Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Zombies - The next "soccer moms"

Or not. It does appear, however, that zombies have entered the sphere of social commentary, as a modest horde (15 is a pretty modest horde) stormed American Idol tryouts recently to protest the rotting influence of television and a group of Canadian zombies wandered around Montreal early last month. It was unclear what statement they were making. I expect a throng of zombies to assail Bush's vacation home in Crawford next.

These and other zombie-centric public displays are apparently part of a "zombie renaissance" sweeping the nation. I imagine it can be traced back to 28 Days Later, followed within the last couple of years by several other higher profile zombie movies. I bought the four-disc Dawn of the Dead Ultimate Collection recently and have been watching the different versions of the film with audio commentaries, including mentions of zombie mischief by extras during filming. One of my favorites: while shooting in the Monroeville Mall at night, zombie extras amused themselves by taking photo booth pictures of themselves in full makeup, then replacing the sample photos on the side of the booth with their own to be seen the next day when the mall reopened.

The Gorillaz can also be counted among the latter-day zombie enthusiasts, explaining the frequent zombie references on their albums in this interview with Wired.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Market discipline in punditry

I noticed over the past couple of days that people are making some high-profile bets on their predictions, first in global warming, now in oil prices. Maybe this will make some headway toward imposing some market discipline in the punditry industry.

Getting out of the house


As I mentioned before, I saw Bruce Campbell and his new movie, Man with the Screaming Brain, last week. Apart from that, I attended the APWBWGTTD meetup last week, the Braves/Padres game on Friday and Saturday I went to see MF Doom at the Loft, joined by local supervillain Scott S of Messages from the Ether.

Campbell's new movie, his directorial feature debut, is about what you'd expect from the guy who appeared a couple of years ago as an elderly Elvis in Bubba Ho-tep. Faint echoes of B to Z sci-fi artifacts like The Man Without a Body and The Thing with Two Heads are detectable, but its most charming feature is the utterly random plot driven as much by an inexplicably psychotic femme fatale gypsy (does anybody really need a reason to be psychotic?) as by Stacey Keach's mad scientist. It was shot in Bulgaria, as are many of the "made for Sci-Fi Channel" movies like this one. Campbell expressed some frustration with working in Bulgaria during the Q & A, which is a somewhat refreshing change of pace from Charles Band and the folks from Dimension who always rave about the Eastern European locations and crews they depend upon increasingly for cost control purposes.

The best moment of the evening, though, had to be Campbell's rant at the endless stream of dreck coming out of Hollywood in the form of pointless remakes, sequels, and PG-13 horror. The last observation especially hit a chord with the horror audience in attendance, and while there are good movies from the past and present that earn a PG-13 rating, I think Campbell's ire is best exemplified by the miserable product getting wide theatrical release like Boogeyman, Darkness Falls, and They.


I enjoyed the hell out of the MF Doom show, although I think many in the audience weren't used to the standard hip-hop show tradition of starting several hours late. The long delays in this show pushed the limit of that tradition, I must say. Doom himself didn't go on until about 2 AM, after several other guests had rounds including local talents Mobonix and DJ Kool Akiem. Most of the opening MCs were timewasters, but Akiem spun a bunch of real classics, mostly NYC. A lot of Wu Tang, Rakim, KRS, and DJ Premier. No problem there, although he seemed to want to run his set like a seminar, cutting out the track for a few seconds to see if the crowd were reciting along. Doom ripped it when he finally did come out, but I was disappointed that Doom didn't do anything from the forthcoming Dangerdoom album.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

You don't say...

A story in the NYT yesterday says that less than one in four high school graduates taking the ACT this year were prepared in reading comprehension, English, math and science. I can't say I'm surprised, given some of the students who take my upper division courses.

Everybody out of the pool?

With the ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary rating John Roberts "well-qualified" I think it's not inappropriate to start considering what kind of justice Roberts will be. This notwithstanding the repeated calls from Democrats for more documents from the White House relating to Roberts' past work for various presidents. We've seen plenty of materials from his tenure in the OLC under Reagan demonstrating his willingness, even enthusiasm, to recommend very conservative positions on questions of national authority and separation of powers. The Dems aren't looking to enlighten themselves more on Roberts' attitudes as much as they are looking for damaging material in a desperate hope to derail his nomination. I sympathize, but find the claims that senators can't evaluate Roberts without these materials disingenuous. I also think the current White House's reluctance to share materials from Roberts' term in the solicitor general's office has less to do with hiding things about Roberts and more to do with Bush II's general reluctance to release any information about his father's presidency.

All that aside, Tony Mauro asks an important but somewhat obscure question: Will Roberts join the cert pool? The cert pool is the practice of dividing petitions to the Court requesting discretionary review among the clerks of those justices participating in the pool, which right now is everybody except John Paul Stevens. So, while all the other clerks review and write memos about only a portion of the cert petitions, Stevens' four clerks review them all. As I've told my students, if you ever get a chance to be a Supreme Court clerk, don't clerk for Stevens.

If you're bored to tears by this so far, you may not want to

There are some indications that Roberts may not join the pool, as he's been critical of the arrangement in the past. Justice Marshall's papers revealed some internal disquiet with the pool process as well. In essence, the pool limits the number of eyes that gaze upon each petition, increasing the likelihood of cert-worthy petitions being overlooked. The fact that those eyes don't even belong to a justice makes it even more disconcerting.

Many people have speculated on the dramatic decline in the number of cases the Court accepts for review over the last two decades. No one I know of has examined the possible role of the cert pool, but Brennan and Stevens suggest that clerks are more reticent to recommend grants than the justices. It's certainly something worth considering, as there is some evidence that justices themselves tend to become more willing to grant as their length of tenure grows.

Roberts' suggestion of parallel pools and Kennedy's of a "shadow pool" both seem like improvements over the current situation, in which every petition is briefed twice, but most justices see only one memo and the other justice sees only the other (informally, justices may see both I suppose) and the diametric alternative of dissolving the pool so that each justices' clerks brief each petition for their own justice. The goal should be to divide the briefing so that clerks can spend more time reviewing each petition, but to allow for more than one review for each petition to be shared among justices.

Kennedy writes that his suggestion "would impose a slight additional burden," by which I imagine he means a burden on the justices, who must read two memos rather than one, not the additional burden on clerks. The obvious advantage, it seems, is redundancy for the sake of quality control, but I can see another advantage. With two clerks briefing each petition for general consumption, the review process may produce a sense of competition in which the clerks, either individually or as "teams" try to do a better job than others of rooting out meritorious requests. Since most law school exams are full of "spot the issue" questions, it should be something the clerks are used to.

For more details on the buildup, procedurally and politically, to the Roberts confirmation hearings, see the Supreme Court Nominations Blog.

For those who are still with me after all that slog, I saw Bruce Campbell and his new film, The Man with the Screaming Brain the other day. I also got a copy of his new book signed. That book, Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, is something of an autobiographical novel complete with celebrity cameos, Hollywood insiderism and a terrifying race to contain a dreadful virus. I've only skimmed it so far, but it seems a lot like Bret Easton Ellis' new novel Lunar Park, but with more vomiting and fewer pratfalls. No wait, less vomiting and more pratfalls.

Friday, August 12, 2005

Understanding Microbreweries - The Next Great Frontier

I've noticed that David Brooks' latest column, All Cultures are Not Equal, has remained at or near the top of the NYT's most emailed articles and is making the rounds of notable links pages. I can only assume people are anxious to share the latest weak, ridiculous irrelevancy with which Brooks has favored us. After his last column attempting to identify a relationship between two trends he doesn't even conceptually or empirically distinguish from one another, this one offers a series of non sequiturs. The funniest part is that they're wrapped up in a truly hilarious call to service.

That call is for the "18-year-old kid with a really big brain" who will master cultural geography and "understand the forces that will be shaping history for decades to come." I'll return to this later on when I explain the title of this post.

Brooks argues that multiculturalism has prohibited discussion of "national traits" and the relationships between enduring cultural traits and development of various sorts. Suddenly, I felt like I was back in high school, hearing about the evils of cultural equivalence promulgated by pointy-headed academics. As I entered academia, I kept expecting to run into this and other such "gospels" and never have. Maybe if I were in an English department.

I assume Brooks didn't notice the "social capital" explosion in the social sciences and public sphere over the last ten years launched by Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" article in the Journal of Democracy and subsequent book. Putnam's concept is subject to some slippage, but his early work on the development of democratic institutions in Italy is clearly about the persistence and influence of cultural traits. Putnam's work and the responses of other scholars like Theda Skocpol, who stresses civic engagement in large-scale groups instead of the community organizations that Putnam focuses on, has drawn a great deal of attention to these issues.

Returning from 80s episodes of Firing Line to the present, Brooks discusses the increased clustering of people into like-minded communities. Notice that in the middle of this he asserts that back when "many people worked on farms or in factories" they had more in common with one another. Likewise, you'd expect, a lot of those people lived in fairly homogeneous communities, but that doesn't follow for Brooks. Also, the rise of specialization, which you would think would mean that people now work with more people who have different backgrounds and training, is seen as a sign of our divergence from one another.

Now, there is something to the troubling capacity of people to technologically shelter themselves from differing opinions, but I'd be more worried about geographic, neighborhood clustering if I actually knew any of my neighbors. Like a lot of people in urban and suburban America, I know people primarily through work and shared activities, where I meet people of many political, social and cultural persuasions.

A brief trip around the world in which religious radicalism is presented as the core direction of world citizens and we get to the point he's been dancing around: "some nations with certain cultural traits prosper and others with other traits don't." This is reflected in his list of important scholars: Weber, Banfield, Huntington, Harrison, and Sowell. It isn't just about cultures diverging, it's about distinguishing winner cultures from losers. I can recommend some of those scholars (Sowell) more than others (Banfield) while some are interesting (Huntington) and others banal (Harrison). What they share are contentious, sometimes dubious, arguments about the preeminence of successful cultures over failed ones.

Ironically, recent scholar-phenom Jared Diamond has demonstrated that a lot of the things attributed to culture by these types of scholars are actually due to environmental factors. I think Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel is sometimes reductive and could have done a better job of showing how path dependence and often-epiphenomenal cultural developments reinforce environmental differences, but all in all it's a successful rejoinder.

Brooks returns to his pitch for cultural geography, despite the fact that none of the scholars he cites as examples are cultural geographers. I remembered hearing of cultural geography before, unfavorably, so I searched online and discovered that the Journal of Cultural Geography was founded by the creators of Popular Culture Studies at Bowling Green, in an attempt at rebranding. Recent articles in the journal include "Globalization Reconsidered: The Historical Geography of Modern Western Male Attire" and "Microbreweries as Tools of Local Identity". Yeah, teenaged genius, please get cracking on that.

More promising is the field of economic sociology, profiled recently by Virginia Postrel. I read guiding light Mark Granovetter in grad school and have subsequently sampled a good deal of the social network analysis that has resulted. Granovetter's demonstration of the "strength of weak ties", the value of having loose connections with many people, suggests that the breakdown of tight organized connections that Putnam was so worried about might be beneficial individually.

In the meantime, we can hope that Brooks' wunderkind will solve the mystery of globalization and men's clothes.

Step into liquid

The posts at Greencine Daily are often long, but yesterday's was really huge. That or I just noticed it today. Taking in this list of recommended reading, listening and viewing is sort of like gazing out at the unruly ocean, knowing that you haven't the leisure or stamina to do more than wade up to your shoulders (or hips, more likely). I've already blown about an hour just sampling a few things that caught my eye.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Appalling research

I stumbled upon a summary of an article from The Lancet dating from 1998 entitled "Optimum body-mass index and maximum sexual attractiveness" (you can download the article itself in pdf here). The research purports to demonstrate that the Body Mass Index is of greater importance to the sexual attractiveness of the female body than the waist to hip ratio. At first I was incredulous that someone would actually write such an article, but reading over the summary and article itself only made me more disgusted with this research.

The authors had 40 male undergraduates rate the attractiveness of 50 female bodies (faces were not shown) on a scale of 1 to 7 and estimated a polynomial regression equation on the results. BMI enters the equation as a main effect, squared, and cubed to account for its predicted nonlinear effect. The summary above reproduces their figure demonstrating the fit of their predicted values to means of the actual ratings.

I can't believe this kind of thing gets published. First, they use ordinary least squares regression on ordered, non-zero data. They should be using a generalized linear model like ordered probit, otherwise their coefficients will produce nonsensical outcomes for certain values. Second, the pattern is clearly more complicated than the polynomial function they've specified. I would have at least suggested a fractional polynomial, if not a spline model. This type of sloppy work is highly offensive.

Fortunately, I found a response to the article clearly illustrating several of the faults of this research. Further studies in this area can be done much more cheaply due to subsequent research discovering that chickens and humans have very similar judgments of human attractiveness (see the article, "Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans" here). This research deservedly won the Ig Nobel prize for Interdisiplinary Research in 2003.

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

If it bends, it's funny...

The Economist has an interesting but brief article on humor research explaining two of the prominent explanations of why some things are funny. It's especially interesting to me, I guess, because I wrote my undergrad senior thesis on the place of humor in Habermas' theory of communicative action (I didn't think there was one) and in the process reviewed a lot of the theory and research on humor. At the time, I was fascinated with the Situationists and anxious to indulge my interests in political theory and comedy simultaneously. I concluded then that humor research would probably advance more as an empirical enterprise, which was one of my first steps from political theory to quantitative political science. I'm pleased to learn that people are still doing this research even though I discovered that studying humor wasn't nearly as much fun as enjoying it.

In the interest of being humorless, I note that the superiority and incongruity theories that are presented here date back a lot longer than this article credits them. Superiority as an explanation of humor is usually attributed to Thomas Hobbes, while the incongruity explanation goes back at least to Immanuel Kant, although Arthur Schopenhauer (a personal favorite of mine) has a more elaborate treatment. The roots of superiority theory can be traced back even to Plato and Aristotle, who were both hostile to laughter as a form of mockery or derision, although Aristotle was a bit more accommodating to laughter. Unfortunately we don't have the mythological second book of the Poetics on comedy that serves to motivate much of the action of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Another track of humor theory focuses not so much on the object of humor as much as the subject who finds it. George Santayana and Freud explained humor as a dissipation of or relief from pent up energy, a relaxation of mental strictures. This approach finds root in Herbert Spencer, I think, who believed humor had a physiological basis. I don't think this is at all inconsistent with either of the other approaches and all seem to have some validity. The difficulty in explaining humor is that one must simultaneously explain why certain things are (more) funny than other things and that certain things are (more) funny to certain people than to other people.

The title quote from Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors isn't as appropriate as another from the same movie, "comedy is tragedy plus time", but I like it better. The "tragedy + time" formulation could be applied to the initial example in the Economist article, but since Allen attributes this theory to a character in the movie who is supposed to be a pompous ass, I'm not sure we can infer that it's his point of view.

Friday, August 05, 2005

The Politics of Bo and Luke

I thought I was out of touch for a moment this morning when I read Douglas Kmiec's commentary on Findlaw. Discussing the public outcry over the Supreme Court's decision in Kelo v New London (which I have discussed here, here, and here), Kmiec writes that despite several other stories competing for the attention of the public, "the nation's attention remains transfixed upon the injustice of forcing families from their homes for the economic development advantage of other private owners." I follow the news and thought this was a bit of an exaggeration, so I did a quick Nexis search of U.S. News from the Midwest and found that a search of the month of July turned up 32 hits for "Kelo," 55 hits for "Plame" and 80 hits for "John Roberts."

My relief was short-lived, however, as the Friday movie reviews made me realize that Kmiec was right. AO Scott's review of the Dukes of Hazzard movie, opening today, elicited a groan from me, since I hated the television show as a kid growing up in Georgia. I'm sure the movie is no more flattering to the South and no more interesting to my mid-30s self than the show was to my pre-teen self.

But a moment's reflection made me realize that the film's makers had more on their minds than redneck buffoonery. Scott's review confirmed Kmiec's statement through its brief summary of the plot. The scheme of villain Boss Hogg, described as a "corrupt local official," is "seizing land - including the Duke farm - to convert Hazzard County into a strip mine." The highest profile Hollywood movie of the week, designed as a populist crowd pleaser, is a clear dramatization of the issues raised by Kelo. Obviously, this case has captured the popular imagination.

Not only does the Dukes movie reflect the Kelo decision's substance, its assignment of hero and villain roles takes the side of Kelo critics. Hollywood, belying its reputation for liberalism, puts the position of New London and the Court's most liberal members in the person of the corrupt Boss Hogg, while the Duke boys take up the stand made by the conservative wing. Clearly, Hollywood is responding to the conservative shift signaled in the last several elections.

I look forward to the Dukes of Hazzard sequel, wherein Bo, Luke, and Daisy must again save the family farm by lobbying Washington to eliminate the estate tax.

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

I know how he does it...

"How does Richard A. Posner do it?" I read this Sunday in the Up Front material of the NYT Book Review section. They're referring to his prolificacy, of course, something I've remarked upon before. As a legal scholar with economist training, Posner takes to heart the maxim that "anything worth doing is worth doing poorly," and that "better than nothing" guideline has served him well. How else do you explain a book entitled Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline that contains no longitudinal analysis and thus no exploration of decline?

I'd contest the claim that Posner's work isn't formulaic as well. His typical approach to any issue is straight from general equilibrium analysis: identify the primary interests in a given decision/rule, assign values to those interests, apply neoclassical price theory and draw up supply and demand curves. Easy as cake. The problems inherent in identifying relevant interests and cavalier assignment of values to those interests are a common theme on the Anti-Becker-Posner blog.

Also, many of Posner's books collect or grow out of his articles. For instance, his latest book on intelligence reform is an expansion of his NYT book review of the 9/11 report.

The occasion of the NYT editors' marvel is Posner's review of several books about the embattled press. I thought the essay was slapdash and fatuous, sometimes hilariously so. For instance, Posner's discovery of "recent Pew Research Center poll data that show Republicans increasingly regarding the media as too critical of the government and Democrats increasingly regarding them as not critical enough." He attributes this to the polarization of media, but in fact it's merely an aspect of typical disconfirmation bias, the "hostile media effect." Of course Republicans will increasingly regard the media as too critical of the government as the government becomes more Republican. The same is true of Democrats. Oddly enough, Posner relies on the confirmation bias (without identifying it) earlier in the essay to explain why people don't consume news media to become better informed.

I raised Posner's failure to deal in longitudinal analysis earlier, and Jack Shafer in Slate notes the same failing in this review. Like Shafer, I blanched at Posner's claim that the presence of Fox News has pushed CNN to the left, as I recall Wolf Blitzer questioning whether liberal Paul Begala was a good Catholic (compared to Robert Novak) during CNN coverage of the Pope's funeral.

In the end, Posner's article pronounces diagnoses, explanations, and conclusions that can satisfy almost everybody. The mainstream media (MSM in blog-ese) are liberal AND more politically polarized AND market-driven AND more sensational AND interested in making the public better informed AND more scandal-prone AND less accurate AND serving the public well. The last conclusion is not only predictable (coming from Posner) but necessary, since Posner assigns almost all of the changes in media recently to the decreasing cost of entry into the media market. Under such conditions, it's practically an article of faith that consumers are better served.

Anyway, how does Richard Posner do it? Quickly, and without a lot of care.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Intelligent Design

I've spotted several passing references to President Bush coming out in favor of teaching intelligent design in schools. My initial impression was one of alarm, but fortunately a post on the Improbable Research blog set me straight on what Bush must have meant.

Now I'm positively happy about the President's position. It's much better than endorsing the teaching of stupid design in schools.