bit surprised it won. It’s a funny genre mash-up. Hardboiled detective fiction, locked-room murder mystery, meets … well, I’ll quote the first paragraph: [click to continue…]

I was at a sort-of DC power lunch yesterday with staffers from the Hill (the first such lunch I’ve ever gone to, and likely to be the last for a while), and the conversation turned to a piece of legislation that’s being pushed hard by lobbyists for big players in the tourism industry, the so-called “Travel Promotion Act”:http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-s1661/text. The Act is supposed to create a $200 million fund to promote tourism, by levying a charge on visitors to the US. The charge is non-trivial – the estimates I heard suggested that in order to raise $10 a head to give to the travel industry’s promotional fund, the government will likely have to impose a total fee of $25 to cover administrative overheads.

This seems to me to be one of the more straightforwardly stupid legislative proposals of the recent past. As someone who used to visit the US a lot before I became a permanent resident, I can testify that I would have found it extremely galling to have to fork over $25 to subsidize glossy brochures for the US tourist industry, and would have likely restricted my travel to the US as a result. For that matter, I’ve heard strong resentment expressed by US citizens who have to pay similar fees when they visit certain countries in Latin America. Even so, it sounds as though the bill has a lot of support – 44 senators are co-sponsoring it already.

This is one of those instances where public choice theory works – a number of big players in the tourist industry (whom, one suspects, will reap the lion’s share of the benefits) are trying to impose costs that will very plausibly hurt travel to the US as a whole, even as it directs more of the tourists who do come in their direction. The major villain in the story is the Disney Corporation – the _Washington Post_ ran a good story a few months ago, “Mickey Goes to Washington”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302837_pf.html, on Disney lobbyists’ involvement in the campaign behind the proposed Act. The Act’s financial consequences are partly obscured because non-US citizens are expected to take a lot of the hit. But I hardly think that it will promote travel.

More generally, there should be some phrase or term for bills or proposals that are likely to have the opposite effect to that which their title suggests – this is hardly an unique phenomenon. Suggestions welcome in comments.

Update: Thanks to “Maurice Meilleur”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/06/24/annals-of-stupid-lawmaking/#comment-244387 in comments, we have a winner. NEGISLATION (n): A legal act which, by design or accident, achieves the opposite effect to that which it purportedly intends. Examples include the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, and the Travel Promotion Act (the Mickey Tax Act) of 2008. See also _negulation_.

Update 2: Title changed to make it punchier

Chris Uggen, of the University of Minnesota, reports from the frontiers of collegiate apparel licensing agreements:

Victoria’s secret recently announced that minnversity-themed t-shirts, hoodies, and underwear will be sold as part of the company’s PINK collegiate collection. … however, the Minnesota Daily reveals that Goldy Gopher [the UMN mascot] will not be participating in the new loungewear line … Spokesgophers made clear that the clothing line is “not in step with the University’s values and focus” and that the Minnversity only “approves tasteful trademark requests.” … Though I wouldn’t want my university to be involved in anything distasteful, I know we can always use new revenue streams. Personally, I only purchase products that are in keeping with the Minnversity’s values and focus, such as my officially-licensed golden gopher “talking beer opener.”

So last week, the rightwing “phrase-du-jour”:http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=10643 was “I am aware of all Internet traditions.” “This week”:http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0608/The_Google.html, it’s “John McCain is aware of the Internet” (via). I sense a certain moderating of ambition …

Like Henry, I also participated in the TPM Cafés Book Club discussion of Clay Shirky‘s Here Comes Everybody last week. My contribution continues along the theme of some of the earlier posts concerning inequalities, but my particular focus is why some online organizing efforts are more successful than others and what factor the organizer’s resources play in all this.

In related news, Clay will be joining us as a guest here in a couple of weeks. This advance warning should give you enough time to go and read his book although it’s not a requirement for commenting on his posts.:)

via “Ethan Zuckerman”:http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/06/23/pdf-visualizing-the-political-blogosphere/, a really nice visualization (with clickable information) of the political blogosphere “here”:http://presidentialwatch08.com/index.php/map/.

I am excited to announce that I am finally ready to write my next book. It’s going to be great. And here’s the best thing of all: you can help me write it! It’s about the Internet and how it’s changing the world. I’ve got the outline done and I was just thinking I need a research assistant to fill in the details. Then I thought – well, why just one? There are a million research assistants out there – let’s crowdsource!

Any book about the Internet needs a big idea. Not just a kind-of-big idea either, but a Great-Big-Fuck-Off-Massive Idea. The kind of idea that is so big you can’t get your head round it, and yet which you can put in a short phrase so you can trademark it. My Idea is that there are _now more ideas in the world than ever before._ What’s more, these ideas are not just stuck inside people’s heads doing nothing, but thanks to the Internet everyone is putting their ideas out there for the world to see. And then these ideas spark other ideas. So with more ideas than ever before, and better ways of getting ideas acted on, the future just has to be insanely great.

More … much more … to be found “here”:http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/06/my-new-book-explosion.html. The title of Chapter 6 (With Enough Eyeballs, All Ideas Are Shallow) is especially cruel. For years, I’ve been planning a vaguely similar book, which would aim at selling millions of copies to both the pop-business-sociology and ev-psych markets. It would be entitled (tada!) _The Blink Slate._ My fundamental problem has been figuring out a way to use deprecated HTML tags on hardback book jackets (sorry oldstyle Internet Explorer users – you’re not going to get the joke). Perhaps I too can crowdsource this problem to the masses of CT readers …