Vernon Bogdanor has a “review”:http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25346-2647303,00.html of Sheri Berman’s _The Primacy of Politics_ (which we ran a “seminar”:https://crookedtimber.org/category/sheri-berman-seminar/ on last year) in the TLS, Large parts of the article are good and perceptive, but Bogdanor also seems to be using the book to make his own, rather odd claims.
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Here is a likely poorly-specified question for biologists, prompted by wanting to buy Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us and then reading a story about genetically modified mice. Weisman’s book asks how the world would change and what of us would survive if humans were all wiped out overnight or just disappeared by something (a virus, the Rapture). The premise is unlikely (something that kills people — all people — but leaves the rest of the world standing) but intriguing.

So I wondered, what if, long, long after our disappearance, some other species arose on earth at least as intelligent as us and eventually started doing evolutionary and molecular biology. Let’s say they have a working theory of evolution much like our own. Now say for the sake of argument that a bunch of transgenic organisms produced by humans have survived and prospered in the interim. So our future biologists find things like a bacteria that produces insulin, or a plant that secretes insecticide, or rice that is high in beta carotene, or more exotic stuff as needed.[1]

I’m wondering, would such organisms even present themselves as empirical anomalies? (That is, how much would you have to know about genomes and evolution for them to seem odd?) And if they did seem odd, how would they be explained? That is, would the evidence of their intelligent design by a previous, now-extinct species be clear? You can see that I’m just irony-mongering here. Would some Arthropod-staffed functional-equivalent of the Discovery Institute point its claw at some of these organisms, saying they were anomalies that could only be explained by the intervention of a divine intelligence? Would Charles Crustacean find a story that could account for their evolution by natural selection? I’m particularly interested in whether the artificial provenance of transgenic organisms would be clear on internal evidence alone. I don’t know anything about this stuff, so probably the answer is “Yes” for reasons obvious to experts. But if it weren’t …

From the sound of Weisman’s book, though, internal evidence wouldn’t be all that was available. Our putative Arthropod successors would likely be able to conjecuture as follows: “The lost civilization who did this is probably the same one responsible for leaving those giant goddamn piles of steel-belted rubber rings and miscellaneous plastic items piled around the place.” To which someone would no doubt reply, “Come off it, no organism that spent its time making rubber tubes and piling them up in giant mountains would have ever been smart enough to figure out genetic engineering.”

[1] It occurs to me that rice requires a lot of cultivation to prosper, but there aren’t any humans to take care of it. Hence, “insert example as needed.”

Unclear why exactly:), Michael Froomkin asks the question:

What would be the most unattractive job in the regular economy? I’m not talking about the objectively least-well paid or statistically most dangerous, or most unpopular (car salesman?). I mean, what job would you least like to have. No fair saying subsistence farmer in Darfur either — I mean in the US (or other developed economy).

His response: toll booth attendant.

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The question of disciplinary boundaries seems to be coming up a lot lately, and Brian’s post on Gott’s Copernican principle provides yet another instance. Gott, an astrophysicist, is interested in the question of whether you can infer the future duration of a process from its present age, and this issue seems to received some discussion in philosophy journals.

It may be beneath the notice of these lofty souls, but statisticians and social scientists have actually spent a fair bit of time worrying about this question of survival analysis (also called duration analysis). For example, my labour economist colleagues at ANU were very interested in the question of how to infer the length of unemployment spells, based on observations of how long currently unemployed people had actually been unemployed. The same question arises in all sorts of contexts (crime and recidivism, working life of equipment, individual life expectancy and so on). Often, the data available is a set of incomplete durations, and you need to work out the implied survival pattern.

Given a suitably large sample (for example, the set of observations of Broadway plays, claimed as a successful application of Gott’s principle) this is a tricky technical problem, and requires some assumptions about entry rates, but raises no fundamental logical difficulties. The problem is to find a distribution that fits the data reasonably well and estimate its parameters. I don’t imagine anyone doing serious work in this field would be much impressed by Gott’s apparent belief that imposing a uniform distribution for each observation is a good way to go.

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From time to time, I think of winnowing down and revising my published work into a collection of essays. And then kicks in the memory of having a player in literary publishing in New York (fully “made,” as they say in the Mafia) tell me, in the tone one would use in explaining things to a child, “You can’t publish a book of essays until you are somebody.”

Well, now I’ll keep in mind the example of John Emerson, whose writings appear at Idiocentrism and who regularly intervenes in the CT comments section. He has launched the Éditions le Real imprint with a book of his poems and a volume of essays.
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I was going to pass over this, but I am a shallow person. Fresh from “schooling me”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/15/dept-of-being-savaged-by-a-dead-sheep/ on the treatment of outliers, Megan McArdle has expanded her ambition and now “takes Cosma Shalizi to task”:http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009901.html for his “bizarrely beside the point” “views”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/495.html on the heritability of IQ, the statistical estimation and interpretation of _g_, and his failure to understand the analytical methods of “the serious IQ guys.” Megan may not be aware that I “taught”:http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/754/ “Cosma”:http://www.santafe.edu/profiles/?pid=236 “what little”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/prob-notes/ he “knows”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/research/ about statistics. He’s also much nicer than me. So she’ll have no trouble disposing of him.

_Update_: Yeah, on second thoughts I should have just passed over this.

The edited volume on research methods that I mentioned earlier is shaping up nicely and I’ll be shipping it off soon. However, I’m still not sure about the title and subtitle, and was hoping for some input from anyone who’s willing to give it some thought. This is what I’m working with now:

However, having “research” in there twice doesn’t seem right. Any thoughts on either the first or the second part?

As a reminder, the chapters in this book provide helpful behind-the-scenes accounts of doing empirical social science research for a wide range of methods such as use of large-scale data sets, interviews, observations, experiments and historical documents. The unique contribution of this collection is that it provides readers with a realistic idea of what to expect when embarking on empirical investigations by offering richly detailed descriptions of the logistics of individual research projects. The volume draws on the experiences of recent successful dissertation writers and young scholars doing cutting edge research in their respective social scientific fields.

If someone comes up with a title I end up using, I’ll happily send the person a copy of the book and will think of some additional gesture of gratitude. (CT mug anyone?:) Thanks!

As “Atrios points out”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_07_15_archive.html#162127958575664769 the Pope is indeed a Primate as well as a primate. This reminds me of watching RTE news years ago reporting on the death of “Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiach”:http://www.answers.com/topic/tom-s-cardinal-fiaich, Primate of Ireland. The newscaster asked some talking head whether he preferred to remember the Cardinal as a man or a primate. I know which PZ Myers would pick.

“John Tierney”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/science/17tier.html?8dpc=&_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all today writes about Richard Gott’s Copernican principle. He has a little more on “his blog”:http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/how-nigh-is-the-end-predictions-for-geysers-marriages-poker-streaks-and-the-human-race/#more-103, along with some useful discussion from “Bradley Monton”:http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/fac/monton.html. The principle in question says that you should treat the time of your observation of some event as being a random point in its duration. Slightly more formally, quoting Gott via “a paper”:http://spot.colorado.edu/~monton/BradleyMonton/Articles_files/future%20duration%20pq%20final.pdf Monton wrote with Brian Kierland,

bq. Assuming that whatever we are measuring can be observed only in the interval between times t_begin and t_end, if there is nothing special about t_now, we expect t_now to be located randomly in this interval.

As Monton and Kierland note, we can use this to argue that the probability that

bq. t_future is between _a_ and _b_ times t_past

is 1/ ( _a_ + 1) – 1 / ( _b_ + 1), where t_past is the past duration of the event in question, and t_future is its future duration. Most discussion of this has focussed on the case where _a_ = _b_ = 39. But I think the more interesting, or at least easy to interpret, case is where _a_ = 0 and _b_ = 1. In this case we get the result that the probability of the entity in question lasting longer into the future than its current life-span is 1/2.

As a rule I tend to be very hostile to these attempts to get precise probabilities from very little data. I have a short argument against Gott’s Copernican formula below. (Against the general version, not for any particular values of _a_ and _b_.) But first I want to try a little mockery. I’d like to know anyone who would like to take any of the following bets.

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Jerome Weeks offers another tale from the crypt:

A 17th century English lit doctoral candidate has completed her dissertation on Samuel Pepys, the famous diarist. Early on in her studies (yes, the gender makes this seem sexist, but I’m just reporting the anecdote as I heard it) she moved away from the university because of something — oh, let’s say she had to live with her parents. So she completed her work by mail. This was not that uncommon 25 years ago, and probably even less so today with the internet.

At any rate, it’s the day of her defense, she returns to the department and faces a jury of professors — who quickly realize that in all this time, no one has explained that Pepys’ name is pronounced “Peeps.” But the professors are embarrassed as well, to have one of their Ph.D. candidates get this far and never to have spoken to one of them directly. So our plucky candidate has the unnerving experience of hearing her mentors nervously coo at her for several hours.

Everytime she says “Peppis,” one of them would softly go … “Peeps.”

Maybe it actually happened. Maybe it’s academic folklore. But Jerome says he had one confirmation of the premise: He told the story to an English professor who admitted he hadn’t realized how the name was pronounced either.

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Someone I believe to be Megan McArdle weighs in at the Economist blog on the laughable graphic run by the WSJ the other day. Brad DeLong is not impressed, nor is Mark Thoma (in part because comments are misattributed to him in the post), and nor am I. She singles me out for membership in “a special category of wrong,” I think mostly because my Ph.D is in sociology and not economics.

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The Invasion (UK) is, perhaps, the greatest of the Cyberman stories – prefiguring the Pertwee years on earth, establishing UNIT as a regular feature and clearly influenced by Quatermass 2. It set the stage for the earthbound adventures of the Pertwee years (even as a kid it struck me as odd that aliens all seemed so intent on using S.E. England as their landing stage preparatory to the domination of Earth). Nicholas Courtney is great – finding his character, but not yet as trigger happy or irritated with the Doctor as he would become Its not been watched much in recent years, not least because two episodes were victims of the BBC’s recurrent vandalism, part of the criminal destruction of a good deal of its output in the fifties and sixties, even into the seventies. (They even managed to discard the 1972 remake of Dick Barton, which they’d had to remake because they’d thrown out every single episode of the original series; it was recovered only because some lunatic in Australia recorded it when it on broadcast). The Andromeda Anthology deals with lost/destroyed episodes by using stills and text on the screen to replace the missing bits. I found this a bit hard to take (still, worth it for the sake of seeing a classic, and Julie Christie really is great). The Invasion deals with it better

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By now you’ve probably all seen this ridiculous graphic from todays’ WSJ, which purports to show that the Laffer curve is somehow related to the data points on the figure. “Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/07/most-dishonest-.html, “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_07/011682.php, “Matt Yglesias”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/worst_editorial_ever.php, “Mark Thoma”:http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/07/yet-again-tax-c.html and “Max Sawicky”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/003184.html have all rightly had a good old laugh at it, because it’s spectacularly dishonest and stupid. I just want to make a point about so-called outlying cases, like Norway.
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