Amanda is throwing her hat in the ring. I guess the question is: are we supposed to write “Hot Abercrombie Chick!” on the ballot? That seems vaguely embarrassing, although probably less so than voting for Nader…

James Joyner links this NYT piece with the snarky comment:

I await the study that investigates New Years resolutions.

I tend to agree with commenter “steve,” who writes:

Too bad there are some in this country who want to make so called virginity pledges part of serious public policy. When serious people call for new years resolutions in order to solve serious socail [sic] problems your point will stand.

But I think there’s an interesting question here: why aren’t many of the pledges kept? I suspect it has to do with peer pressure: students who don’t sincerely want to make virginity pledges are pressured into them by religious groups they are affiliated with, parents, or friends. And, in general, people don’t keep pledges when there’s no effective sanctioning mechanism to ensure fealty to them; unless you’re female and get knocked up, nobody’s going to know whether or not you actually kept a virginity pledge.

That said, one other part of the study, as reported in USA Today, seemed a bit puzzling:

The study also found that in communities where at least 20% of adolescents pledged the STD rates for everyone combined was 8.9%. In communities with less than 7% pledgers, the STD rate was 5.5%.

Not only is this a massive ecological inference problem (there’s absolutely no way to show causality here), the causal mechanism doesn’t even function right: adolescents are a relatively small part of the population, dwarfed by the sexually active adult population. Nor is there any test of whether the pledge rate affects STD rates over time—which at least might get at the question of whether pledges have some aggregate effect on STD incidence. Most odd.

Anyway, I tend to agree with critics that government-led efforts to encourage abstinence—a cornerstone of both the Bush and Clinton administrations’ “sex ed” policy*—are likely to be completely ineffective, if not counterproductive, in reducing teen pregnancy and STD transmission. The feds should find something better to waste our money on instead…

Events are now on an inevitable collision course down in Hattiesburg. Today’s developments:

• The Hattiesburg American interviews University of Southern Mississippi president Shelby Thames. Thames did not back off his assertions that the AAUP was a union or his criticism of history professor Doug Chambers for allegedly cancelling class in response to Thames’ actions.
• Thames also went after the president of the USM faculty senate today, accusing him of hypocrisy.
• Thames suggests that criminal charges may be in the offing against fired professors Glasmer and Stringer. The professors deny they engaged in any illegal or unethical conduct.
• 69% of USM faculty voted on the no confidence motion; 64% of the entire faculty (including those who didn’t vote) voted in favor of the no confidence motion.
• USM provost Tim Hudson says he’s not stepping down, despite disagreeing with Thames’ actions in the case.
• Thames will not resign in the face of the overwhelming no confidence vote.

My interactions with Matt Stinson’s household troll “Billy” rated a mention at Prof. Bainbridge’s place. One more notch in my online tally against comments…

I Know What I Know and the Hattiesburg American are both reporting that the faculty of the University of South Mississippi voted overwhelmingly in favor of a no confidence motion against USM president Shelby Thames, and voted overwhelmingly in favor of reinstating ousted professors Frank Glamser and Gary Stringer.

Lily Malcolm asks why ambitious go-getter John Kerry ended up going to law school at decidedly middle-of-the-road Boston College rather than a more prestigious institution. Lily has some theories:

Maybe he was sick of the Ivy League. Or he decided BC would be better for his political career. Or he had terrible grades (how bad would they have to be to outweigh a Silver Star?). Were there financial complications? Geographical constraints?

Obviously I can’t read Kerry’s mind. My gut level feeling is that geography, alone, wouldn’t explain it—assuming his resume was as impressive as Lily indicates it should have been, Kerry could have gone to Harvard—historical Yale–Harvard grudges notwithstanding. And, generally, the “political career” explanation only works when you’re talking about leaving the state or region for law school; no rationally ambitious Mississippian would dare try to come back home and run for office after going to Princeton or Yale, what with the perfectly good (at least for such political purposes or for in-state practice, if not for one’s future reputation on the national scene) law school sitting right here in Oxford.

Indeed, it’s possible that Kerry’s high-profile antics after returning from Vietnam had a negative impact on his stature; law school admissions committees in the early 1970s, I suspect, were rather conservative bodies filled with men who served in World War II or Korea before their academic careers. Hanging out with the Hanoi Jane crowd and publicly accusing your comrades-in-arms of being war criminals don’t seem like the sorts of activities that would have endeared Kerry to an Ivy League admissions committee circa 1971.

That being said, people end up at particular schools for the most idiosyncratic reasons. Someone familiar with my academic record and standardized test scores probably wouldn’t guess I’d have degrees from the University of Memphis and Ole Miss. The place where one got a particular degree is only a very rough indicator of one’s talents—something I’m hoping (though skeptical) that hiring committees bear in mind.

Update: Lily has an update with a number of different perspectives.

Jane Galt, freshly rested (but not tanned), has a post of Den Bestean proportions on academe’s political diversity problem. Jane ponders these questions, in turn:

1. Are conservatives underrepresented in academia?
2. If they are, is this underrepresentation due to action on the part of the faculty, or is there some other reason that we can’t (or shouldn’t) correct?
3. If conservatives are underrepresented, and the cause of this underrepresentation is due, in whole or in part, to the actions of the faculty or administration, should we try to do anything about this?

You should definitely RTWT™.

Update: Both Jane and James Joyner don’t think the remedy is to be found in the political process; James writes:

I also share her libertarian instincts on the matter; there’s not much to be done about this phenomenon that wouldn’t be worse than the problem.

Somehow, I think “Annoy France—Vote Bush” would be a very effective campaign slogan. That said, the “Priceless” approach seems effective too.

As for me, I did my civic duty today and cast my ballot in the only primary offered (the Democratic one). Unlike usual, the real vote-counting equipment wasn’t in use—instead, we got a sheet of paper obviously run off on a laser printer with various “fill in the circle” options, including “uncommitted.” Since I think the Democrats ought to be committed, that option was right off the table; instead, as a sensible, strategically-minded voter, I decided to throw my support to the candidate not named Kerry who was most likely to be close to the 15% threshold needed to get delegates.

USM president Shelby Thames is now blaming the whole mess on the American Association of University Professors, a group whose combined national membership isn’t that much bigger than his campus’ student enrollment.

Ah, well, it could have been worse; he could have blamed outside agitators and sicced the Sovereignty Commission on them.

Congratulations to Kelley on her first blogiversary! And also congrats to Kevin Drum on the occasion of his moving on up in the world.

Forgive me for saying it, but the latest news from Hattiesburg seems just a wee bit odd:

University of Southern Mississippi President Shelby Thames said Tuesday he is considering whether or not to allow two dismissed professors back into the classroom to serve out the semester.

If he makes the decision, the reprieve would only be temporary. Thames said he would initiate termination proceedings at the end of the semester against Gary Stringer and Frank Glamser, two outspoken critics of his administration and leadership.

Thames, mind you, is the same guy who on Friday considered Stringer and Glamser such a threat to the university that he had the university’s custodial staff cart off stuff from their offices and change the locks while he was meeting with them. My bogosity meter is rapidly approaching 11 here, folks.

Thames’ meeting with USM students today didn’t exactly go well, either, according to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.

More on this topic here; this is my entry in today’s OTB Traffic Jam.

Stephen Karlson and Eugene Volokh have followups on their posts from yesterday on the ongoing kerfuffle at Southern Miss. Quoth Volokh on the importance of the case:

[T]he faculty—as joint governors of the school—must have the right to criticize the administration, which must of course include the right to investigate alleged resume fraud by the University’s vice president of research. If the University is right that the faculty members whom it’s trying to fire engaged in defamation (i.e., were themselves lying) or real misuse of university facilities, then its actions might well be proper. But if the University is just trying to silence faculty members whose criticisms it sees as disruptive, that’s very dangerous indeed. Shared governance, whether in Washington, D.C. or in a university, necessarily involves some disruption and tension. Trying to eliminate that disruption and tension is impossible unless one abandons the shared governance project.

Meanwhile, I Know What I Know is still on the case; as Scott notes, The Student Printz is all over this, and it isn’t looking pretty for USM president Shelby F. Thames.

Via both Stephen Bainbridge and Will Baude, I took the latest “flavor of the month” quiz: the Libertarian Purity Test. I got a 50 out of a maximum 160, mainly because my hard-core minarchist libertarian views have subsided over time in favor of more practical politics.

IMHO, the quiz was actually pretty poorly engineered; the “libertarian” answer was always the “yes” answer. This sort of thing generally leads to response bias. But, the questions seemed to tap libertarian attitudes better than the infamous Political Compass does.

James Joyner has stirred up a bit of a hornet’s nest over his complaints about Patrick Henry College and, by extension, the homeschool movement it is associated with. James argues that PHC and homeschooling, by and large, foster closed-mindedness and a lack of exposure to diverse points of view. Since PHC, for example, only hires Christians—and, from a reading of their “statement of faith,” only Christians who believe in scriptural inerrency—a PHC student is not going to be exposed to people with varying religious viewpoints within the academy. And to the extent home-schooled students (generally Caucasian, Christian, and middle-to-upper class) are exposed to diversity by interaction with other homeschooled students, one suspects the ethnic, religious, and economic diversity of the children interacted with will be minimal.

On the other hand, we have the recent discussion of Duke University’s lack of political diversity in its faculty—not to mention the reaction of the American Association of University Professors to proposals for academic bills of rights, which is basically to say, “yes, we think there should be political diversity—but, unlike racial and gender diversity, we’ll have none of that government oversight stuff to ensure it actually happens.” Such attitudes suggest that the AAUP doesn’t take these legitimate concerns of many students and faculty seriously.

I don’t disagree with the AAUP’s Committee A when it says that being confronted with controversy in the classroom is an essential part of a postsecondary education. However, when only conservative students are being confronted with that controversy, as is often the case, it seems that universities are failing in their missions to challenge and educate their students.

But—that said—the antidote to the Dukes of the world is not to establish more Patrick Henrys and Oral Roberts. Rather it is for mainstream academe to take seriously its commitment to ensure a broad and challenging education for all of its students without marginalizing some for their political or religious beliefs.

There’s a big brou-ha-ha down in Hattiesburg at the University of Southern Mississippi: two tenured faculty members are being terminated by the university administration, apparently for speaking out against a university vice-president. More details at Critical Mass, I Know What I Know (just start at the top and keep scrolling down), The Volokh Conspiracy, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Clarion-Ledger.

Update: More at Crooked Timber and Opiniatrety, as well as Cliopatria (I take issue with the latter’s characterization of higher education in Mississippi in general, however) and Stephen Karlson.

I promised myself earlier this weekend that I wouldn’t blog about this, because I have a pending application at USM for a tenure-track faculty position, but there’s no way I will accept a job at a university that apparently has no respect for the tenure process.

Bill Hobbs takes his advocacy of a taxpayers’ bill of rights for Tennessee to its liberal opponents, with five reasons why liberals should support TaBOR:

1. TaBOR will cause the state to manage its resources more wisely and set priorities – reducing wasteful spending.
2. TaBOR will shield existing programs from deep cuts during future economic downturns.
3. TaBOR will foster more grassroots political involvement and encourage better communication between citizens and their elected representatives.
4. TaBOR will foster more trust and confidence in government.
5. TaBOR will make it easier to pass a state income tax.

Arguably, the first four are good reasons for anyone to support TaBOR; regardless, go and read the whole thing.

Robert Garcia Tagorda, Christopher Genovese, and Alex Tabarrok today take note of this article in Science News, which indicates that 3 researchers have found that coins, when tossed, land the same way up they started about 51% of the time.

Why hasn’t this been discovered in practice before? Interestingly, the article discusses a previous experiment with coin tossing that didn’t discover any bias:

During World War II, South African mathematician John Kerrich carried out 10,000 coin tosses while interned in a German prison camp. However, he didn’t record which side the coin started on, so he couldn’t have discovered the kind of bias the new analysis brings out.

Kerrich most likely didn’t discover the bias because some other part of his coin-tossing procedure ensured randomness. And, indeed, in a large number of trials, if there’s no bias in the starting condition (approximately equal numbers of coins are “heads” or “tails” when tossed), there will be no bias in the aggregate result—even given this finding.*

More to the point, the practical value of this finding seems minimal. The most obvious application—wagering—is precluded because no casino game that I’m aware of uses coin flips, though it’s possible that the ball in roulette and dice in craps may be similarly biased—again, given a known starting position, something that is rare in roulette at least (as the ball is under the control of the casino staff rather than the wagerers).

James Joyner isn’t quite convinced of Jeff Jenkins’ argument that John Kerry is more conservative relative to Democratic presidents (historically) than George Bush is liberal, using Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal’s NOMINATE method. James writes:

The problem I have with Poole’s coding methodology is that it’s excessively time bound. To compare Bush 43 to Reagan or Kerry to Carter ignores massive shifts in public opinion during those time periods. The “center” is not a spot on a map; it’s a median of current attitudes.

There are actually two versions of Poole and Rosenthal’s methodology. The version Jenkins apparently used for his analysis (from the description in the article) is called W-NOMINATE, and only looks at a particular Congressional session (e.g. the 107th Congress, from 2001 to 2003). There’s a second version, called DW-NOMINATE, that allows comparisons over time between Congresses. In other words, using W-NOMINATE is inappropriate for comparisons over time.* James goes on to write:

I’d think the ACU/ADA ratings are much more useful than Poole’s, since the comparison is made against one’s contemporaries.

Actually, ACU and ADA ratings are essentially interchangeable with W-NOMINATE first dimension scores. But I think James is critiquing Jenkins for something that Jenkins actually didn’t do (even though the article might lead you to think he did).

It seems to me there are two related questions here: is Bush more extreme than Kerry? and, are Bush and Kerry more extreme relative to their partisan predecessors? The first question was pretty clearly answered by Jenkins in the article. The second can’t be answered by the W-NOMINATE method that Jenkins used—which, given his indication that he deliberately simplified the analysis (by using W-NOMINATE instead of DW-NOMINATE), makes it seem odd that he tried to make comparisons over time. The question I think Jenkins answered is “are Bush and Kerry more extreme relative to predecessor presidents vis à vis the Congresses they faced”—and, for that comparison, W-NOMINATE or ADA/ACU scores would work equally as well.

Update: Jeff Jenkins has a comment at Dan’s place that clarifies the situation; he did use DW-NOMINATE for the interyear comparisons, but that point was lost in the editing process. So ignore the above paragraph. ☺ He has some interesting points too in regard to Poole and Rosenthal’s book, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting.

Also worth pointing out is the forthcoming APSR piece by Doug Rivers, Josh Clinton, and Simon Jackman, “The Statistical Analysis of Roll-Call Data”. There's also a recent issue of Political Analysis in which all of the articles were on ideal-point estimation (which is the technical term for NOMINATE and the Rivers-Clinton-Jackman approach). And, if you want to do it yourself, Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn have included the Rivers-Clinton-Jackman procedure in their MCMCpack package for GNU R.

I previously discussed Kerry’s ideology here. Dan Drezner also discusses the article in question here.

Today’s Clarion-Ledger has an article on the continued difficulty some large-county legislators are having getting an exception to the statewide ban on county sheriffs using radar.

The status of all the various bills is here, while the current law is here.

As Steven Taylor notes in the latest Toast-O-Meter, there’s a primary to be held this Tuesday in Mississippi and three other Southern states. Democratic frontrunner and presumptive nominee John Kerry will be campaigning in Jackson tomorrow at a black church and Tougaloo College.

Steven Taylor, prompted by the Invisible Adjunct, observes that the appropriateness of lecturing versus using a seminar format is largely determined by three factors:

1) the level of the course (e.g., intro, advanced undergrad, grad), 2) the subject matter, and 3) the size of the class.

I’d broadly agree with Steven. All three of these factors are highly correlated; relatively straightforward subject matter is generally taught at an introductory level in large classes, while more complex subject matter usually involves small classes taught at an advanced level. The exceptions—notably the “honors seminar” version of intro—work because there’s an underlying assumption that the students in the course are already familiar with most of the material that they would have learned in the non-honors course, thus the course is no longer a true “intro” course.

Starting this summer, Mississippi’s getting a new area code—769—which will overlay the 601 area code in central Mississippi. Amazingly, Mississippi only had one area code until 1997. (Everything you’d ever want to know about area codes is here.)

To borrow a phrase from another Sci-Fi series, wa-HOOO! But, yeah, I’d like the TV show back too…

A recent addition to SN‘s blogroll is the self-described Hot Abercrombie Chick!, Amanda. She seems to attract very weird commenters. She also received this email, which is just downright odd… but, since I’m bored, I’ll put my limited matchmaking skills to work to fulfill this gentleman’s request.

Here’s the punchline from Steve Verdon:

I used to have quite a bit of respect for Krugman. Now I see him as a despicable, low-life, partisan jackass.

Read the whole thing for the rest. It’s pretty sad.