I still owe David Janes some feedback on his new feedreader (David: I’ll get to it in my Copious Free Time later this week!). In the meantime, download version 1.0.0 for your Windows box and take it for a spin; Jäger takes a different approach than most feed readers, letting your preferred browser handle displaying entries (instead of using an IE or Gecko component internally), but it gets the job done very well.

I’m alive and well back in Oxvegas. More when I’m actually motivated to do anything…

I’m taking a short break at my hotel before heading back to the conference, which I have to say has been a pretty good one for me—I’ve gotten to catch up with some good old friends from ICPSR and elsewhere, met some new ones, and had a few promising conversations about job prospects in The Discipline™. Now off to get a sandwich and head back.

(I saw Dan very briefly yesterday afternoon… otherwise, except for Dirk, it’s been a blogger-free weekend so far.)

Another week, another Hamas leader dies with a generous assist from the Israeli Defense Forces. Funny how that works.

Tim Sandefur takes exception to familiar address among bloggers who don’t know each other:

Can it really be that hard for people to understand that when you don’t know someone, it’s not proper to call him by his first name? There’s no way to point this out without sounding rude in today’s backslappingly Jacksonian ultraegalitarian world, but when I’m tired of ignoring it, and finally say something about it, all I get is a ration of crap. There’s nothing mean or uppity about the rule, folks, it’s just the rule. The rule is, if you don’t know someone, you call him Mr. Soandso, you don’t call him Jim or Bob or Bill—and if you’re publicly speaking to a third person about Mr. Soandso, you call him Mr. Soandso, even if you are on a first name basis with him.

I think that’s true to some extent, but in a lot of ways blogging is like a community—you get to know people in a different way (by reading their posts, rather than by interacting with them), perhaps, but I think it’s awkward to refer to someone whose blogging I read and respect (and hopefully vice versa) on a regular basis using formal pronouns and titles. Heck, there are a few bloggers I’ve never met who I consider friends (of course, there are also folks like Dean & Rosemary Esmay and Mike Hollihan and Len Cleavlin who I have met in person, though only because of blogging).

There is also a certain carryover from academe, where it is considered generally collegial to refer to eschew titles—the hierarchy is enforced in other, more subtle ways instead.

As far as I am concerned: I’m Chris (or Christopher if you’re my parents), and you may call me that, although I’ll certainly forgive, and wouldn’t dare correct, anyone who insists on “Doctor Lawrence” or the (technically incorrect, at least for now) “Professor Lawrence” for reasons of upbringing or an interest in maintaining the tu-vous distinction for other reasons.

My panel this morning ("Public Support for the Iraq War") was surprisingly well-attended (at least, compared to panels I’ve presented on in the past), and we had a good discussion despite the absence of our original chair/discussant due to a family illness.

You can browse the MPSA paper archive online; my panel was Section 13, Panel 13 (I can’t figure out how to make a direct link that won’t break); of course, if you’re only interested in my paper, you can get it here.

Dan Drezner takes a look at John Kerry’s “new and improved!” misery index:

Every index can be challenged on the quality of the data that goes into it, and the weights that are assigned to the various components that make up the overall figure. A lack of transparency about methodology is also a valid criticism. For example, in my previous post on the competitiveness of different regions in the global information economy, the company responsible for the rankings provides little (free) information on how the index was computed. That’s a fair critique.

Even when the methodology is transparent, there can still be problems.

This is a subject near-and-dear to my heart. In quantitative social science, your econometric model is only as useful as your indicators; a crappy indicator renders the whole model essentially useless.

Unfortunately, our ways of dealing with the problem of how well an indicator reflects a concept leave a lot to be desired; “face validity”—which boils down to “I think the indicator reflects the concept, so we’ll a priori assume it does”—is relied on, even by good scholars, to an extent that will make you blanch. Even seemingly obvious indicators, like responses to survey questions, are often woefully inadequate for measuring “true” concepts (in the case of public opinion research, attitudes and predispositions).

Building an index helps with some of these problems—if your measurement error—but introduces others (like ascribing valid weights to the items, as Dan points out). A few cool tools, like factor analysis and its cousin principal components analysis, are designed to help in finding weights, but even they have problems and limitations, most of which basically boil down to the fact that human judgment is still involved in the process.

I’ve arrived safe and sound in Chi-town. Illinois has to be the most boring state in the nation; the whole state is flat as a pancake as soon as you get north of Mount Vernon (where I-64 crosses the state on its way between Louisville and St. Louis), and it doesn’t get more exciting until you can see the Sears Tower about 300 miles (500 km) later.

I even tried going a different way than usual (“Surely this lake on the map means topography nearby,” I thought erroneously), and all I got for my effort was an extra hour of staring at endless farmland, although I at least got off I-57—in other words, at least the flat, boring farmland was different flat, boring farmland. (From Effingham, I took Ill. 32 to Ill. 121 to Decatur, then took U.S. 51 north to Bloomington, then I-55 into Chicago.)

Speaking of Effingham, that giant cross is just freaky. Say what you will about Southern Baptists, but at least they have the good taste not to inflict something so immensely gaudy on the motoring public (preferring, instead, giant fields of tiny crosses or trinities of smaller crosses that aren’t hazards to unsuspecting amateur pilots).

Now, off to get me a light dinner and to finish getting junk out of my car.

Amanda Butler shares her tax-filing pain. She should count herself lucky—going back as far as I’ve had to file tax returns, which would be about 15 years or so, I’ve never been able to file either 1040EZ or 1040A. Products like TaxCut are a godsend, that’s all I can say.

Gerard Alexander of the University of Virginia takes on virtually all the existing scholarship on Southern politics in the latest Claremont Review of Books—and, IMHO, comes up a bit short of proving his point to my satisfaction, although a proper treatment of the article will have to wait until sometime tomorrow.

I will note that Alan Abramowitz came to virtually the same conclusion* in “Issue Evolution Reconsidered” (The Journal of Politics, 1994), which was a rebuttal to Carmines and Stimson’s Issue Evolution, which, along with Huckfeldt and Sprague’s Race and the Decline of Class in American Politics is probably the classic academic work that promotes the “southern strategy” explanation for the Southern realignment—the Black brothers, however, see dealignment rather than realignment to the GOP, and in a lot of their discussion, they actually support what Alexander says, at least to some extent.

Link via Lily Malcolm (a recent victim of a minor paring knife accident).

Well, at last, I have a real, bona fide campus interview, tentatively scheduled for the week after next, for a tenure-track job at a regional state university with a predominantly non-traditional student body in the lower plains (think “where the wind goes blowing…”). I already have a pre-interview scheduled for this weekend in Chicago (with a different school), but this is the first campus visit.

It actually seems like a fun job, where I’d get to play “big fish in a small pond,” and to be honest the idea of focusing on teaching rather than doing research is starting to appeal to me—not that research-oriented departments have been beating down my doors, mind you.

(Now to finish my preparations for the Chicago trip, including a couple of overheads for my paper presentation…)

One of the reasons why blogging has been pretty light this weekend—in addition to my spending the Easter holiday with family in Memphis—is that I spent much of Saturday doing the work I’ve been trained to do, in this case anonymously reviewing the text of a forthcoming political science textbook for a publisher.

While the text doesn’t focus on ideology, as a way to motivate the material (am I being vague enough?) it discusses the ideological divisions of the American public, and the contrasts among conservative and liberal thought on economic and social regulation—one of the fundamental topics in the study of political behavior in the United States. After reading it, something about that discussion clicked in my head, and suddenly the debate over the August 6th PDB—and the conviction by liberals like Kevin Drum that it contained the key information needed to prevent an attack, despite the clear absence of any “new” information that would suggest an attack of the magnitude of 9/11 (despite the sensationalistic account of Middle Eastern men taking photos of a building in New York—mind you, it was a federal office building, not the World Trade Center complex)—made a lot more sense.

Steven Taylor apparently had essentially the same thoughts on the matter:

While clearly much (most?) of the wrangling over the PDB is partisan in nature, much of the debate may also be ideological. Part of what defines a conservative in the political vernacular of the United States is skepticism about government, while liberals tend to think that given the right people and information that practically any problem can be solved by government. ...

[O]ne’s view of government clearly colors how one interprets these events. As a conservative (and as a student of government, here and abroad), I am highly skeptical of the ability of governments to successfully execute policy. Hence, I am unsurprised by governmental failures. I am not saying that policy can never be successful—it can. However, it rarely is an efficient process, and the more complex the undertaking, the more likely failure is to happen. At a minimum I know full well that government is not very good at processing information. ... However, it would seem that from the liberal point of view the problem isn’t government and its complexity, but rather the people who occupy government at a given moment. Now, I am not saying that that doesn’t matter—it does. But, I do not think, and believe that empirical evidence backs my position, that government becomes more efficient and efficacious just because one set of persons occupy positions of power. ...

And no, I am not arguing that government always fails. Although I would note that that tends to be the default position. I am not an anti-government libertarian, but I am highly skeptical about the ability of governments to do what they set out to do. Hence, I am not surprised wen governments fail. Liberals in the US context tend to be more optimistic about the abilities of government, and hence are more shocked when it fails. And, as noted, that failure is usually attributed not to systemic problems of governing huge numbers of people, but, rather, to those who are doing the governing. Hence, the fault must lie with Bush and Rice must be a “moron”, etc.

Obviously, unlike Steven I’m not a conservative—but I share the conservative skepticism that government power can be universally effective, or that it can always stop bad things from happening. Governments are comprised of people, and people are inherently flawed: they make mistakes, they aren’t omniscient, and they tend to make decisions consistent with their own personal interests. Aggregating a bunch of fallible people in a government, while reducing the possibility that one person’s mistake won’t matter, doesn’t eliminate it entirely.

I think the disappointment of the 9/11 commission is that, rather than trying to figure out how we can prevent future attacks and ensure the mistakes of 9/11 aren’t repeated, its members have decided to engage in alternating displays of grandstanding and ass-covering, and are seemingly more concerned with their job prospects in future administrations sharing their party affiliation than figuring out what structural and practical obstacles stopped policymakers from getting even all the unclassified information that indicated a plot was afoot on their desks.

Xrlq is kind enough to donate some of his web space to partisan hack valued former public servant Richard Ben-Veniste to discuss the August 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing. In other news, partisan hack valued random guy from California who somehow got The Washington Monthly to pay him to be a partisan hack blogger Kevin Drum seems to agree with Ben-Veniste-as-channeled-by-Xrlq, while partisan hack political scientist Steven Taylor disagrees.

Congratulations to Martin Michlmayr on winning reelection as Debian Project Leader; even though I supported another candidate in the election, I think Martin will continue to do good work for the project in this position.

Robert Prather agrees with Jeralynn of TalkLeft that the proposed Victims’ Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is a bad idea, and I tend to agree with that assessment.

In general, the amendment seems to be an example of a solution that is in search of a problem. At the federal level, there is nothing in this proposed amendment that couldn’t be guaranteed by statute in federal criminal proceedings. At the state level, there is little evidence that states have failed to consider (and either accept or reject) the need for similar provisions in their jurisdictions, or have deliberately excluded the interests of crime victims from political debate, which is the general threshold I’d say you need to cross to justify a federal intervention into areas of traditional state sovereignty like criminal justice.

In any event, you can read the full text of the proposed amendment at THOMAS and decide for yourself.

If anyone ever tells you to take seriously the comments of a former British cabinet member, here’s a new counterexample to add to your arsenal (along with the ravings of Robin Cook and Claire Short):

[Former Northern Ireland secretary] Mo Mowlam has called on the British and American governments to open talks with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Bear in mind, of course, that Ms. Mowlam’s former bailiwick (i.e. trying to stop the Provos and Loyalists from killing one another and returning responsible government to Ulster) is hardly a model of efficiency and good order, even today. It might also be worth bearing in mind that, to open talks with Mr. bin Laden, first we’d probably have to find him. Even the peacenik Liberal Democrats aren’t buying this lousy bill of goods:

Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell criticised Ms Mowlam’s remarks.

“What possible result would there be from sitting down with al-Qaeda?” he asked.

“Their intention is to destroy the liberal values upon which our way of life is based.

“You cannot negotiate with those whose aim is your own destruction.”

It’s nice to see good sense is alive and well in at least some quarters across the pond.

Link via Jeremy of Who Knew?

Heidi Bond lets loose the BLINK tag but somehow fails to incorporate Microsoft’s one-upping of Netscape’s non-standard HTML ante: the sublimely evil MARQUEE tag.

Apropos of the substance of Heidi’s post, given the vista of my career options at the moment, a job as an “evil minion” seems like a reasonable option.

Anyone who tells you that email propogation is instantaneous should consider this Received trace:

Received: from X.Y.edu
        by sunset.backbone.olemiss.edu (8.12.10+Sun/8.12.9) with ESMTP id i38G1LAf017356
        for <cnlawren@olemiss.edu>; Thu, 8 Apr 2004 11:01:21 -0500 (CDT)
Received: from a.b.c.d
        by X.Y.edu (8.12.9-20030924/8.12.9) with ESMTP id i36JvaK3027962
        for <cnlawren@olemiss.edu>; Tue, 6 Apr 2004 14:57:37 -0500 (CDT)

In other words, the email took 44 hours, 4 minutes to get here (well, 44:08 if you count the 5 minute fetchmail cycle on my inbox). I probably could have gotten a paper letter sent first class from X.edu (within a day’s drive in a neighboring state) in less time.

Jeff Jarvis gives a pretty good flavor of the complete joke that the 9/11 Commission is. For all the people who say George W. Bush is a moron (and Lord knows I agree with that assessment in a lot of ways), he was certainly correct to resist both this idiotic commission and its pointless cousin foisted on us by Congress, the Department of Homeland Security.

Tim Sandefur gets straight to the heart of things: the commission is simply “a symposium of blowhards.”

Ryan of the Dead Parrots notes the increasing use of anti-plagiarism software tools in academe (to fight the scourge of term-paper copying, something noted by Brock yesterday), the use of which apparently may be spreading to newsrooms to catch journalist-plagiarists (though obviously it won’t catch the Jayson Blairs of the world, who generally invented stories rather than copying them directly).

I have somewhat mixed feelings about these services. On the one hand, they do combat a real problem, and one that potentially damages the academic process. But, like Ryan, I wonder if requiring students to turn these papers in using these services (as a former colleague of mine is doing this semester) creates a presumption of guilt; funnily enough, I’d actually be more comfortable if I (the instructor) were the person submitting the papers to TurnItIn.com, rather than having my students do it. Maybe I’m weird that way.

Josh Barro (one of the Harvard Republicans) points out the reason only one person died when the City of New Orleans derailed near Yazoo City yesterday: practically nobody was aboard:

[The train carried 68 passengers and 12 crewmembers.] That works out to 7.56 passengers per car and 5.67 passengers per crew member. Perhaps unsurprisingly, few passengers are enticed by a train that can take them from New Orleans to Chicago in just 19 hours and 5 minutes. If this train is any indication of ridership on Amtrak’s routes outside metropolitan corridors, it’s no wonder its director says it needs a $1.8 billion dollar subsidy to continue operating in 2005.

They particularly aren’t enticed by a train that costs $182 to ride round-trip, $320 if you want to ride on the lower level, and a whopping $520 if you want to have a bed to sleep in. By contrast, you can fly non-stop round-trip to Chicago from New Orleans next weekend for $398… or, if you’re willing to do some advance planning, you can fly round-trip for $244 over a weekend in May. Not to mention that your trip will be almost 17 hours shorter in duration.

Or, you can ride Greyhound, completely unsubsidized,* for $138 round trip—and, if you pick the right bus, it doesn’t take much more time than the Amtrak train.

Update: * Both Stephen Karlson and a reader point out that there is a gross subsidy to the highway system (i.e. almost all highways are paid for by the state and federal governments); my point was, however, that the net subsidy is essentially zero, as all highway spending in the United States (except expenditures on low-volume local streets, which are usually supplemented by local property taxes—such streets would be necessary even in a less car-dependent society, mind you) comes from state and federal motor fuel taxes, which are borne by highway users such as Greyhound; in fact, highway taxes also pay much of the budget of the Federal Transit Administration, which is responsible for mass transit in urban areas. Apologies for any confusion.

Is there anyone who thinks this plan is a good use of time and resources?* I realize that the fungibility of resources (a fancy way of saying the ability to “walk and chew gum at the same time”) is often overrated, that DOJ‘s “porn surfers” wouldn’t be much help in the War on Terror, and there is a bit of a dark side to the “legit” pornography industry that takes advantage of young (but legally adult) women from abusive backgounds, but a crackdown on dirty movies seems like a pretty stupid idea nonetheless. I personally would have no beef with a crackdown on “kiddie porn” and the like, but as Glenn Reynolds points out the Ashcroft plan goes far beyond this eminently reasonable target to go after such examples of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Porn” as Skinemax and Spectravision.

But, if we must do this, I think David Adesnik’s solution of having the ex-Taliban Gitmo detainees do the, er, heavy lifting seems appropriate. And I suspect the reaction of Josh Barro of the Harvard Republicans reflects that of most young conservatives: a healthy dollop of “what the hell are they thinking?”

One of the phone interviews this afternoon seemed to go well; the other felt like a train wreck in slow motion. As of now, both of the phone interviews I’ve had with departments that used a speaker phone seemed to go poorly; the second department today used a real conference call, which went much better.

Now the waiting game begins…

Well, it’s not going to go down as the best paper I’ve ever written, but here’s the Midwest paper in all its glory. Now I have to prepare for those back-to-back phone interviews this afternoon…

One of the posts I inadvertently trashed during the composition stage yesterday was essentially the same as this Steve Verdon post.

It coulda been worse… I could have come out as Krugman.