Glenn Reynolds in the course of rightly criticizing the neo-Confederate movement makes this rather incongrous statement:

As a political force, neo-Confederate sentiment is pretty trivial at the moment, even compared to the decaying remnants of Marxism.

Apparently Glenn didn’t get the memo about these schmucks who apparently have a substantial chunk of the Mississippi legislature doing their bidding. At least the Marxists around here are in relatively harmless professions (or serving on the Jackson City Council, which amounts to basically the same thing).

Somehow, the departure of William Safire from the New York Times has led to the gratuitous misuse of language:

Participation varied by region, and the impressive national percentages should not obscure the fact that the country’s large Sunni Arab minority remained broadly disenfranchised – due to alienation or terror or both.

The word “disenfranchised” literally means deprived of voting rights. Southern blacks were disenfranchised under Jim Crow. Women were disenfranchised prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment.

By contrast, Sunni Arabs in Iraq were not disenfranchised; nobody stopped them from voting. Instead, they chose not to drag their sorry asses to the polls, for whatever reason.

Today’s CL reports that BenJarvus Green-Ellis, who left Indiana University a couple of weeks ago, will be joining the Rebel football team in 2006, with two years of eligibility after sitting out the 2005 season due to NCAA transfer rules. Green-Ellis’ arrival will hopefully help shore up an Ole Miss rushing attack that has been anemic at best ever since the departure of Deuce McAllister. (þ: SEC FanBlog)

In other Ole Miss news (reported in the same article), the Rebels and the University of Memphis are considering rescheduling the 2005 opener at Memphis’ Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium for Labor Day (Monday, September 5th) from Saturday, September 3rd, presumably in the hopes of attracting regional or national television coverage for the matchup.

I don’t normally do the link round-up thing, but today seems like a good day to make an exception:

• Steven Taylor rounds up posts on the Iraqi election, as well as providing a bit of perspective of his own:

  The bottom line is: not every event in the world is part of a game between Reps and Dems where one side scores and the other side falls behind. Too many people treat the world like one football game where their team can do no wrong, and the other team must lose.

• Leopold Stotch writes:

  Obviously the new Iraqi government has a Herculean task ahead of it, but this is a major turning point in modern history. The Iraqi people are the true winners, but the secondary winner is the American voter, who once again put US foreign policy on the right side of history. The losers: the jihadists, old Europe, and most of the Democrat party.

• Joe Gandelman looks at Auschwitz and the Iraqi elections in light of the current conflict with Wahabiism.

I have to say that the scenario as things have played out has been at the “optimistic” end of my general thinking about this process, but there’s a rather long road ahead. I tend to think this election is an important—and necessary—first step, both for the Iraqis and for the Arab world at large. Now the hard work of building a democratic and inclusive constitution begins.

Today’s Clarion-Ledger helpfully explains why seven intersections in Jackson have been torn up for the past month while a contractor futzes around with installing new traffic signals.

I ran into one of the half-dozen or so students who was in my first-year class in grad school at the University of Mississippi (he subsequently changed majors, worked for a while as the assistant dean of student affairs at Ole Miss, and got a Ph.D. in education) today at Brookshire’s; he’s now living in Jackson and serving as the education policy advisor to the governor.

Orin Kerr discusses law school grading practices, including the notorious (and universal) use of strict curves, without as much overthinking as I engaged in earlier this week.

Interesting piece in today’s New York Times about plans to build another nuclear reactor next to Entergy’s existing nuclear plant about 60 miles southwest of Jackson. (þ: Tom Maguire and a student)

Today’s Clarion-Ledger features the newspaper’s latest attempt to help Jackson-area readers figure out how to drive through roundabouts. Somehow I don’t expect this effort to succeed where others have failed.

The which intentional tort are you test is making the rounds today; like TigerHawk and Will, I too am “trespass to chattels.” Perhaps more importantly, I am also glad to have never attended law school.

Since before Robert’s post on this topic, I’ve been pondering grades in general, prompted by this post by Will Baude relating his experience at Yale, where he hasn’t yet “taken any classes that attempt to draw actual distinctions among the students.” Indeed, the very purpose of grading (as opposed to marking, as my Canadian colleague refers to it) is to discriminate among students on the basis of their academic performance. Thus all of the participants in the debate are right in their own ways, but I think they (individually, at least) miss the big picture.

Leopold Stotch and Steven Taylor both bemoan the administrative meddling in grade assignment inherent in Princeton’s decision, a sentiment with which (as a fellow political science professor) I must concur, lest we become like those emasculated law profs who not only no longer control their grades but also lack control over their own exam conditions. On the other hand, Nathan Novak thinks it’s a non-issue, due to the widespread use of class rank to compare students from different institutions; Andrew Samwick makes a similar point, although he acknowledges that grade inflation does lead to compression of the grade range. At the extreme end of the scale, the Grouch thinks grades don’t matter at all; I wouldn’t go that far, due to reasons of path dependence, but I can see his point—few people today care what grades I got in high school or as an undergraduate, but I wouldn’t be a professor today if I hadn’t gotten mostly A’s and B’s.

I think what Princeton is trying to do (rightly or wrongly) is address the “compression” problem that Andrew talks about—if 50% of the class are getting A’s, ny meaningful discrimination among those students has been eliminated; in other words, there’s been a loss of information in the process. If the purpose of grading is simply to drop passing students in buckets based on their absolute performance, giving 50% of students A’s might be appropriate; on the other hand, if the purpose of grading is to determine the relative merit of students, putting 50% of them in a single category isn’t very helpful.

The trouble is, we expect grades to do both of these things. The Millsaps college catalog, for example, requires all political science majors and minors to earn C’s in all of their coursework for the major (which leads to its own sort of compression effect, since effectively the minimum passing grade is raised from a 60 to a 73), and students must maintain a 2.0 GPA to participate in various and sundry extracurricular activities—the C and 2.0 represent absolute standards. But we also use grades to evaluate relative achievement, for election to honorary societies such as Phi Beta Kappa and for awarding other honors.

I don’t know that there’s a simple answer to these problems, although perhaps including measures of central tendency and dispersion along with assigned grades (as is at least partially the case at Dartmouth, according to Andrew) might be a good start.

It’s always nice to see our state legislators up to business as usual:

Some Mississippi lawmakers are scheduled to speak Thursday to the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “a patently white supremacist group.”

Well, isn’t that special. Even better, AP reporter Emily Wagster Pettus manages to track down one of the nitwits expected to attend this speaking engagement; unintentional hilarity ensues:

State Rep. John Moore, R-Brandon, said he’s scheduled to speak at the CCC gathering Thursday. He said he’ll talk about issues to be considered during the current legislative session.

Moore said he didn’t know anything about the group’s position on race.

“If I find out for certain they are a racist organization, I am going to confront them,” he said.

“You hear that the NAACP is racist, but that wouldn’t keep me from talking to them,” Moore said.

One is forced to conclude that Moore’s invites to the Rankin County NAACP chapter meetings must have gotten lost in the mail. But it gets better.

He said he had never looked at the CCC‘s Web site, but he sat with an AP reporter and scrolled through it. After looking at the question-and-answer section on race, Moore said: “I didn’t get any indication from this that they were racist.”

You know, there’s a joke just begging to be made here about the reading comprehension of Mississippi State graduates, but it’s not even funny in this context. The people of Brandon ought to be embarrassed to have this guy allegedly representing them in the legislature. (þ: memeorandum)

This is almost becoming a recurring joke:

Route: I-55

Impact: medium

On I-55 north 2.5 miles north of Pearl Street, the left lane will be closed to replace posts from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. today. The ramp leaving Woodrow Wilson to go north on I-55 will be closed.

This marks the third time in four months that MDOT has replaced these stupid things, which are intended to stop traffic coming from eastbound Woodrow Wilson Drive cutting across three lanes of traffic to exit at eastbound Lakeland Drive (Hwy 25). I applaud the sentiment, but it’s increasingly clear to me (although apparently not our esteemed Department of Transportation) that something more substantial than plastic posts are needed here.

I don’t have a lot to say about Johnny Carson’s passing Sunday at the age of 79—I was never a huge fan of his, always preferring David Letterman—but an interesting footnote of his life (that I only discovered a few days ago) was that he came to Millsaps College for part of his naval officer’s training in 1943. Small world and all that.

Something I pondered yesterday as I ate dinner at Fazoli’s reading both of Jackson’s alt-weeklies: why are virtually all alt-weeklies mostly left-wing affairs? The advertisers, for the most part, don’t care about the politics—they just want 18-to-34-year-old eyeballs on their ads—and most young people don’t care about politics; even the ones who do aren’t particularly leftist in their outlook (rather, the distribution is fairly evenly bimodal, since people who care about politics tend to be of one wing or the other, but the median college kid isn’t that far to the left). So why are alt-weeklies full of articles crusading for “social justice” and whining about SUV owners and people who rent movies at Blockbuster?

I suppose there’s an economic argument that leftist writers are more willing to accept low-to-nonexistent pay to produce content for the alt-weeklies than right-wingers would, since the opportunity cost for the typical left-winger is lower—but this wouldn’t apply to the college kids (including some I teach) who write a good deal for these papers. There might also be some sort of network effect; the people who set up the alt-weeklies tend to be leftists, so they get other motley liberals and progressives to join them. But if there’s money to be made running an alt-weekly, surely people with right-wing politics would also have established alt-weeklies. It’s doubly-puzzling since most college alternative newspapers are generally right-wing affairs. Any better theories?

Stephen Karlson and Stephen Bainbridge are not looking forward to their inaugural Airbus A380 flights; quoth Bainbridge:

Now for the really bad news. You’ll only check in with 500 other passengers if the plane is configured with large first and business class sections. A discounter could cram over 840 coach passengers into the [expeltive deleted] thing if it wanted! Can you imagine the wait to get off it? Or to get your luggage at baggage claim.

Thankfully, those of us in flyover country won’t be seeing these behemoths at Jackson-Evers International Airport anytime soon.

Heidi Bond and Amber Taylor are looking around some of their law classes and finding them to be male-dominated. This got me to thinking of my classes this semester, for which I just received final rosters earlier today.

• Intro to American Government: about 50–50 (I think I counted 17 male students out of 36).
• Con Law II (catalog name: Civil Liberties): about 60–40 female (16 students).
• Public Opinion: 75–25 male (8 students).
• Directed Readings and Honors Thesis: 100–0 female (two students, one in each).

The college population is about 55–45 female, and the political science major seems to be around 60–40 female. Not really sure why public opinion is less popular than con law with female students; if anything, I’d have expected the opposite, since con law really only makes sense for the pre-law types, who tend to be male here. Then again, it could be a scheduling thing; the MW 2:45–4 timeslot is pretty empty at Millsaps, while more classes are offered during the 1–2:15/40 slot (so there are more conflicts).

One other oddity: before looking at the roster, I would have guessed that intro was a bit more skewed female. I think part of that is the middle of the lecture hall seems more female, and it’s difficult to have the full class in my field of vision, particularly with glasses (49 seats are crammed in a room that probably was originally designed for 30, so lecturing in there is almost like performing in the “round”).

Steven Taylor has tracked down the actual lyrics for “Hail to the Chief,” for those watching the inauguration on TiVo delay or the morbidly curious. I missed the whole affair because the faculty was spending its time arguing about schedule changes that won’t go into effect for another year, but a skim of the transcript (þ: InstaPundit) suggests the inaugural address was pretty damn good, but doubtless spoiled by the delivery (and, for some, the messenger too).

I just started watching a few new shows:

• Veronica Mars (TiVo), a surprisingly good (and humorous) mystery show on UPN, starring terminally cute actress Kristen Bell as Veronica, popular chick turned outsider after the mysterious death of her best friend (and her sheriff dad’s perceived bungling of the investigation).
• House, M.D. (TiVo), a medical drama on Fox starring Hugh Laurie as a thoroughly sociopathic doctor whose team tries to figure out what’s ailing patients at his hospital. Recommended to me by my mother, of all people.
• Battlestar Galactica (TiVo), the Sci-Fi channel’s (amazingly good) reconceptualization of the often-cheesy 1970s sci-fi series as a dark, gritty space-based drama. I’ve raved about it here and elsewhere already.

So record one, or record ‘em all.

Me, November 3rd:

My gut feeling is that the [2004 national exit polls] in part failed because the networks replaced VNS; Edison/Mitofsky was new at this, and a rookie effort is fraught with perils—as I learned myself yesterday. Coupled, perhaps, with a small cognitive bias on the part of the people being paid by Edison/Mitofsky to conduct the poll themselves (one suspects the typical person looking for day-work isn’t a Republican) and you can easily see why they were quite a bit off, notwithstanding the advertised margin of error.

Edison/Mitofsky, Wednesday:

[B]ased upon the Within Precinct Error that was observed in the 2004 general election we plan to make some enhancements to the exit poll interviewer recruiting process.

• We will use recruiting methods that reduce the number of students and young adults we use as interviewers.
• In addition to the standardized rehearsal and training dialog, we will add a standardized pre-rehearsal training script for all individual phone training conversations.
• We will evaluate other training techniques such as a video training guide and interviewer tests and use the Internet more effectively as an interviewer training tool. (64)

There’s a lot more there if you really care about exit polling techniques, but the bottom line is that interviewer problems seem to account for much of the pro-Kerry bias in the Edison/Mitofsky poll. (þ: Wizbang)

Somehow a number of websites appear to be able to reset my Mozilla Firefox prefs to allow pop-ups… they don’t just pop-up a window, but they actually reset my “block pop-up windows” setting. Has anyone else seen this?

Michelle Malkin didn’t like one of the inaugural events:

I would not expect to hear profanity at any Hilary Duff event, let alone an Inaugural Youth Concert hosted by the Bush twins.

No, but you’ve got to figure that at least you’d have some $1 well drinks and a 2-for-1 deal on Jägermeister. (rimshot)

Besides which, if I somehow ended up at an Fuel concert where the opening act turned out to be Hilary Duff, I’d be quite likely to shout “WTF” at the top of my lungs. Poor event planning indeed.

Thank you; I’ll be here all week. (þ: Protein Wisdom)

Ars Technica passes on word from CNet that various search engine vendors and blogging tool providers (including heavyweights SixApart) are implementing a new plan to limit comment spam by reducing the value of comment spam for search engine placement. Signifying Nothing has already followed suit, although since trackback spam has been less of a problem for us I’m only applying the “fix” (a simple attribute on HTML a tags) to user comments for now.

Actress Teri Polo, last discussed in comments here, is again becoming a topic of debate thanks to a new pictorial in Playboy magazine; Michele doesn’t get the appeal, while Jeff Goldstein does. I tend to think she looks quite a bit better than she did in the notorious ribcage pics from the Meet the Fockers premiere, but I can’t say she is particularly good-looking.

Jacqueline Passey is bemused by the reaction garnered by a casual statement that she “often” blogs without any clothes on. If I thought that a similar revelation about my blogging habits would improve our traffic, I’d happily chime in, but I strongly suspect this would just lead to numerous readers gouging out their eyes in mortal terror.

I humbly apologize to those readers who now won’t be able to get this song out of their heads.