My (Not So) Inner Nerd

Combing the internets doing "research" I happened across a couple of interesting sites relating to sociological research. That is, if you find questions of statistical reasoning and organizational behavior interesting.

• orgtheory.net is a blog focusing on organization researchers from across many disciplines. Although much of it is over my head, some of the discussions are pretty engaging.


• Social Science Statistics Blog which identifies it's mission: "This blog makes public the hallway conversations about social science statistical methods and analysis from the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and related research groups." Today, they look at statistical analyses of the death penalty as a deterrent of crime.

What? You don't find those interesting? Can't say I am too surprised. However, for a great take on the statistical absurdity of Republican presidential primary polls, see this article at Slate.

A New Ronald Reagan?

I was going to write something about Fred Thompson being compared as the next Ronald Reagan and how faulty that comparison is. However, Richard Cohen at the Washington Post has been there, and done that.

Watching the video from Fred Thompson's appearance on Jay Leno last night, something else impressed me about Thompson. The man is so much more measured and thoughtful than any of the current Republican nominees. In response to Leno's question about Iran, Thompson responds:

Iran's a difficult problem, and, you have to have all of the facts before you make a final decision about it. We've got a lot of friends among the Iranian people. The Iranian economy is in bad shape. If we handle it right, and use our intelligence services and our propaganda possibilities correctly, part of that problem might take care of itself, so let's not get ahead of ourselves on that.

While I may disagree with the ways in which he would "use our intelligence services and our propoganda possibilities," this is an incredibly measured response that really looks at the issue itself and doesn't buy into the cheap one-liner. Compare this to Mitt Romney's ignorance about basic facts on Iraq, Rudi Giuliani's revisionist 9/11, and even John McCain, who is by all accounts the foremost of all the candidates on foreign policy is making light of bombing Iran. Of course Thompson has the benefit of not actually being in the race and not having to demean himself by hand-raising straw polls, as he points out, but the amazingly stark contrast between his position and all of the other Republican candidates (except Ron Paul), is noticeable.

What I find interesting is that there is a similar movement afoot in the Democratic party to get Al Gore to run. On their website, the folks at Draft Gore call Al Gore "The Conscience of the Democratic Party" in no small part because he is eloquent and intelligent and, except for his concern about global warming, is not really an activist-type politician. I discussed this more in relation to Eugene Robinson's column.

I don't think that Thompson and Gore are the same and are, in fact, less alike than Thompson is from Reagan; but, what I do think is that Cohen, or even Robinson, glaze over the underlying sense from the strength of these two candidates. People are tired of politics, not for politics' sake — Al Gore has certainly been talking about politics little "p" and big "P" the past couple of years, but the deeply partisan "horse-race" politics reported by CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, NYT, etc. The left wants President Bartlet and the right wants D.A. Arthur Branch. Why? Because these are the consummate thoughtful, intelligent decision-makers who put the country and law in front of themselves; I mean, Aaron Spelling and Dick Wolf created the characters precisely because that is what people want in their elected leaders — and is also precisely why they are fictional.

What is not so fictional, however, is the mess that our country is in. We have a disaster in Iraq, a dismal world opinion, a global climate problem, millions of uninsured citizens, personal and national debt problems and a failing infrastructure that is going to need serious investment in the next twenty years. Al Gore to the left and Fred Thompson to the right have created themselves (both, I should say through the use of Hollywood), to be the characters that we all create in our minds and recreate (through those Hollywood images) to put their face on those characters so that we imagine them as type-cast for the role of President. I'm not exactly sure what this postmodern mirror means in terms of real politics, policies or the health of our country, but looking at the field I can honestly say that we could do a lot worse than Al Gore and Fred Thompson as the race in 2008.

Absolutely Astounding

These pictures by photographer Chris Jordan are amazing... I am only going to copy one series here, but the whole thing is well worth a look.

Cell Phones, 2007
60x100"

Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.

Partial zoom:

Detail at actual size:

Check out the rest of them!

More Attorney-General Corruption - No, Not That Attorney General

It appears that, along with the suspension of basic civil liberties and wrong-headedness about the "War on Terror", the U.S. and Britain share corrupt attorneys general. The Guardian reported that the attorney general of Britain, Lord Peter Goldsmith knew of bribes being paid by the corporation BAE to Bush family friend, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, but that Lord Goldsmith intentionally misled an international anti-corruption agency, the OECD.

What is more, Britain claimed not to let the OECD know about the payments because of "national security" concerns. Now, what, might you ask, are these "national security" concerns that would prevent the government of Britain admitting that they are paying off the royal family of Saudi Arabia? I'll let Tony Blair explain:

Standing beside George Bush, a close family friend of former US ambassador Prince Bandar, Mr Blair said it would have "wrecked" the relationship with Saudi Arabia if he had allowed investigations to go on. "This investigation, if it had gone ahead, would have involved the most serious allegations and investigation being made of the Saudi royal family," he said.

"My job is to give advice as to whether that is a sensible thing in circumstances where I don't believe the investigation would have led to anywhere except to the complete wreckage of a vital interest to our country."

Yes, that is right &mdash "national security" now includes protecting information about bribes paid to the Saudi royal family. I thought that we were in this entire war to advance freedom and democracy to the Middle East? So "national security" is used to protect a monarchy in the Middle East for no other reason than we don't want to embarrass the Crown Prince by creating an uproar because British tax dollars are going to pay into the sultan's slush fund.

Of course, Prince Bandar, in a statement to The Guardian, has denied that these were bribes, and through his "London solicitors", Herbert Smith says:

Whilst Prince Bandar was an authorised signatory on the accounts any monies paid out of those accounts were exclusively for purposes approved by MODA.

This is the exact problem in dealing with royal families and not democracies: The prince can withdraw money, by himself, anytime he wants to!!!.

What also truly amazes me about this second article in The Guardian is how careful they are to document exactly what they did in order to get Prince Bandar's statement and the editorial decisions that were made regarding the decision to go to print without any statement by the prince. To me, this is an amazing contrast to the way that I imagine American newspapers would handle the same situation. I imagine that the American media, whether the NYT or Fox News, would impugn the credibility of any person who dared challenge their authority and sensationalize the fact that they were criticized. Rather, The Guardian is simply matter of fact: we asked for a statement from this person on this occasion, that person on another occasion, informed the prince this is what we were going to do in order to give him one more chance and then we made the decision to go to print for x, y and z reasons. And, after he released a statement, we printed it and explained why the allegations made in it against our paper were false, using the evidence cited. Amazing.

On Hipsters and Yuppies

I am sure that many of you could guess that coming to New York has been, in many ways, a huge culture shock. I am not one of those midwesterners that came to New York and was shocked by everything in the city; I mean, I did grow up outside of D.C. and I study cities for heaven's sake^[1]. I think that one of the most surprising things that I have found is the hipster culture. Now, this is something that I knew existed (because Ann Arbor tries its best to be a miniature New York), but as is true with most things about culture shock, one can intellectually know that something exists and, yet, still not be prepared for the living with it on a daily basis.

Luckily, the New York magazine Time Out which, as far as I can tell is marketed to the young, urban professional that doesn't want to be considered a "yuppie" but probably is one, has done a feature issue on hipsters. The folks at TONY (get it: Time Out New York, how hip &mdash err, I mean &mdash not hip of them) are even kind enough to provide a quiz: What's your hipster dirtbag quotient? They provide this so that their readers can find out if they are a hipster and warn: "Imagine the horror. You've cheered this issue only to discover you're one of them. Find out."

No joke, when I took this quiz, I was informed of the following:

What's a Moz?
We hate to be the ones that have to break this to you, but unless khaki-colored, baggy cargo pants, Yanni and a pleasant disposition come back into style, you're consigned to a life of unremarkable blandness. We're sorry.

Now, I could choose to be offended as I sit in my khaki-colored cargo shorts (no joke), but, then I decided that I am not going to be concerned about it because these people are soooooo far out of my league, I actually am not even cool enough to get the joke because I am actually sitting here typing and wondering, What exactly is a Moz? (any help in comments would be greatly appreciated) So, I guess that we have it, I am officially not cool enough for New York.

Wasting enough time on the internets, I do not have time to read the entire issue, I am lucky that I found this article first, because the author is kind enough to explain to me what a hipster is:

Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity. Those 18-to-34-year-olds called hipsters have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. Hungry for more, and sick with the anxiety of influence, they feed as well from the trough of the uncool, turning white trash chic, and gouging the husks of long-expired subcultures—vaudeville, burlesque, cowboys and pirates.

Of course, hipsterism being originally, and still mostly, the province of whites (the pastiest of whites), its acolytes raid the cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity in the pot. Similarly, they devour gay style: Witness the cultural burp known as metrosexuality. As the hipster ambles from the thrift store to a $100 haircut at Freemans Sporting Club, these aesthetics are assimilated—cannibalized—into a repertoire of meaninglessness, from which the hipster can construct an identity in the manner of a collage, or a shuffled playlist on an iPod.

I may just not be cool enough, but it seems (from the quiz, this one article, and the headlines of the other articles) like the entire TONY issue is devoted to this very irony. I mean, I think that what hipsters love to do most is make fun of other hipsters.

Hipster 1: [Affecting disaffected tone] I can't believe how many hipsters are moving into Greenpoint.

Hipster 2: [Nonchalantly] I know, pretty soon it is going to be exactly like Park Slope.

Hipster 1: Didn't you used to live in the Slope?

Hipster 2: Yeah, but that was sooooo four years ago before all the hipsters moved in.

So, in the end, like most postmodernists, the editors of TONY who pastich pastiche and find authenticity in nothing because everything is authentic. I find it truly frustrating at times and believe that all potential criticisms which the hipsters try and destabilize through irony are simply left intact like:

The hipster who keeps up with the antics of Hilton, Lohan and Spears does so sneeringly, and her knowingness introduces one degree of difference between herself and the Midwestern housewife who buys Us Weekly at the Wal-Mart checkout line.

On the other hand, I could live with no one but the urban professionals who swear that everyone is there to serve them and only them. If you want to know about this group of people in our neighborhood, for whom I have so much disdain I must refrain from writing because it would simply turn into a rant, listen/read this story from Marketplace about the changes that corner-store merchants have made to keep pace with the changing socio-demographics of the neighborhood. At the end, the final woman interviewed (who I can only guess shops at either the Park Slope Food Coop or at Wal-Mart says,

The fact that they have so many low-end products that totally don't appeal to us make me feel like they're like, in this transition of trying to serve two different populations of people.

How dare those store owners who have been able to put together a living in this neighborhood and trying to live the American dream sell those [gasp] low-end products! I mean, they need to decide &mdash poor people like them or rich people like us

Given the choice, give me the hipsters.

---

[1] I must also acknowledge that it is nice to actually live in a city, considering this fact. And, honestly, I think that I had much less culture shock moving from A² to NYC than I did from Houston to A². [return]

Google: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Corporations

Back from vacation, I have spent most of today trying to get my "home office" (I know, so bourgeois!) in New York set up so that I can actually start getting some real work done. After talking to my committee member last week and spending the last week on a total vacation, I am ready to start tackling the world of statistics, racial residential segregation and gentrification research (for those who might be interested, I am reading Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class. I will let you know what I think when I finish).

In order to be at all productive three things needed to happen:

1. I needed to clear off my desk so that I would have space to work. This, in turn required that:


2. I put together all of my accounts because most of my desk was covered with old bills, unpaid bills, and an assortment of other types of information that either needed to be shredded or filed to that infamous "someplace safe". This "someplace safe" is generally someplace so safe that even I can't find it later using all of my skills of logical deduction. This, in turn, caused me to realize that:


3. I should probably do something to try and organize my life in some way that is compatible with "telecommuting" six hundred miles to Ann Arbor.

As you can imagine, this is something rather tedious and best left for people who actually like to do things like organize desks (this trait in people has often scared me, even in some of my closest friends). However, seeing as how I do not have a personal assistant, I need to do it myself. In the process, I was trying to figure out the relative merits of using Microsoft Outlook versus Google Calendar. I decided that I will probably end up using Google Calendar and Gmail, but I have two concerns. First, I always manage to lose important information every time I try and shift the system in the way that I do things, either digitally or physically. Second, I also have this concern that suddenly Google is going to decide that they are going to charge for everything that is currently free (for instance, this blog). My two very good friends that work for Google, they assure me that there is no way that this would happen &mdash maybe it is the socialist in me, but I always have my doubts when there is a pool of cash to be earned by corporations. No matter how benevolent they may be.

My concerns aside and with my conflicts of interest noted, I think that Google Calendar is really cool! (NB: and by saying that, you realize how not cool I am). It is awesome that you can have multiple calendars that show up on your own calendar so that you can see what is going on either with groups you are involved with or with friends, family, etc. For instance, E. and I used to have one of those large calendars that hung in our apartment; we were each to write down where we would be, what we would be doing, etc. That way, I could know if E. needed a ride or she could know if I was going to be late on a given evening (I don't know why I would ever have been late). Now, this calendar is a brilliant idea; but, given my comments earlier, you can probably guess how well I did writing in the most up-to-date information. Eventually, we scrapped it due to my lack of organizational ability. But, amazingly enough, the one thing that I have done fairly well is keep an electronic calendar. With Google Calendars, we can each see each other without having to create a shared file network between her computer and mine and everything else that is generally really shitty about Microsoft. Of course, that means overcoming E.'s fears that getting a Google account is one step short of Big Brother reading her e-mail (she is a much better person than I, with an even larger suspicion of corporations than mine).

Of course, that got me thinking about the ways that organizations can use these kinds of tools to reach more members, organize more effectively, share across time and distance, etc. But, I think that I will leave that for a later post. I hear Stata calling...

Braniacs for President (and Columnists) 2008!

To all three loyal readers out there, you may have noticed my hiatus. This past week, I flew to California to attend the wedding of a good friend from college and to spent some time with the parental units since I don't get to see them much seeing as how the entire continent divides us. I have been woefully oblivious of the news except for the Rosie/Elizabeth dust-up on The View (my mom watches the show and is, therefore, intrigued by this broohaha) and the lost whales in the San Fransisco Bay. I don't fault myself too much for being an un-knowledgeable citizen shirking my civil society responsibilities; after all, this is why there is vacation.

But, alas, vacations are not always truly vacations. In the process of waiting for one of my committee members to call me back about a paper that I am writing, I looked up what was going on in the world at the Washington Post. Luckily for me, today is Eugene Robinson's column in the post. For all of you who have never read his work, I believe that he is one of the smartest columnists in America and often writes about stories that other columnists ignore or writes about the more "common sense" angles of stories that other columnists treat as "horse-race" analyses.

Today, Robinson chose to write about the buzz surrounding Al Gore's run for office. Rather than focusing on Al Gore's weight as a factor about whether he would run, Robinson &mdash shock of all shocks &mdash decided to focus instead on his intelligence. I mean why would any one want to focus on that? Unfortunately, because intelligent people will have a difficult time getting elected:

Al Gore has been in town launching his new book, "The Assault on Reason," and you could have predicted the buzz: Is he about to jump into the race? What you probably wouldn't have predicted is the counter-buzz that Gore, poor fellow, is just too ostentatiously smart to be elected president.

While the entire column is worth the read, here is the part that I found particularly important:

Leave aside the question of whether Gore is even thinking about another presidential run, or how he would stack up against the other candidates. I'm making a more general point: One thing that should be clear to anyone who's been paying attention these past few years is that we need to go out and get ourselves the smartest president we can find. We need a brainiac president, a regular Mister or Miss Smarty-Pants. We need to elect the kid you hated in high school, the teacher's pet with perfect grades.

When I look at what the next president will have to deal with, I don't see much that can be solved with just a winning smile, a firm handshake and a ton of resolve. I see conundrums, dilemmas, quandaries, impasses, gnarly thickets of fateful possibility with no obvious way out. Iraq is the obvious place he or she will have to start; I want a president smart enough to figure out how to minimize the damage.

Huh, what an interesting concept...It would also seem to apply to columnists in the nation's papers of record &mdash too bad Eugene Robinson doesn't have the same notoriety as Maureen Dowd or Thomas Friedman.

UPDATE:While Maureen Dowd certainly deserves much criticism, I must also be fair and acknowledge that she has a very intellegent and well-written column [sub. required] this week on why President Bush can no longer be trusted on the war in Iraq.