a little at a time, then all at once

I have decided to put this blog on hiatus, at least for awhile. When I started it, I didn't really intend it to be anything more than a goofy outlet for whatever cognitive runoff came to mind while I was working--a natural extension of e-mails I would send out to groups of friends. I didn't think that anyone who wasn't already a friend of mine would read it, and, for that matter, I didn't actually think I would stick with it for more than a week or two.

I certainly did not imagine that having a blog would be a way for me to make many new friends--you know who you are--which has been the single best thing about it.

But then, sometime over the past year or so the audience problem caused by all the different relationships I had with people who were sometimes reading--family, friends, students, colleagues, prospective employers--made it harder for me to write with the same spirit with which I started. I've also sometimes felt like I was morphing into some kind of peculiar jester-statesman for my discipline, which I'll profess to some ambivalence about.

Dealing with troll-commenters has also sapped some of my enthusiasm for blogging, especially as having to turn off anonymous comments has reduced comments from non-trolls as well. (It's strange: I blogged along for quite awhile without comments and not missing them, but once you have them, it's hard to feel the same energy from blogging when their number is sharply reduced.)

In any case, I don't want to be melodramatic about this, especially since given my tendencies toward distracted logorrhea I'll probably be back sooner or later, here or somewhere else. (And especially since last time I proclaimed a hiatus it ended up not being for long.) Even so, it seems opportune to repeat how grateful I am to everyone who has been a supportive reader over the years.

assorted

I have not been blogging steadily lately and will confess to some uncertainty about the future of the JFW enterprise, but, here, let me get you caught up:

• My talk at Yale went all right. I was complimented by a couple people on being willing to present null findings, which is a mixed compliment to receive since of course when I collected the data for the project I wasn't expecting null findings.
• I stayed in the New Haven Lawn Club after my talk at Yale. I was given a key with a giant plastic keychain that said ROOM #8 in huge letters. When I unlocked the door to my room, I saw that someone else's stuff was still there. Then I looked at the door and realized it was room 9 instead of 8. I wonder if the giant keychains were just a ruse to throw people off the trick that the hotel actually had the same key for every room.
• One of the things I did in Cambridge this weekend was go to CSI: The Experience at the Museum of Science. I had fun, but am not sure I would recommend it to anyone else just because most of my fun was from resolutely not sticking to the way the designers intended the exhibition to be done. As one thing: you are given one of three crimes to "solve," do not fall for that. Just do all the stuff for all the crimes, as even if you do not have the little sheets for the other crimes you will have no problem "solving" them as well, and only one of them has an interesting plot twist.
• I am contemplating a hunger strike to call attention to the need for Northwestern sociology to change its front webpage to something more elegant and less busy.
• Obtaining Office 2007 is all that remains for me to have my computer set up so that I don't have any glaring barriers--other than, well, myself--to being productive in my office. (I use Outlook 2007 for work e-mail and OneNote 2007 as my note-taking platform.) It's unclear how protracted a stumbling block this will be--technically my Northwestern machine has an Office 2007 license but Northwestern does not have the Office 2007 media to install it on any machines. Whatever. I'm not happy about it being my ninth week here and still not feeling like I have my basic computer needs set up.
• Hooray for Genarlow Wilson being free! I'll confess that the Jena 6 have failed to rouse much outrage within me, but Wilson: there is the victim of a clear injustice. Added bonus hooray for Wilson saying that he plans not only to go to college but to major in sociology "because I feel like I've been living my major" (story here)
• Following the recommendation of a certain clandestine blogger, I've watched all 50 or so episodes of How I Met Your Mother via iTunes the past few weeks. I'm so surprisingly pleased to see that life can go on after Doogie Howser, MD. I feel somewhat guilty/melancholic about the extent to which I feel empathy with certain aspects of the protagonist given that he is supposed to be 8-9 years younger than me, although not as guilty/melancholic as I do about the extent to which I feel empathy with the 18-year-old girl protagonist of Ghost World.
• Two thumbs up for Ian Ayres' book Super Crunchers. The chapter on all the evidence about the failure of expert qualitative judgment to surpass simple quantitative algorithms will cause one to wonder what purpose is served by having academics spend so much time pouring over junior-search-candidate and graduate-admissions files.
• One-and-a-half-or-so thumbs up for Cass Sunstein's book Infotopia. The chapter on all the evidence about the failure of deliberating groups to surpass the judgment obtained by just averaging individual opinions will cause one to wonder what purpose is served by academics spending so much time discussing issues in faculty meetings (Or, well, it's relatively easy to see various purposes served, but it's less clear how much making better decisions is one of them.)
• Oh, and, further evidence of the vanishing cognizance of wringers from american culture, from ESPN.com: "These guys were put through the ringer," he said from Tampa, Fla. "I think we're ready to make an informed decision." (see previous post on subject here)

planes, trains, automobiles, and beavers

I'm giving a talk at Yale tomorrow. For this, I am taking the first flight out tomorrow to Boston, and then taking the train from Boston to New Haven, so that Friday I can take the train back up to Boston and spend the weekend re-visiting Boston and Cambridge.

I talked to my mother earlier this evening. She was impressed to hear I am giving a talk at Yale. She talked about how proud my grandfather would be if he were alive, that a grandson of his would be flying to the east coast to give a talk at Yale. That cinched the conclusion that I really need to wear a jacket and tie for this.

Yale asked me for a title months ago, and the result is that I'm talking about a project I thought I would have returned to by now but have not. Really, the talk is going to be two, not-yet-published, conference-length talks spliced together into one colloquium-length talk. I wish I was farther along on the projects in question, but I think the talk will go okay if I am not too exhausted from the lack of sleep and traveling. Also, having the research be not what I am working on right now means that I will probably be less adroit in answering any questions than I might otherwise be.

Unrelated: A friend of mine is looking for apartments and saw an ad for an 8th floor unit in a building that a rate-your-apartment service online had a report of some "small rodent" problem. She wondered whether a building with a rodent problem could have rodents all the way to the 8th floor. I said yes. Correct? I also said the only thing for sure ruled out by the phrase "small rodent" was beavers, since beavers are the largest rodent. However, Wikipedia says I'm wrong, and that beavers are only the second-largest rodent, after the capybara. So, question 2: if somebody complained on a rate-your-apartment site about a beaver infestation problem, would an eighth floor unit be safe?

correlation, or causality?

Above is a graph of the predicted probabilities over the past year of Barack Obama being the Democratic nominee for president, as available on intrade.com. The red line corresponds to when I officially endorsed Obama on this weblog.

my very slow adventures settling in, virtual edition

Today, I switched my professional webpage so as to list my Northwestern affiliation rather than my Harvard/Wisconsin one. I had forgotten all about this until an NU student apologetically sent a message to my GMail account, saying said she couldn't actually find my NU e-mail address anywhere online.

I am still deciding whether to move my professional webpage from jeremyfreese.com to jeremyfreese.org or jeremyfreese.net. Opinions welcome. I would set up a blogpoll if I had the energy for it right now.

One of Northwestern's staff, meanwhile, asked me either to send a photo of myself for the webpage, or to set up a time to have one taken. I've been avoiding it because their faculty page does something strange with the photos that makes a large percentage of them look like the resolution or aspect ratio is inappropriate. I am unphotogenic enough that I don't need technical deficiencies making my visage more unsightly.

one little boy detective playing a pc game; before long it was morning, and then he just felt lame

Out of some perverse desire to screw up any hope of getting my sleep onto a proper schedule, I was up until almost 3 last night finishing a computer game, And Then There Were None, based on the Agatha Christie novel. I hadn't played a PC game in several years (indeed, I'm not sure I have since graduate school), but I was intrigued by it because back in junior high I read all of Agatha Christie's novels. I was curious how one would adapt And Then There Were None into a game, especially since the box promised the game was not compromised if you'd already read the book--it was the world's all-time best-selling mystery novel, and still is if you refuse to acknowledge that the first Harry Potter book is a mystery novel.

As a sociological aside, And Then There Were None has its title because the American publishers in 1940 chose not to bring it out under it's original UK title, Ten Little [N-Words]. (That title is based on a nursery rhyme that is central to the plot.) An American paperback in 1964 used the name that had been used by an earlier play, Ten Little Indians. Current versions of the paperback apparently omit the "Indians" as well and go with "Soldiers." The game I was playing used "Sailor Boys."

The game does indeed have a different ending than the book. I used online hints liberally, because there was no way I was giving this a week or whatever of my life. As a result of these hints, I was able to solve a series of puzzles that first had me break a code to open a secret passage to an underground cavern, then take a raft ride to an abandoned village, then build a giant parachute to try to fly off the island, and then find a buoy at sea with a secret German radio beacon. All this, in turn, turned out to be absolutely irrelevant to the solving the murder or anything else with how the game ends.

The game was sold as a Double Mystery Pack, along with Murder on the Orient Express. It promises "an all-new surprise ending." Murder on the Orient Express is one of the two Christie novels known especially for its distinctive solution, the other being The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. My suspicion looking at the materials was that they were going to trade the ending of Murder on the Orient Express with the ending for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I'm not sure I'm going to play through the game to find out if I'm right, though.

i am trying to imagining the sioux city officials response when the faa told them, 'don't want SUX? how about GAY?'

From AP [HT: MS]:

SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) — City leaders have scrapped plans to do away with the Sioux Gateway Airport's unflattering three-letter identifier — SUX — and instead have made it the centerpiece of the airport's new marketing campaign.

The code, used by pilots and airports worldwide and printed on tickets and luggage tags, will be used on T-shirts and caps sporting the airport's new slogan, "FLY SUX." It also forms the address of the airport's redesigned Web site — http://www.flysux.com.

Sioux City officials petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to change the code in 1988 and 2002. At one point, the FAA offered the city five alternatives — GWU, GYO, GYT, SGV and GAY — but airport trustees turned them down.

Although I bet they would sell more "FLY GAY" t-shirts than they will FLY SUX.

in case I was under any delusions that graduate school was something other than a very long time ago

Jay uses the example in his sociology class of Radiohead letting fans choose how much to pay for their new album and discovers that no one in his class appears to have heard of them.

Completely unrelatedly, an unusually kind-spirited friend of mine recently had occasion where she was supposed to speak extemporaneously for a few minutes about her "least favorite celebrity." She ended up drawing a blank. I told her that if I had been me, I would have done Paul McCartney (see, e.g., here or here). We then decided that maybe this wasn't a good idea, given that the task was only to speak briefly and that there was some incentive not to come across as a raving lunatic during that time.

academic freedom doesn't mean very much if it doesn't extend to stuff we don't like

I belong to a perhaps dwindling group of academics who self-identify as liberal but also believe that it is a sad day whenever a fellow academic loses a job for saying something out loud that they genuinely believe. I was proud when UW-Madison went to the mat on behalf of an adjunct professor who believes that the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy. I was sad when Ward Churchill was fired for plagiarism charges that never would have been pursued had he not made an abhorrent comparison between 9/11 victims and lackeys of the Nazi regime. So, no, I'm not prancing with joy around my office because James Watson has been suspended from his administrative responsibilities at Cold Springs National Laboratory--although that's better than his being suspended from his affiliation there entirely, which was the initial report I read.* (It remains to be seen whether there will be a push to rename the school named after him.)

Part of the media coverage on the Watson episode has included bringing up past statements of his as evidence of some putatively larger pattern of despicable speech. I'm intrigued by the very first example that CNN's stories keep using:

In 1997, Britain's Sunday Telegraph quoted Watson as saying that if a gene for homosexuality were isolated, women who find that their unborn child has the gene should be allowed to have an abortion.

Obviously, I believe that women should not choose to abort a fetus because of some indication that the child was otherwise going to grow up to be gay. But, I thought the whole point of bumper stickers like "Keep Your Laws Off Of My Body" and "If You Don't Like Abortion Don't Have One," is that my belief about what a woman should choose, at least in the first trimester, is irrelevant for whether a woman should be allowed to choose for herself whether to have an abortion or not. It's not exactly the same to say that women should have the right to choose, except for a couple of reasons that we have decided are morally abhorrent, in which case she should be compelled to carry the child.

How exactly would we enforce that, anyway? I take it as obviously infeasible to give women information but prevent them from acting upon it, yet still allow them otherwise to choose to abort their fetus for unspecified other reasons. "It's not because he has the gay gene, honest! I just changed my mind, is all." So presumably what would need to be done is to outlaw the screening test, at least until whatever gestational point women no longer have an unrestricted right to an abortion. Even if the screening test was relatively straightforward and involved genetic information really only relevant to sexual orientation, I'm unsure how I would feel about saying the mother has no right to this information, but given the multiple effects of genetics and how whatever genetic information implication in sexual orientation might also be relevant for other traits, it seems even more suspect to me to endorse withholding this information.

Incidentally, I don't actually think there would be much of a market for aborting fetuses because they have some elevated risk of being gay, or even if there was some combination of genes that for sure would lead a child to be gay (note that the possiblility that genetic configuration X results in a gay adult is not equivalent to saying all gay adults have genetic configuration X). Abortion based on the sex of the child, meanwhile, may be a different matter.

* The idea that academic freedom does not extend to retaining leadership posts is the only way I can feel comfortable with what happened to Larry Summers at Harvard.

yen for ham fighting

To ask why I would be looking at the Wikipedia entry for "Professional Baseball in Japan" is to fundamentally misunderstand how I use Wikipedia, but anyway here is a quote from it:

For almost 30 years, until 1906, a game could be viewed freely, as it was considered shameful to take money for doing something the players liked.

Granted, of course all sorts of people do not like their jobs, but it's interesting to imagine making a living and enjoying your job being mutually exclusive as a normative matter.

Speaking of Japanese baseball, I still remember when someone told me that the Nippon Ham Fighters are to be read as "The Fighters for the Nippon Ham corporation" rather than "The Ham Fighters of Nippon."

it's seems wrong that something with a 31.8% chance of not happening should feel like a foregone conclusion, but it does

Current market-based estimates of the probability of candidates winning the 2008 Democratic nomination:

Clinton: 68.6%
Gore: 11.5%
Obama: 11.2%
Edwards: 3.5%

So, Obama has fallen behind someone who has given no indication of running for President. It's becoming harder to imagine what that 1 in 3 scenario would be under which Clinton does not win the nomination.

I am no longer as pessimistic about Clinton's chances of winning the general election, although I'm not sure if this is just me being lulled into denial about how nasty the Republican negative campaigning against her is going to be.

Prediction markets, incidentally, have consistently failed to reflect the idea that Clinton faces a particular disadvantage over other Democratic candidates should she get the nomination. So while people such as myself like to opine that idea, it doesn't have traction among anyone willing to put money where their mouth is.

alas, poor bucky

Via Tom, a story by Madison's alternative newspaper here is enough to make a former UW faculty member melancholy about what UW has to contend with in the Wisconsin legislature. Some selections:

Explaining [State Rep.] Nass' 2005 push to make faculty follow codes of conduct, including not making "anti-American" statements, Mikalsen says, "Part of the issue is we have foreign-born professors. Those professors say things."

[...]

Last year, Nass became chair of the Assembly's Colleges and Universities Committee, which oversees the entire UW System. As the UW's foremost critic, he made good on his reputation, joining his GOP colleagues in the Assembly in backing major cuts to specific UW programs and an overall budget that would, over the next two years, force the System to make $120 million in cuts.

Asked how he chose specific cuts, Nass gives a vague answer about looking for ways to reduce spending. It's Mikalsen who responds: "We know where they're hiding the money. We're able to go after line items."

[...]

Among the cuts proposed by Republicans: 17 administrative positions (which Nass considers "duplicative"); 25% of the UW's communications and marketing staff; and $4 million from a special fund to retain "high-demand" faculty. [I presume this is the same fund that was just created to try to help staunch the exodus of midcareer-faculty-with-mobility-options from Madison.] In the capital budget, the Assembly has also eliminated funding for new student dormitories and student unions.

Sigh.

bull

I haven't been feeling very bloggy lately. It hasn't been due to my being a tornado of productivity on professional fronts. Indeed, between moving, getting settled in, having a friend visit, and dealing with a post-all-that malaise, mid-August to mid-October has been the least productive two month period for me since graduate school. All this is further evidence that blogging and professional productivity have this curious curvilinear relationship for me: my less productive times professionally correspond blog-wise to the times when I am posting (relatively) little or a lot.

This past week, I finally switched my e-mail from forwarding from my Northwestern to my Wisconsin account to the reverse. Then today, I switched it back again. I'm having a couple of different problems with Northwestern's e-mail servers. My hope is that these will move toward being resolved when I have a desktop machine running Outlook in my office. I worked out the specs on my computer with staff here on July 17. I've been here since the first week of September. Last week the machine finally arrived, and now I'm waiting for computing staff to install the software. The cause of the delay in getting a machine is not entirely clear to me, other than that the problem was in getting the order actually placed and not with Dell filling the order and shipping it out. Anyway, suffice it to say that this has one more week to resolve itself before I officially Flip Out.

The computing problems are perhaps the most emblematic way I've let myself be thwarted by things from getting off to the best start work-wise here at Northwestern. Accordingly, this afternoon I am writing a little document to myself "Motivational Bull" to articulate my short- and medium-term priorities and try to get myself more oriented toward action rather than whingeing around in my head.* I got the phrase "Motivational Bull" from an earlier post by Chris. Looking back at that now, I realize that he might have meant "bull" in the sense of "bull[bother]". I thought he had meant it like a papal bull--a motivational edict to the self--and thought that was a felicitious and inspiring turn of phrase.

* If I could make four changes to Standard American English, they would be: (1) To make the word "whingeing" commonplace, (2) To make "y'all" standard and free of Southern connotation, (3/4) and to adopt the Australian preferences of "potato gems" for "tater tots" and "fairy floss" for "cotton candy."

blink

Prompted by, of all things, a colleague, I have resumed playing 5-minutes-per-side Scrabble with random strangers over the Internet (user jfreese on ISC). No offense, but you probably don't want any part of me at 5-minutes-per-side Scrabble. I'm much better at it than the regular 25-minutes-per-side Scrabble, or, more accurately, I'm less worse at 5-minutes vs. 25-minutes than most players are. Equivalently, having five times as much time to think about one's moves doesn't benefit me nearly as much as it benefits other people. I cannot shake the sense that this fact bespeaks something more general, but I'm not sure exactly what it is. I suspect it's not flattering.

BTW, as far as I can tell, three things separate intermediate from novice players from Scrabble:

1. The mental default is to try to score in two directions (if a triple word score square is not involved). For this, obviously, it helps the more 2- and 3-letter words you know.

2. The mental default is to look for a bingo whenever an S- or blank- is on one's rack, keeping them on the rack otherwise unless one has a quite good play. (With 5 minute, where one has no time to ponder, I don't even contemplate using a blank tile for anything other than a bingo until it's the end of the game.)

3. The player very much takes into account the tiles left on one's rack when making a play. I might overthink this in longer games, actually, which may be part of the reason I don't improve as much if given more time.

the five things i hate most (not in order)

1. Wicker furniture
2. Coconut
3. Bats
4. War criminals or SPSS (tied)
5. The New York Yankees

The Yankees are six outs away from being out of the playoffs. My hopes are up, and yet I have this dismal, accursed feeling like they will escape this peril and continue to torment me.

Malcolm Gladwell once compared rooting for the Yankees to rooting for Wal-Mart against a mom-and-pop-store. This is the single truest thing Malcolm Gladwell has ever written.

Update, 10:32pm: Only three outs left. Please, please.

Update, 10:34pm: Jeter pops up. Two outs left. Please-please-please-please-please.

Update, 10:36pm: Abreu hits a home run. Cleveland's lead down to two runs. Bother!

Update, 10:39pm: Rodriguez flies out. One out left. Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.

Update, 10:41pm: Strike out! O, happy day! Happy day! Better than a chocolate malt with extra malt!

muncholesen by proxy

ESPN.com story about a woman who "possibly" has fabricated stories of hitting 16 holes-in-one in six months:

She's practically a neophyte, new to the game five years ago, and now at age 47 has reported more holes-in-one in six months than most PGA Tour players make in a career. By one count, she did the 16 in 118 rounds this year. That comes to a hole-in-one once every 30 swings on par 3s, a rate of success that causes Dean Knuth, creator of the U.S. Golf Association's Slope Rating System and a Golf Digest contributor, to blurt this assessment: "That's impossible." David Boyum is a math guy with a Harvard Ph.D. and co-author of What the Numbers Say. He puts the odds of Gagne's feat at "1 in 2,253,649,101,066,840, 000,000,000,000,000, 000,000."

Update: The golfer has posted a maniacal response to the story on her blog.

even without the special scatologically-themed exhibit...

Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry is substantially cooler than the don't-get-me-wrong-it's-cool-in-its-own-right Boston Museum of Science. Regarding feces of a more masculo-bovine sort, I wanted a photo of this quote because I thought it was resonant with my complaint about the American Sociological Association having as its most recent conference theme "Is Another World Possible?":



(The complaint being that, as rapid and thoroughgoing as innovation takes place in our society, it takes a remarkably narrow perspective to be able to see the world as mired in the kind of stasis that would lead someone to ask if a different world was possible. Then again, the conference logo suggests that sociology's dream is to encase our existing world in one made of cold, gray stone, which I would agree would require a special conference just to figure out if it is even possible, especially since the logo also appears to advocate tilting our planet 90 degrees upon its axis before placing it in the stone case.)

Other things you can do at the Museum of Science include walking inside a model of the heart, using a computer to try to make your own clone, and playing an alpine ski video game (granted, I didn't follow what the connection to science or industry was for the last game):



If only it had a special laser hair restoration exhibit.

turns out all along that pi was just a hip shorthand for 'pisces'

So, I have an immediate answer whenever the paparazzi ask what most puzzles me about the gender I am not: "The whole horoscope thing." Of course, I understand that there are many women who reject horoscopes entirely, but still both personal experience, survey data, and perusal of differences in women's and men's magazines all indicate a much greater affinity for horoscopes among women than men.

Last night I was in Barnes and Noble and saw Danica McKellar's Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail. McKellar was Winnie on The Wonder Years. The book is supposed to help girls become interested in math. When the cover promised "horoscope inside!," I thought it was a joke, but, no, there is a section where she consults with an astrologer for a section about how the different astrological signs correspond to different math personalities.

The book cover also promises to answer "do you still have a crush on him?", but I didn't look to see what math it uses to determine that.

BTW, also in Barnes and Noble, a friend and I stood completely engrossed at the graphics novel table for a half hour reading the entirety of Robot Dreams, a book about a dog who wants a friend and so builds a robot, which he then takes to the beach where tragedy ensues. I think I'm going to go back and buy it for my coffee table collection.

inside the sociologists' studio

I'm on the schedule to speak at the proseminar Northwestern has for its first-year graduate students. According to the e-mail, in addition to discussing research projects, thoughts about graduate school, and perspective on the profession of sociology, professors will also be asked to answer the following questions (apparently inspired by the show Inside the Actors' Studio, which I've never seen):

1. What is your favorite aspect of sociology?
2. What is your least?
3. What turns you on [creatively, spiritually or emotionally] about your work?
4. What turns you off?
5. Do you have a “side profession” that you dabble in other than sociology?
6. What advice would you give to your “younger grad school self” if you could go back in time?
7. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

I think that for #7, my answer is just: "No worries, mate." (Not only for the implied eternal benefit, but also because it would vindicate my theory that God is Australian.)

am i the only one who did not know this?

When you snap your fingers, almost all of the snapping sound comes from the contact of your middle finger with your palm, not from the release of your middle finger from your thumb. (If there is anyone else who was unaware of this, you can block your middle finger from hitting your palm to confirm that this is so.)

overheard (or, i know this much is pru)

(the Prudential building in Boston and the building next to it that one of my friends thinks is supposed to look like a chess queen)

"That the Pru and the building next to it are supposed to look like the King and Queen from a chess set (far right in this picture) -- did you make that up? I've twice mentioned this idea to other people and they didn't believe me."
"You were the one who told that to me. Seriously."
"No way! You were totally the one who told me. You are always mixing me up with other people. Totally."
"I have no idea who told me this if you didn't. I certainly don't vouch for it being true. I didn't even believe it when you told me about it."
"That's so weird. I didn't believe you when you told me about it either."