Steven Taylor has posted the most recent iteration of the infamous Toast-O-Meter.

Lily Malcolm visited her local Radio Shack and CompUSA stores today, and came back with this nugget of knowledge:

If the CompUSA people really knew much about computers, they wouldn’t be working at CompUSA.

In all seriousness, there are a number of solutions to the problem of getting data from one’s old computer to one’s new computer. If both computers have an Ethernet jack, the preferred option is to either (a) connect both computers to an Ethernet hub or switch using regular Ethernet cables or (b) get a “crossover Ethernet cable.” You can also get something flashy that will walk you through the procedure, like LapLink, but I’m pretty sure the basic software is built into recent versions of Windows… you may need to set up “Home Networking” to do it.

Me? I usually just pull the hard drive out of the old PC, slap it in the new one, and copy the files that way. It’s normally faster, but far more intimidating for the novice.

Greg Goelzhauser at Crescat Sententia considers the use and abuse of behavioral economics by legal scholars, jumping off from this interview with Berkeley economist Matthew Rabin. Greg writes:

That humans fall prey to a variety of heuristics is nothing new or extraordinary. What is important for law and economics is if some of these heuristics lead the relevant actors to systematically err in their decisionmaking. Unfortunately, many of those writing in the behavioral law and economics field care little about whether the actors they are concerned with actually rely on the heuristics attributed to them or, if they do so happen to rely, whether reliance actually leads to systematic error. The reason? These are often difficult empirical questions.

I’m not sure that this is an accurate characterization of what a heuristic is; it’s not simply a matter of “falling prey” to them, as many are reasonable shortcuts. You assume that the store with the cheapest price on a product is advertising it, rather than calling every store in town. Instead of digging through the platforms to find the most stridently anti-war presidential candidate, you assume the candidate making the most noise about the war is that candidate.

Now, as Tversky and Kahneman have pointed out, some heuristics do lead to systematic, non-random error. And some of those errors are big enough that the cost associated with the error is larger than the deadweight loss of not using the heuristic (calling every store in the world or spending hours reading the minutae of Lyndon LaRouche’s campaign platform).

Greg’s larger point—that social scientists and legal scholars often assume away the “difficult empirical questions” associated with determining whether systematic error exists—is well-taken, but I think characterizing heuristics as something we “fall prey” to assumes away the more important question of whether the systematic error involved in using heuristics outweighs the costs we avoid by using them.

It seems the “enterprise web filter software” that Brock tested in September isn’t the only popular censorware product that blocks a large number of weblogs; Eric of Classical Values took SonicWALL’s web filter for a spin and, shall we say, was unimpressed. (Link via Tim Sandefur.)

The Baseball Crank has all the nasty stuff the Republicans never got to say about Howard Dean neatly collected in a single post. It might come in handy, just in case Dean ever tries to get elected to the city council in your town.

Brock Sides points out a public policy reason for states to subsidize universities (one that I thought about, but didn’t mention, in my prior post):

State support of higher education may be a rational investment by the state in its own tax base.

There is some merit in this argument, if the marginal increase in tax receipts due to residents’ higher education exceeds the amount of subsidy required—bearing in mind that, ceteris peribus, many of those residents would have gotten a collegiate education anyway. And it’s certainly an empirically-testable proposition, although one that’s difficult to examine in a single blog post.*

Anyway, as a graduate of two state universities and as someone with about a 70% chance of working for a state-supported institution next year (under the completely unreasonable assumption that I have an equal chance of being offered every single job I’ve applied for), self-interest—if nothing else—compels an end to this discussion.

John Cole is right to be disgusted by ex-Colorado coach Gary Barnett’s remarks about former CU player Katie Hnida, who was allegedly raped by one of her former teammates. Barnett said, apparently in response to an inquiry from a reporter as to the reason for Ms. Hnida’s departure from the team (and transfer to New Mexico) in 2000:

It was obvious Katie was not very good. She was awful. ... Katie was not only a girl, she was terrible. OK? There’s no other way to say it.

Not only does the comment show a lack of seriousness by Barnett, it also makes me question his abilities as a coach and leader. Good coaches don’t speak ill about their players in public; that’s close to the cardinal rule of coaching. What a dipshit, and good riddance.

More on this story in Friday’s New York Times.

Matt Stinson thinks Julian Sanchez’s argument by analogy on the term “unborn child” fails. Julian argues:

If you don’t share their view about the moral status of the fetus, that’s like calling a pile of bricks an “unbuilt house” or, for that matter, a blank screen an “unwritten blog post.” Let’s not give them this one.

On the other hand, Matt says:

I’m pro-life, though not stridently so, but would a pile of bricks, without human action, begin to form a house over a period of nine months, unless you smashed those bricks down with a sledgehammer, and would a blog post begin to appear on that blank screen unless you pressed the delete key repeatedly?

Luckily enough, however, Smokey the Bear may still call discarded lit cigarettes “potential forest fires.” Or something. Semantics was never my strong suit…

Will Baude is the latest to jump into the public universities argument (roughly between Jack Balkin and the Volokh conspirators); Will writes:

I don’t particularly have a problem with government involvement in the private education market—either through direct subsidy (which is probably unnecessary) or through regulating the likely capital market failure. In other words, government-guaranteed student loans are great; a “graduate tax” could accomplish the same thing.

I used to generally agree with Will on this point; however, I’ve come to think that government subsidies—like guaranteed student loans, Pell grants, and student loan interest credits—make public and private universities insensitive to price as a rationing mechanism. This leads to much of the same problem we see in the health care market: most consumers don’t discriminate on the basis of price, because they have no personal stake in the price of service. In the case of higher education, the problem is more subtle, as at least there are direct costs to the consumer—they just aren’t felt until after college, due to in-school deferments of loan interest and principal payments. Regardless, this allows universities to increase tuition and fees at rates well in excess of inflation.

The disconnect between price and demand also allows universities to use price as a “prestige” factor; although virtually nobody actually pays $40,000 a year to go to Harvard, the price premium makes it appear as if you’re getting a better education than you would paying $15,000 to go to Americana State University. (You probably do get a better education at Harvard, but I suspect the premium is not worth $100,000.)

There are good reasons to criticize public subsidies of state universities—particularly in a poor state like Mississippi—but public subsidy of colleges and universities in general bears considerable scrutiny as well.

Update: Will Baude responds:

One thing to think about—

The reason, in general, that American[a] State U has a tuition of 15,000 to Harvard's 40,000 has a lot to do with the subsidies that American State provides to its U. To be sure, some private colleges are cheaper than others, but lots of kids I knew did indeed take price (and their financial aid packages) into account when choosing between them. And the diversity of price in private universities is pretty small—I don't know whether that's due to a universal-ness of costs (I doubt it) or more likely because demand is fairly price-inelastic. While it's true that subsidies (and to a lesser degree, loans) encourage that elasticity, it's not actually clear that's bad. On the one hand, some kids go to Harvard who really should have gone to Miss. But on the other hand, some kids go to Miss who otherwise wouldn't have gone at all.

Just a thought.

My experience as an undergrad (granted, 5+ years ago) was that there was more price differentiation among private universities; I know the tuition at Rose-Hulman was significantly lower than that of Georgetown, and the price differential was more than could be justified on the basis of cost of living differences between D.C. and Indiana (not to mention that Rose-Hulman is a superior academic institution to Georgetown). There may be less differentiation among elite-tier private institutions like Chicago, Stanford, and the Ivys, however (some of that used to be due to now-illegal agreements among the Ivys to limit financial aid awards to exceptional students).

Now it is true that price does matter to some people, even with government subsidies (both to universities and students). On the other hand, I find it difficult to justify subsidizing a flagship public university like Ole Miss on the backs of working class people; that being said, Ole Miss may be something of an aberration in this regard, although I suspect a number of other colleges, like the University of Alabama, Auburn, and LSU, are similar “blue blood” state universities (to say nothing of elite-level state universities like UC-Berkeley and Michigan, which are far more selective).

Alex Tabarrok endorses an econometrics text that makes two rather bold simplifying assumptions:

Stock and Watson use a “robust” estimator of standard errors right from the beginning. This means that they can dump an entire chapter on hetereoskedasticity and methods of “correcting” for hetereoskedasticity (these rarely worked in any case.)

They do not waste time discussing the difference between the t-distribution and the normal-distribution. Instead, they assume reasonably large datasets from the get-go and base their theorems on large-sample theory.

I can sort-of-see the value of always using heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors (although I think it’s better to model the heteroskedasticity if you can), but dispensing with the t distribution seems to be a bridge too far. Large sample theory is nice, but (a) common econometrics software (e.g. Stata, LIMDEP, and R) uses the t distribution even into sample sizes in the 100s, so you need to discuss it anyway, and (b) there are plenty of theorems that can only be tested with small samples due to data limitations. Now, these may be less problematic in the large-n world that economists inhabit, but I’d have real trouble justifying such a text for a graduate seminar in political science methods (undergrads rarely get beyond bivariate regression).

Since John Kerry’s alleged “zipper problem” has been debunked, Andrew Sullivan notes that Sid Blumenthal (not to be confused with Atrios) thinks John Kerry should sue the Sun for libel. Funnily enough, Jeffrey Archer had much the same idea under similar circumstances, but it didn’t quite work out the way he planned…

Update: Conrad has thoughts in a similar vein. And thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link!

CalPundit and Steve Verdon are among those noting a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists over the Bush administration’s use and alleged abuse of science. Steve writes:

Personally I think the notion of impartiality is misleading. All scientists have their own views on the issues and particularly the area they are researching. ... Of course, the fact that scientists and researchers themselves have their own views and biases does not let the Bush Administration off the hook when it comes to possibly distorting science. However, it cannot be ignored that the Union of Concerned Scientists can also be said to have an agenda and that this agenda may be playing a role as well in this report when that agenda diverges from the agenda of the Bush Administration.

There’s not much to disagree with in either post, but something to bear in mind is that science is always politicized when it is used to make political decisions; there’s no way around it. For example, if a hypothetical study shows that tightening emissions standards will save 3000 lives a year, but cost consumers $100 billion per life saved, politics is going to decide which figure gets emphasized.

Update: More at the Dead Parrot Society.

Michael Jennings has uncovered a bit of a visual oxymoron over at TransportBlog.

David Pinto has a revenue sharing plan for baseball:

I’ve felt for a long time that what baseball needs is a competitive form of revenue sharing. Teams would be paid for their road games based on how many people they brought in, not just in the stadium, but for the TV and radio audiences as well. This would encourage teams to sign an Alex Rodriguez, since they would make money from the fans he would draw on the road.

Something vaguely similar happens in college football—road teams in non-conference games normally get an appearance fee. Something like that makes sense for baseball as a revenue-sharing mechanism—after all, George Steinbrenner wouldn’t be making much money if the Yankees didn’t play opponents at home. Someone more awake than me will have to figure out the fairest way of implementing such a system; my guess is that, unreliable as they are, tying the “opponent share” to the existing TV and radio ratings is the way to go.

Wonkette has the exit poll numbers:

Kerry 38
Edwards 33
Dean 17

Maybe we will have a real contest after all…

If you’ve been following Outkast’s advice for developing your instant photos, the folks at Polaroid say you may be damaging them. My recommendation: shake it like a 1980’s-vintage Late Night “Viewer Mail” letter instead.*

Also worthwhile: the Peanuts “Hey Ya” video. No, seriously.

Professor Bainbridge notes a very marked contrast between John Kerry’s rhetoric on the campaign trail and what his aides have been telling lobbyists about Kerry’s bona fides.

Apparently this weekend’s theme in the blogosphere is registration required. Apropos of that: our friends at the CA are going to start requiring registration in the near future.

I haven’t waded into the big war between Randy Barnett, Prof. Bainbridge, Brett Marston, and others over the proper role of the courts; that isn’t to say I’m not interested, just that I haven’t had a chance to sit down and really articulate what I think. Then again, anyone who knows of my affinity for Federalist 10 would probably be able to guess that I’m firmly on the Barnett/Marston side of the debate. For another perspective, see Steven Taylor’s latest post.

Happy first anniversary to PoliBlog!

Brock rather optimistically wrote below:

The presumptive nominee, John Kerry, deserves credit for voting in favor of NAFTA. I hope he has the courage to stick by what he knows is true: that tariffs and other protectionist measures do more harm to the country than good.

Brock apparently missed tonight’s Democratic debate, in which Kerry virtually repudiated NAFTA by advocating wider use of its environmental and labor side-agreements for protectionist ends—even though, in fairness, he was the best of a horrible field on that score. I’ll let Alex Knapp speak for me on Democrats’ commitment to our nation’s international agreements on trade:

You know, for a bunch of people who criticized Bush for being unilateral on military issues, they sure are eager to act unilaterally in rescinding our international obligations on trade issues. Or does international law not mean anything to these candidates?

Of course, since France is also a highly protectionist country, any issue where we agree with France but repudiate agreements with other countries apparently doesn’t meet the Democratic definition of “unilateral”.

Prof. Jim Lindgren of Northwestern dropped me an email responding to this post*. Lindgren writes:

I appreciate your thoughtful comments on Somin's note posted on the Volokh Conspiracy.

As you know but your readers might not, the two leading academic cross-sectional surveys are the American National Election Studies (ANES) from the Univ. of Michigan (which Somin used) and the General Social Survey (GSS) from the University of Chicago (which I used in my note to Instapundit). Political scientists naturally tend to use the ANES, while sociologists tend to use the GSS, with the rest of the social sciences using both to a substantial extent.

Each have their advantages and disadvantages. In my opinion, because the ANES is taken around the time of national elections, it is better for understanding elections and voting. Because the GSS is not taken around election time, it is better for understanding how large political groups, including Republicans and conservatives, tend to think at times other than the few months on either side of a national election. For this reason, the GSS trends in political orientation tend to be far more stable than the ANES data on this question, which are unreliable in their high variability from election to election. [Greg Caldeira (political science, Ohio State) and I are doing a paper on this phenomenon.]

Your observation about independent leaners behaving more like party adherents than weak identifiers as a Republican or a Democrat is true of voting as revealed in the ANES. It is not true as a generalization for issues across the board (it varies by issue).

For example, in the 1994–2002 GSS, independents who lean Democratic are like Republicans in their high performance on vocabulary and analogical reasoning tests. Leaners to either party tend to fall between Republicans and Democrats in their educational level. Independents who do not lean either way usually score down with the Democrats, either below them or between strong and not too strong Democrats.

That is why my analyses usually discuss types of people, rather than treating liberalism/conservatism and party identification as left/right ordinal or interval variables.

First, I’d like to thank Prof. Lindgren for his correspondence.

Second, I’d like to clarify that I advisedly used the word behavior; opinionation (such as issue positions) and attitude-holding are not behavior, and it is true that the relationship Bartels notes between party identification as measured by the “standard” 7-point scale and voting behavior may not apply to opinionation or attitude-holding.

I think the observations about Democrats are interesting, because I suspect they reflect a bifurcation in “strong Democratic” identifiers: on the one hand, you have groups who are identified with the Democrats on the basis of social affiliation, such as the poor, most minority groups, the working class, and organized labor; on the other, you have highly-educated people with “social consciences” who have a more psychological attachment to the Democratic party on the basis of ideology. This certainly doesn’t seem like an original observation, although I’m not sure anyone has shown it empirically rather than impressionistically (citations welcome).

In other viewer mail, another Chicago correspondent—Debian developer/economist Dirk Eddelbuettel—notes an article in a recent week’s Economist ($) on statistical significance versus substantive significance, a distinction social scientists probably need to pay more attention to. (Also see this week’s letters page.)

Somehow I missed Eugene Volokh’s post on the whole “conservatives are stupid” kerfuffle. There are a few caveats in order with this use of ANES data:

1. Partisanship is not ideology. While the two concepts are correlated highly in the United States, a “strong Republican” is not necessarily a conservative. (The correlation has improved over time, however, as the South has dealigned.) The ANES does include an ideology item.
2. The partisanship scale used by the ANES has a weird inflection point noted by Larry Bartels several years ago: “weak identifiers” are generally more independent in their behavior than “independent leaners.”
3. Political knowledge is not general knowledge (as Volokh’s correspondent notes). Again, while general knowledge is correlated with political knowledge, the latter is only one component of the former.
4. There are numerous disputes over whether “quiz-type” political knowledge questions properly tap overall respondent knowledge about politics. Read chapter 2 of my dissertation if you need all the morbid details. Read the appendix of chapter 4 if you want to see how various types of questions performed in a 1998 Dutch election survey that uses a larger battery of questions than the contemporary ANES (I suppose the Dutch are more willing to subject themselves to quizzes than Americans, although Delli Carpini and Keeter disagree).

The GSS data cited in this InstaPundit post is more dispositive, although I am not as familiar with the GSS—and there may well be caveats that Prof. Lindgren does not mention or is unfamiliar with.

The latest Toast-O-Meter is up with a special Valentine’s Day theme, courtesy of Steven Taylor. As always, it’s the comprehensive review of everything you tried to tune out about the primary campaign over the last seven days.

I’m off shortly to Memphis to argue with Best Buy for what should be a new laptop, probably something Centrino-based (woo-hoo!).

Update: Well, that went well… not.

Seen in my Apache log file just now:

172.200.37.120 – - [14/Feb/2004:01:07:25–0600] “HEAD / HTTP/1.1” 200 – “http://www.drudgereport.com/” “StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004”
172.200.37.120 – - [14/Feb/2004:01:07:28–0600] “HEAD / HTTP/1.1” 200 – “http://www.drudgereport.com/” “StarProse Referrer Advertising System 2004”

Now it’s possible that someone is doing this to discredit Drudge; the IP resolves back to an AOL dynamic IP address, a Google search turns up several sites where anyone can download this tool, and Drudge has plenty of Google PageRank™ already; he doesn’t need to use a referral spammer to boost it.

In any event, I have reported this incident to AOL’s abuse system. Those with particularly devious minds may want to see if this robot will follow a HTTP redirect (301/302) to a bot honeypot or follow an infinite redirect loop.