by Kieran Healy on November 20, 2004
Over at “Brian Leiter’s blog”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/ the Stanley brothers, “Jason”:http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jasoncs and “Marcus”:http://www.weatherhead.cwru.edu/faculty/faculty.cfm?id=5208 are guest blogging about Philosophy and Economics. Marcus “writes”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/economics_scien.html:
bq. I wonder if there are some commonalities between the desire to be “technical” or “scientific” that one sees in economics and some of the things Jason is posting about in philosophy. It seems to me that the internal academic war between “continental” humanism and “Anglo-American” empiricism has impacted a lot of different disciplines …
The internal narratives of Anglo-American philosophy and modern economics see their paradigm emerging at almost the same time. In economics, it’s the “marginal revolution”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_economics inaugurated by Jevons, Menger and Walras from 1871 or so. In philosophy, it’s the publication of Frege’s “Begriffsschrift”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begriffsschrift in 1879 that ushers in the modern era.
Like the idea of the Industrial Revolution or the Enlightenment, transformative events like these are both immediately appealing (hence their status as canonical moments in the field) and hard to pin down definitively (hence the big literature by historians and sociologists of these disciplines arguing about them). But it’s interesting on its face that they occurred at similar times. These events also immediately show that the notion of an Anglo/Continental Science/Humanism split is a tricky one to defend, seeing as Frege was German and only 1/3 of the Marginal Revolutionaries were English. But the stereotypes are so strong that many people think, for example, that the French really never did much mathematical economics.
by John Q on November 20, 2004
by Kieran Healy on November 20, 2004
Mike Hout and some colleagues at Berkeley have a “working paper”:http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/election04_WP.pdf called “The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections”. A “summary”:http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/election04_Sum.pdf is also available as well as the data itself. Hout is a well-respected sociologist, so if he thinks the data for Florida show some anomalies he’s worth listing to. Hout et al try to estimate whether the presence of touch-screen electronic voting made a difference to the number of votes cast for Bush, controlling for various demographic characteristics of the counties as well as the proportion of votes cast for the Republican Presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000. Here’s the punchline:
bq. As baseline support for Bush increases in Florida counties, the change in percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 increases, but at a decreasing rate. Electronic voting has a main, positive effect on the dependent variable. Furthermore, there is an interaction effect between baseline support for Bush and electronic voting, and between baseline support for Bush squared and electronic voting. Support for Dole in 1996, county size, median income, and Hispanic population had no significant effect net of the other effects. Essentially, net of other effects, electronic voting had the greatest positive effect on changin percent voting for Bush from 2000 to 2004 in democratic counties. … Summing these effects for the fifteen counties with electronic voting yields the total estimated excess votes in favor of Bush associated with Electronic Voting; this figure is 130,733.
Hmm. I’m going to go mess around with the data for a while and see what we can see.
*Update*: OK, I’ve looked at the data, and so have others. I think the case is not proven. More below the fold.
*Update 2*: Mike Hout has added a comment below.
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by John Q on November 19, 2004
There’s a story I read somewhere of a judge interrupting an unsatisfactory witness and asking
Are you trying to flaunt your contempt for this court ?
to which the witness replies
Oh, no Your Honour! I’m trying to conceal it.
I was reminded of the story by this
NYT editorial, which accuses a Rhode Island judge of abusing the contempt power to pursue a vindictive campaign against a reporter, Jim Taricani, but then fails to name the judge in question. A one-minute Google search reveals that the judge in question is
Chief U.S. District Judge Ernest Torres Given that it was defending the right of reporters to publish the truth without fear or favor, what exactly did the NYT have in mind here?
by Henry Farrell on November 19, 2004
Duncan Black has it “about right”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/11/self-righteous-versus-scold.html:
bq. The Dems should be going after the techno-lib vote by fighting against the Intellectual Property grab which is currently going on. Give people their porn, their Napster, and their unfettered Tivo. And, yes, I am respectful of genuine intellectual property rights but DMCA, the Mickey Mouse Preservation Act copyright extension and the inevitable progeny of both will soon make it impossible to say or do anything without handing over a license fee.
To which I can only add that the Democrats should be doing this anyway, because it’s the right thing to do. Just because the movie and music industry are ‘our’ plutocrats doesn’t mean that Democratic politicians should be supporting their attempted land grab. One of the few real rays of hope for the modern left is the public domain and Creative Commons movement. The left should be supporting what it’s doing – helping to create a free space for collective and individual endeavour. Handing the strangling cord to entrenched interests probably isn’t good politics; it’s certainly bad policy.
by John Holbo on November 19, 2004
I’m writing about reading right now; a response to a (draft) essay Mark Bauerlein has written about the NEA’s Reading At Risk survey. I’ll quote a bit from Mark:
These findings [steep decline across the board, especially among the young] won’t surprise those who have spent any time in an average college classroom. Professors have always griped about the lassitude of students, but lately the complaints have reached an extreme. English teachers note that it’s getting harder to assign a work over 200 pages. Students don’t possess the habit of concentration necessary to plow through it. Teachers say that students don’t comprehend spelling requirements. Spelling is now the responsibility of spellcheck. Last October at an MLA regional meeting, a panelist who specializes in technical writing observed that while his students have extraordinary computing skills, they have a hard time following step-by-step instructions for an assignment.
I tend to be a sunny optimist in the face of this bad news. First, I assume profs have been grousing extremely about students since forever. (It is such fun I can’t believe any generation of pedagogues has had the will to forego this perk of the job.) Second, I tend to assume that somehow the rich, strange new cognitive shapes young minds assume are all right in their way. Yes, they can’t spell. (I had always assumed Matt used voice recognition software and was dictating his posts. How else to explain his homonym trouble? Matt has a brain like a planet. If he can’t spell, that means spelling can’t be that important.) But mostly I am just so bookish, and everyone I know is, and everyone I grew up with was, and my schools were crammed with bookish teachers and kids clawing after books … I guess I just can’t quite believe that it could be true that less than 50% of the population has read any literature in the last year. (The idea that you can’t assign a 200-page novel in a college class? Preposterous. Can’t be.)
In this vein, Matt Cheney has a fascinating post about teaching Neil Gaiman’s American Gods to high school students. (And Gaiman is duly fascinated.) Matt hits upon the same hard limit as Bauerlein: "I knew that few of my students would ever have read a book of more than 200 pages." But the really interesting and baffling hurdle actually came next.
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by Eszter Hargittai on November 19, 2004
As a follow-up to my recent post about academia and blogging, I have compiled a brief informal survey for academic bloggers, broadly defined to include all academics (any rank) who either read and/or write blogs. Please consider filling it out. It should take no more than five minutes. The material will not result in any scientific publications, it is merely meant as an informal exercise to inform some conversations. I am collecting all information anonymously. I will post a summary of the material on CT at a future date.
UPDATE (Saturday, Nov 27, 2004): I have now closed the survey, thanks to all those who participated.
by Chris Bertram on November 19, 2004
Brian Leiter’s “Philosophical Gourmet”:http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/default.asp report is now out in its latest version.
[UPDATE: I hadn’t noticed that Kieran gets a credit for statistical advice on the front page!]
by Kieran Healy on November 19, 2004
I learned today that Otis Dudley Duncan, sociologist and anatomist of the “American Occupational Structure”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0029036704/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, has died at the age of 83. Duncan was a major figure in mid-20th century sociology, a pioneer in the theory and practice of social measurement, the analysis of stratification, “occupations and prestige”:http://cloud9.norc.uchicago.edu/faqs/prestige.htm, organizations and urbanism. He taught at the “University of Arizona”:http://fp.arizona.edu/soc/ for many years. Bloggers may know his name because — well into his retirement — he was one of the first people to notice and analyze “inconsistencies”:http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/guns/duncan1.html, “errors and omissions”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/guns/files/duncan3.html in John Lott’s claims about defensive gun use.
by Brian on November 18, 2004
“Kai von Fintel”:http://semantics-online.org/blog/2004/11/google_scholar links to one of the newest (and coolest) toys in the toolbox.
bq. “Google Scholar”:http://semantics-online.org/blog/2004/11/google_scholar
It returns academic papers matching a search phrase you look for, ranked by number of citations. Hours and hours of fun to be had!
by Eszter Hargittai on November 18, 2004
I realize this topic has been discussed here (e.g here, here, here, here, here, here) and elsewhere (e.g. Brian Leiter, but also in the mainstream media: e.g. The Guardian, Chicago Tribune) numerous times already. I am bringing it up because I have been asked to speak to a campus-wide audience about academia in a digital world and I have picked as my topic: “Can blogs revive academic debate?” I only have about fifteen minutes to talk and I want to touch upon several points. What better way to prepare for such a talk than to try out some of the ideas on a blog? There are two main points I want to address and thought I’d discuss here a bit. I welcome your feedback. First, I want to talk about blogs as a great medium for debate of all sorts that does not always seem possible in one’s immediate physical surroundings. Second, I would like to consider how the material posted and discussed on blogs relates to published material and whether there is any potential for such contributions to count toward one’s academic achievements and service. I elaborate on the second point below. There seems to be some amount of disagreement in the blogosphere on this issue and I wanted to bring it up for some more discussion.
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by Chris Bertram on November 18, 2004
John Allen Paulos has “a useful piece in today’s Guardian”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1353369,00.html on the meaning of the US election and the tendency people have to draw sweeping conclusions about the US electorate from the numbers:
bq. Excuse my mathematician’s obsession with coin flips, but consider this. There is a large bloc of people who will vote for the Republican candidate no matter what, and a similarly reliable Democratic bloc of roughly the same size. There is also a smaller group of voters who either do not have fixed opinions or are otherwise open to changing their vote.
bq. To an extent, these latter people’s votes (and thus elections themselves) are determined by chance (external events, campaign gaffes, etc).
bq. So what conclusion would we draw about a coin that landed heads two or three times out of four flips (or about a sequence of two or three Democratic victories in the last four elections)? The answer, of course, is that we would draw no conclusions at all.
by John Q on November 18, 2004
Scandals surrounding the Oil-for-Food program and postwar reconstruction in supply contracts, particularly with respect to Halliburton just keep on going. So I thought I’d repost this piece from six months ago, pointing out that it’s silly to try and score political points out of either of these.
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by Chris Bertram on November 18, 2004
I may be the only Timberite who was both able to watch last night’s “Spain–England football”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/internationals/4013477.stm (soccer to you guys) “friendly” international and who also had the inclination to do so. It was a miserable spectacle on nearly all fronts (the only mitigating factor being the brilliance of some of the Spanish passing). There was petulant violence from the England players, especially the child Rooney who was subsituted before he could be red-carded. Rooney threw the black armband he was wearing for Emlyn Hughes to the ground as he left the pitch (a gesture which won’t be forgotten when he visits Anfield next). England’s footballing display was miserably inept, but though I admired the Spanish on the pitch I was willing Jermaine Defoe or Sean Wright-Phillips to score at the end (they didn’t) as every touch of the ball by one of England’s black players was met by loud monkey-chants from every corner of the ground. Anyone who deludedly believes that the population of Europe consists largely of liberal sophisticates would have received an education from last night’s game.
by Ted on November 17, 2004
Most readers will have seen the footage of the American soldier in Fallujah killing an insurgent who was either unconscious or pretending to be unconscious. I’m not prepared to judge the guy, who deserves the presumption of innocence.
If you can’t trust Instapundit citing NewsMax citing ten thousand howler monkeys at Free Republic, who can you trust?
The official citations show Kerry was not awarded the Silver Star “for simply pursuing and dispatching” the Viet Cong. In fact, the killing is not even mentioned in two of the three versions of the official citation (see “supporting documents” at right.) The citations – based on what Elliott wrote up at the time – dwell mostly on Kerry’s decision to attack rather than flee from two ambushes, including one in which he led a landing party.
The longest of the citations, signed by Vice Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, commander of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam, describes Kerry as killing a fleeing Viet Cong with a loaded rocket launcher. It says that as Kerry beached his boat to attack his second set of ambushers, “an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from Patrol Craft Fast 94 and fled. Without hesitation, Lieutenant (junior grade) KERRY leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hooch, and killed him, capturing a B-40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber.”
Two other citations omit any mention of the killing. One was signed by Admiral John J. Hyland, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, and the other was signed by the Secretary of the Navy. Both those citations say Kerry attacked his first set of ambushers and that “this daring and courageous tactic surprised the enemy and succeeded in routing a score of enemy soldiers.” Later, 800 yards away, Kerry’s boat encountered a second ambush and a B-40 rocket exploded “close aboard” Kerry’s boat. “With utter disregard for his own safety, and the enemy rockets, he again ordered a charge on the enemy, beached his boat only ten feet away from the VC rocket position, and personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy.” In these citations there is no mention of enemy casualties at all. Kerry was cited for “extraordinary daring and personal courage . . . in attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire.”