Before I link to yet another advertisement for your amusement, I thought it was worth noting the interesting twist in some of us actually seeking out and making conscious decisions to view ads. Aren’t consumers supposed to hate advertisements? Isn’t the great fear about TiVo and similar devices that audiences skip over all the ads? That may be the case if the commercials are horrible, which many of them are. But the fact that people voluntarily visit sites that feature ads suggests that there is room for advertisements in our world. They just need to be good enough to capture our attention. Remember the Honda commercial called Cog? Talk about creative. I personally liked the Get Perpendicular Hitachi flash movie to which I posted a link yesterday (although that may be a bit too geeky for some). The Ad Forum hosts thousands of ads from across the world (although only a small fraction seem to be freely accessible). Again, some of them are creative enough that people will voluntarily go to the site to check them out. Here are some recent popular ones: Frogger and The Banana. So dear advertisers, instead of getting upset about new technologies how about getting creative?

I’ll take this opportunity to give a shout-out to David Krewinghaus to whom we are grateful for our cool header banner. Some of his work exemplifies well what I am talking about above.

UPDATE: I had also meant to post a link to the video depicting the shot made by Tiger Woods the other day. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’ll understand the connection to this post once you view it.

I was thinking about Chris’ post on tactical voting and I was struck by the thought: Why hasn’t Labour introduced preferential (single transferable) voting in Britain? Readers will probably be struck by the alternative question, Why should Labour introduce preferential (single transferable) voting in Britain?

My first is that this would be an improvement in democracy, both for individual constituencies and for the country as a whole. Although no voting system is perfect, preferential voting is much more likely to produce an outcome that reflects the views of the majority of voters than is first-past-the-post.

I don’t suppose that an argument like this will cut much ice with the Blair government (or most incumbent governments), so let me move to the second point. Labour would almost certainly benefit from this shift, at the expense of the Tories. It seems pretty clear that Labour would get the bulk of LDP preferences, as well as those of the Greens and minor left parties. The Tories would pick up preferences from UKIP (but this group looks like a flash in the pan) and the far-right (but this is a small group, and there are disadvantages attached to such preferences, especially if, say, the BNP demands preferences in return).

It’s true of course that the biggest benefits would go to the Liberal Democrats, since their supporters would not have to worry about ‘wasted votes’. But even here, there’s a hidden benefit for Labour. Sooner or later, there will be a hung Parliament, and the price of LDP support will be full-scale proportional representation. If Labour introduced preferential voting without being forced to, it would not only cement LDP support but would greatly weaken the case for PR.

The remaining objection is that of additional complexity. This can be overcome, in large measure by adopting the optional preferential system, where voters can indicate as many or as few preferences as they choose.

Kash on the comparative waits for health care services in Western democracies.

Washington Monthly’s piece about VHA hospitals.

The New Yorker’s excellent medical writer Atul Gawande on how a doctor is paid.

I’m going to be writing about what deregulation of health care might mean¹, but I think that I’ll end up coming back to how an American doctor gets paid by insurance companies². This is not the best way, or the only possible way, but it’s where we’re starting from. From the New Yorker article:

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Today’s FT has an interesting short article about the growing foreign policy clout of the European Union (something I wrote about back in June of last year). Robert Zoellick recognized this when he took time out of his short European tour to talk to MEPs in the Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. Even more interesting is that the Parliament has been taking more of a hands-on role in the enlargement process; a highly critical Parliament report on corruption in Romania (which is an EU candidate state) triggered a government reshuffle there. This is the kind of under-the-radar change that is likely to have substantial long-term repercussions for the transatlantic relationship. On the one hand, as I noted last year, this is likely to mean a more stormy relationship between the EU and US over the medium term. Just as the US Congress passes laws and makes demands that constrain the ability of the executive to make international deals, so too the European Parliament is likely to make it more difficult for the EU as a whole to reach accommodations with the US. This is especially likely in the touchy issue area where human rights and security concerns intersect. When I talk to people in the Parliament about transatlantic cooperation in security and intelligence sharing, the Maher Arar case and the practice of extraordinary renditions come up again and again. On the other, the Parliament may provide the US with a new ally in areas such as the China arms embargo, where Parliament’s concerns about human rights and US foreign policy interests point in the same direction.

If Vicente Fox is serious about democracy in Mexico he will exercise his power of pardon and allow Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (currently polling ahead of all other candidates for the upcoming Presidential race) to stand for election next year even if he is found guilty of what amount to minor charges in Mexico’s corrupt political culture. In fact, it would be fairer to pardon him in advance of the verdict in a lengthy court case, Mexican courts not being known for swiftness.
The U.S. should make its views known as well. Lopez Obrador may not be the most palatable candidate, but that is all the more reason for the U.S. to take a stand in favor of his not being shut out on dubious procedural grounds. This seems a chance for the U.S. to show its pro-democatic bona fides at little cost.

[Presidential spokesman Agustin] Canet Gutierrez strongly denied that Fox was trying to scuttle Lopez Obrador’s candidacy, but he said the critics had a point in noting that seemingly far greater corruption had gone unpunished.

“It is difficult to answer that — it doesn’t show coherence, and we accept that,” Gutierrez said.

That’s just what I was thinking…

The preliminary results from the first 13,000 voters on the “Who Should You Vote For?”:http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/press4.php site are interesting ….

bq. Party the user expected:
Labour 21%
Conservative 20%
LibDem 37%
UKIP 2%
Green 6%
NONE GIVEN 14%

bq. Actual party suggested: Labour 4%
Conservative 9%
LibDem 58%
UKIP 12%
Green 17%

By this time in the week most people are ready for a break (that’s probably why you’re visiting CT in the first place, right?:). Here are two amusing links (in that geeky sort of way at least:).

• NetDisaster (I’m especially fond of the dinosaurs option)
• Get Perpendicular! (you’ll want to check this out when you can have the sound turned on)

I’m not sure if this is an occult link with the Zeitgeist, or just a manifestation of the reallocation of attention that leads new parents to notice other people’s babies, but a month ago, I finally got around to ordering “The Strange Death of Liberal England” (George Dangerfield) which arrived at Easter. In the ensuing couple of weeks I’ve seen not one but two uses of the same idea, with both Protestantism and Toryism dying strange deaths. Maybe this is happening all the time and I’ve just started noticing.

“Over at John Band’s site”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/full_post.asp?pid=970 they’re all doing Chris Lightfoot’s “Who Should You Vote For?”:http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/ (in the coming UK general election) test. Annoyingly, I came out Lib Dem on this though I fully intend to grit my teeth and vote Labour anyway. But for the purposes of this post I’m going to go all meta and discuss what we are trying to do in voting and how that affects how we should vote. Here’s something I posted on the philos-l list just before the 1992 general election:

bq. A friend asked me to provide him with an argument against tactical voting and I came up with this – derived very loosely from some of the things Geoff Brennan says in his ‘Politics with Romance’, in Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit eds The Good Polity (Blackwell 1989).

bq. The only situation in which an individual voter can affect the outcome is one where there is a tie among the other voters. But in a large electorate this is unlikely to be the case. I want to do two things with my vote: express a preference and secure an outcome. But since my chances of the latter are so small, I may as well concentrate my deliberations on the expressive side. If I am a positive identifier with a particular party — and this is more important to me than my negative feelings towards another party — then even if my party is third I should still vote for it (if I vote). By doing so I secure one of my objectives (the expressive one) but run only a vanishingly small risk of incurring the cost of bringing about a worse outcome than if I had voted tactically. The rational voter should therefore vote for the party she prefers unless it is more important to you expressively to declare your hostility to the party you loathe most – in which case vote for the best placed challenger to that party.

In other words: it is a waste of time and effort to try to bring about a determinate outcome. You’ll almost certainly make no difference. Tactical voting is an attempt to bring about some determinate outcome. But if what is important to you is saying “Blair hooray!” or “Howard boo!” then you can do this perfectly well (voting being only one way of doing it of course). And there’s no merit to the argument that voting for the Lib Dems, Respect, or even the Monster Raving Loony Party is a “wasted vote”. It is no more wasted than any other. So vote for whom you like best, or against whom you hate most, instead of making micro-calculations about effectiveness.

(BTW I realise that this argument deprives me of one lot of nasty things I might say about people who voted for Ralph Nader in either 2000 or 2004, but there are many other nasty things to be said about such people anyway, so I don’t care that much.)

Joe Scarborough:

Whether the debate centers around a Presidential election, the right to die movement, the gay agenda, prayer in school, or simply letting our children recite the Pledge of Alligence, the teachings of Jesus Christ always seems to thwart the agenda of America’s left wing elites.

Forget what you heard in the 1960s.

God is not dead.

In fact, he is very much alive and beating liberal elites on one political issue after another.

Maybe that is why so many of them hate the Prince of Peace.

via Andrew Sullivan, who wonders, as I do, which of Jesus’s teachings related to homosexuals or Bush vs. Kerry. Perhaps if I didn’t hate the Prince of Peace I’d know.

In 580 words, Scarborough uses the words “elite” or “elites” 6 times. This kind of class resentment is understandable from a “regular Joe” (his term) like Scarborough, but it’s hard to put your finger on when it developed. He might have picked it up during his hardscrabble days as a partner in a Florida law firm. He might have learned to resent the elites that he hired and fired as a newspaper owner. It could have come from his days as a hard-working blue-collar Congressman. (As Tom DeLay has attested, it’s very difficult making ends meet on a Congressional salary.)

Or maybe it’s more recent. Like most millionaire television pundits, Regular Joe can probably really commiserate with the concerns that working folks have about shitty service from the incompetent idiots that our employers hire to style our hair and apply our makeup.

Meanwhile, the House is about to vote for the permanent repeal of the estate tax. Joe will probably get right on that.

P.S. Did you notice that one of the “liberal elites” named ‘n’ shamed is Christopher Hitchens? What a coincidence.

Now that Meetup has decided to start charging for its services, I wonder if Upcoming.org is going to take off. It seems like a promising service and many new features are being added these days. It’s not clear why it’s been so slow to spread. It seems it’s still lacking the necessary critical mass. It’ll be interesting to see how the recent additions of features to it and the changes at Meetup may influence its future.

I am not letting this performance be the sole CT contribution to the noble cause of book-related vanity-stroking blog memes.

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“Tom B,” commenting at Making Light, points us to the Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator, which uses context-free grammar to generate papers, complete with graphs, figures and citations, which can then be submitted to conferences with low or no standards for the papers they accept. Its creators (MIT pranksters) have already succeeded in getting accepted by one conference – if they can raise the money, they intend, Yes Men style, to go there and deliver the paper with straight faces. It seems to me that pranks of this sort (the Atlanta Nights affair also qualifies) have the logic of a reverse Turing test – any conference (or publishing house, or journal, or whatever) which is stupid or unprincipled enough to accept this sort of nonsense is revealing itself to be a fake.

A reminder to CT readers in the DC area: Chris Mooney is giving a talk today at 5pm (Room 602, the Elliott School for International Affairs, 1957 E St, Washington DC) on “Abuses of Science in Politics and Journalism.” – RSVP at cistp@gwu.edu. The talk will preview some of the themes of his forthcoming book, The Republican War on Science, which you can pre-order at Amazon. Blurb for the talk below.

When 48 Nobel Laureates denounce the current administration for abusing and distorting scientific information, we can safely say that the once strong relationship between the scientific community and our political leaders has all but disintegrated. What are the causes of the current crisis? In “Abuses of Science in Politics and Journalism,” science writer Chris Mooney takes on both the politicians who have distorted scientific information, and the media gatekeepers who have too often let them get away with it. On issues ranging from global climate change to the new pseudo-debate over the theory of evolution versus “intelligent design,” he will explain who’s undermining science–and why their strategies are succeeding.