Marybeth passes on a link to a New Scientist article that indicates some casinos are planning to add RFID tags to their gaming chips in 2004. It seems like an effective way to combat fraud, but I’m not sure it’d do much good for rating players—chips change hands often, and you’d still need to tie the physical location of the player to the chips for it to be useful. I suppose you could do this by implanting an RFID tag in the player’s club card (and figuring out a way to measure proximity of chips to that card), or by having players insert their card into a reader at their seat at the table—which would work at blackjack, 3-card poker, or baccarat, but be problematic for craps or roulette where players normally stand.

One more thing to add to the list for when I become rich and famous (hah!).

Pieter Dorsman of Peaktalk wonders if the United States might be following the path of Canada and the Netherlands, with both the left and the right in those countries becoming disaffected with the centrists who held sway in the 1990s. Definitely a good read. (Digression follows…)

Who says an Ole Miss degree is a ticket to a dead-end career in the retail industry? Not Roosevelt Skerrit, a graduate of the University of Mississippi who is now prime minister of the Carribean island nation of Dominica (not to be confused with the Dominican Republic). Skerrit, 31, received a B.A. in Psychology and English in 1997, and is a former lecturer at Dominica Community College. A little more info is in this AP account and this press release. Very cool.

David Levy reports to Tyler Cowen on Brazil’s laughable implementation of its response to US-VISIT. What I don’t get is: if it’s an indignity for Brazilians (and virtually everyone else in the world who enters the United States) to be photographed by U.S. authorities, how on earth do they reconcile the fact that their own passports include photos?

I’m less convinced by the need for fingerprinting, but I suspect fingerprint matching algorithms are much more reliable than face matching ones, and it certainly seems worthwhile to verify that visa applicants are the same people who actually enter the country.

Steven Taylor has the latest Toast-O-Meter update, live from N‘Orleans (I have to say that Steven’s far more dedicated to his craft than I would be in his stead). And who says political science is irrelevant?

At the Southern Political Science Association meeting this week, Merle Black, professor at Emory University, and expert on Southern Politics, stated that Dean had no chance of winning any of the South in the general election, indeed, assuming no radical events, that none of the Nine would be able to win the South, although Clark might could win Arkansas. The entire panel, all experts on Southern Politics, concurred.

According to the SPSA program, the panel included both Black brothers, Harold Stanley, Hastings Wyber, and Ron Weber, and was moderated by Robert Steed… for those of you keeping score at home.

Something’s wrong with the latest DiTech.com ads—and it’s not the “I lost another loan to DiTech” guy, who—along with the Verizon “Can You Hear Me Now?”† doofus and the thankfully-retired “Dell dude” Steve—has rapidly worn out his welcome.

Link via Kate of Electric Venom.

VK’s Jeep broke down today. The worst part? No, not the $40 cab ride because the tow truck driver wouldn’t let her ride with him (who’s ever heard of that?)... it’s this:

Oh, and did I mention that I’m driving a white minivan until I get my Jeep back? The pain. Oh, the pain.

Well, as someone who learned to drive in a Plymouth Voyager minivan and whose first car was a 1984 Chevrolet Celebrity station wagon… I can honestly say “I feel your pain.” (Karma has been kinder since, however.)

Update: John Jenkins’ first car was a 1986 Pontiac Grand Le Mans station wagon with faux wood paneling. I concede defeat in the crappy car rally (though I think the Grand Le Mans and Celebrity were basically the same body—but my station wagon, bought in 1992, didn’t have wood paneling; instead, it was blue). By the way, after I totalled the Celebrity in 1997, it was replaced with a blue 1989 Buick Regal coupe, which was sold in 2002.

Rick Henderson got XM Satellite Radio for Christmas, and seems to be enjoying it. Even with my “mainstream” musical tastes, I prefer XM to the horrible spot load (radio jargon for number of commercials per hour) and lack of variety of mainstream radio—and judging from the number of satellite radio antennas I’m seeing in Oxford these days, I’m not alone.

Anyway, XM is going to neutralize one of the few advantages its rival Sirius has by removing commercials from 68 of its 70 music channels on February 1st (many of which were already commercial-free—the only “commercially impaired” channels are Viacom’s MTV Radio and VH-1 Radio); now that all of XM’s radio programming is in-house with the launch of Kiss-XM (replacing the incredibly-spot-infested Kiss-FM of Los Angeles), it’s a smart move, as ads really weren’t selling on the music channels. Also cool, if you live in a real city, is the launch of local traffic and weather starting in March. And, last but not least, MSNBC will be added to the dial, so you can get your daily dose of Olbermann or (ick) Imus. All very cool.

Not a paid endorsement—I just love my XM. No more fiddling with CDs or listening to Let Go a thousand times, over and over and over…

As James Joyner notes, we’re now back to Bert on the homeland security scale. Except where we’re not. Clear? Good.

Incidentally, “yellow” is not to be confused with “Amber.” And that’s capital-A Amber, since it’s named after someone (like Code Adam), and has nothing to do with the color amber.

Update: Mike Hollihan has more on this theme.

Andrew Sullivan’s latest screed against the anti-same-sex marriage right contains this gem of reasoning:

[National Review]’s open-ended anyone-can-apply civil unions proposal would be the biggest assault on marriage since no-fault divorce.

That’s right—it’s Covenant marriages for everyone in Sully’s ideal world. Because we all know that it’s better to have people stuck in loveless relationships than to let them out of them.

The funny thing about Sullivan is that even though I agree with him on the merits (even though, as I’ve said before, I don’t buy at all that gay marriage will inherently have a “civilizing effect” on homosexual relationships), every time I read one of his gay marriage posts I find myself reconsidering my position. By this time next year, he may have turned me into a committed opponent at this rate…

The libertarian/modcon reaction to George Bush’s “Mars shot” proposal has been generally negative , Dan Drezner, and Robert Garcia Tagorda for a sampling; the Crescat crew is conflicted, to say the least). And I largely agree—not so much because it’s an inefficient allocation of resources, although it is, but because the “pork” isn’t really a public good.

When Washington earmarks $X million dollars to build a highway in someone’s district, or grants funds for a flashy new federal courthouse somewhere, at least the pork has a public good quality: everyone benefits, or has the potential of benefitting, in a meaningful way. But the space program doesn’t create a public good; instead, it redistributes money from taxpayers to people with “Ph.D.” at the end of their names—Robin Hood in reverse—with only the vague promise that the public will see benefits. (Whatever benefits there are, however, will likely be patented, with the royalties devolving to the contractors—not the government to compensate for the “seed money” from the grants.)

The small upside in this is that at least we’re trying to help Dennis Kucinich find his way back home… who says Americans aren’t a generous people?

Due to a combination of disorganization, lack of interest, and tight finances, I’m not in New Orleans this weekend for the SPSA conference. Steven Taylor, however, is, as are (I presume) a number of friends of mine—and, judging by the emptiness of Deupree Hall this afternoon, all of the Americanists in our department are there too.

It’s nice to hear, at least, that SPSA has found a conference hotel with in-room high-speed Internet access (now, if only the Palmer House in Chicago had it…).

Note to potential presidential candidates: don’t go on obscure Canadian political panel shows—your comments may return from the past to bite you in the ass.

Link via Matt Stinson.

Will Baude is documenting Dan Drezner’s use of profanity in the classroom. I think I’ve used “pissed off” and variants of “shit” in lectures, but never anything stronger. On the other hand, I’m sure my students have used far worse terms in reference to me…

Well, I have to give Howard Dean (or at least his M.D. program) some credit: at least he doesn’t think life begins at childbirth like his fellow Democratic presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark does (also see James Joyner ). Clark not only believes that life begins at childbirth—he thinks that was the Supreme Court’s holding in Roe v. Wade (which, er, it wasn’t—in fact, the court found that third-trimester abortions were almost never constitutionally protected, something often lost in the grand abortion debate). I’m about as pro-choice as they come, but I can’t go so far as to endorse borderline infanticide. Though, I have to say that scholars who buy the legalist model will love Clark’s endorsement of stare decisis as the sole legitimate approach to judicial decision-making.

I think Howard Dean’s advisors had the right idea by telling Dean to shut up for a while. Clark’s problem is that he can’t do the same, because his persona still isn’t well-defined enough.

Kate Malcolm thinks colons are a scourge in academia. Anecdotal point: my vita lists twelve different works (my dissertation, a working paper that I plan to send out for review Monday, and ten conference papers). My dissertation’s title doesn’t contain a colon; the working paper does. Six of the conference papers have colons in their titles; two have a question mark that functions as a colon; and two lack colons completely.

Of the colon titles, though, only two fit the “witty title, sober subtitle” pattern: one was a co-authored piece that I didn’t pick the title for (which is one of the question-mark titles), and the other uses aliteration in the main title. The remainder contain colons because of allusions to other works (two pieces that are extensions or responses to published material), to set up the context that a theory is being tested in (e.g. “Impeaching the President: The Influence of Constituency Support on a Salient Issue,” where the substantive situation being analyzed isn’t the key focus, but it is the “hook” for the theories being tested), or because I wanted to downplay the authoritativeness of the work.

All that being said, colons are probably overused. Perhaps as full-text indexing of journal articles becomes more widely adopted, including the integration of the SSCI into other databases, colons will become less widespread.

Update: One of the co-authors I impugned above, fellow Ole Miss alum Scott Huffmon, writes:

Obviously, an exception should be made for those of us who feel it is both sport and imperative to come up with the most annoying paper titles. I actually had to harass Bobbi [our other co-author] into that title. I told her, “It may sound and look stupid, but I’m not submitting a title without a colon…it’s tradition.” John White and I decided we would try to put as many colons in titles as possible after a guy … wrote a conference paper titled (the post colon subtitle may be off, but the pithy pre-colon title is correct), “How Bubba Votes: The Voting Behavior of Southern White Males.”

I plan to continue my quest for the most annoying and stupid paper title possible by incorporating unneeded colons whenever possible. I stand defiant in the face of your punctuationist discrimination.

Viva la colon!!!

If this doesn’t prove academics have too much time on their hands, nothing will.

I’m a bit late to the story of Pete Rose admitting he bet on baseball—a story that was actually supposed to be embargoed until his appearance on ABC’s Primetime Live, but no matter (earlier reactions include John Cole’s and Michele’s; everyone in my blogroll who has an RSS feed and had something to say about it is listed here) . I think Larry Ribstein’s reaction one of the more interesting, though I don’t think it gets to the heart of the problem with stated betting on baseball.

That Rose bet on games involving the Reds is the big “no-no” issue; if he’d simply bet on other teams, he’d have received a one year suspension. The key question is what is the harm to Baseball from Rose’s bets?—and, by Baseball, I mean the institution that everyone has been saying Rose sullied. Since nobody claims he actually bet against the Reds, it’s hard to charge him with throwing games; he may have had an extra incentive to win in games he wagered on, but that isn’t throwing a game, and unlike other sports baseball betting is normally on the “money line”—you pick straight-up, not against a point spread—so “point shaving” (or “running up the score“) isn’t an issue. (You can also bet other sports, like football, on the money line, but that isn’t very popular.) Rose’s interest as a bettor coincided with his unbiased interest as a manager.

Now, some have argued that because Rose didn’t bet on every single game, and that he apparently got inside information from other managers (including those in the AL—the Reds are an NL team, and before interleague play intelligence on AL teams was pretty useless for NL managers), his behavior is somehow corrupting to Baseball. Because Rose didn’t bet on all games involving the Reds, the argument is that bookies knew that the Reds were less likely to win the game. Even if that’s true, it’s hard to see how Baseball is harmed. The victim is whoever was on the losing side of the bets lodged by Rose’s bookies because of the informational advantage they had—unless Baseball was betting on games, they weren’t harmed at all. Similarly, Rose’s intelligence on other teams only harmed other bettors—not Baseball. And, ultimately, since virtually everyone who was involved was violating numerous state and federal laws against sports wagering—the harm was to people who were already engaging in illegal conduct. If a thief breaks into a drug dealer’s house and steals his TV, the thief’s criminal act doesn’t absolve the dealer for buying home electronics from the proceeds of his own illegal act.

Now, there are other reasonable arguments against Rose’s betting: that it potentially created the appearance of corruption: for example, that it placed him in a position where he might be able to throw games to have his gambling debts reduced. But there doesn’t seem to be evidence that Rose threw games—and, in general I find “appearance of corruption” arguments specious. You can also argue that Rose harmed Baseball as an institution by denying the allegations for 14 years and impugning the credibility of his accusers and other opponents, including then-NBC reporter Jim Gray (who now spends his time about as far up Kobe Bryant’s ass as Ahmad Rashad was up Michael Jordan’s). And Rose’s frequent appearances in Cooperstown, New York haven’t exactly endeared him to the MLB brass. But Rose’s betting, alone, apparently had no ill effects on Baseball.

Update: John Jenkins disagrees with my assessment, as does David Wright via email; both raise essentially the same point (I'll quote John’s post):

Rose's gambling on the Reds changed the way Rose managed games. Baseball has a 162-game season. When Rose had money riding on a game, he would obviously be managing to win that game at the expense of future games. Suppose Rose was clinging to a one-run game going into the ninth and his closer had pitched the last three days straight and his arm was sore. Rose might pitch the guy to win that game because he had money on it, and then cost the team 3 games over the next 2 weeks that they could have won if that pitcher could have rested that day.

I do agree that having money riding on the game might pervert Rose’s incentive structure—and my overlooking that fact may go to show you how much I really care about baseball as a game. On the other hand, Rose’s mediocrity as a manager is such that he might have made decisions that were weak over the long term anyway, even without the monetary incentive to do so.

Another update: Brian of Redbird Nation makes a compelling case for a shorter-than-lifetime ban for Pete Rose.

If you sent me any email between Monday night and Tuesday evening, roughly from midnight to 6:00 PM CST, and it was important (and/or you expected a reply), please send it again.

Thanks!

Michelle Branch is the latest celebrity who I can’t take home to Mom, thanks to the friendly folks at Maxim (link probably not work-safe)—even under the massively hypothetical circumstance that I had a shot.

In other MB news, if you like her latest single “Breathe,” you can get seven different remixes of the song in addition to the album cut on an “EP” CD. Funny how the vinyl lingo still persists in the music industry…

The Memphis Commercial Appeal reports that, despite rumors that Ole Miss head coach David Cutcliffe is on the shortlist in the latest iteration of the Nebraska head coaching search, Pete Boone hasn’t gotten any calls seeking permission to interview Cut. I rather think Cutcliffe—whose reputation is mostly as a quarterbacks and pro-style offense guru—is a poor fit for Nebraska and its option-oriented attack; then again, Cutcliffe is 3–2 against the Big 12 since coming to Ole Miss—with both losses (and one win) coming against Texas Tech, so he’d probably do OK in that conference, and Nebraska probably has much deeper pockets than Ole Miss does.

All that said, I can’t see Cutcliffe going to Nebraska—the scrutiny is just too intense in Lincoln, if the Solich firing is anything to judge by. By contrast, all Cut has to do in Oxford is have a winning SEC record next year (admittedly, not something I’d wager much money on, even with a favorable schedule); if he manages that, he’ll probably be elevated to the height of Johnny Vaught in the Ole Miss coaching pantheon.

First we have MoveOn.org’s silliness; now, Matt Stinson and Dan Drezner rightly are among those who condemn Ralph Peters for his absurdly over-the-top, not to mention downright offensive, New York Post column that explicitly compares Howard Dean’s followers on the Internet with the Gestapo and brownshirts. It’s sure going to be a busy week for the PR wings of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL…

Peter Northrop of Crescat Sententia considers whether or not Britney Spears would have benefitted from a college education. Of course, the snarker in me would speculate that Ms. Spears would have attended Louisiana State University, given her affinity for the institution, despite rumors that she is a fan of Ole Miss quarterback Eli Manning—I’ll leave the rest of the joke to you.*

Snarkiness aside, I don’t think it is necessary or sufficient for people to have an undergraduate education, even though it would certainly be in my economic interest for more people to go to college (as it would increase the demand for political scientists), and I suspect much of the attitudinal maturity associated with college education has more to do with the experience of being “on one’s own” for four years than it does with the undergraduate curriculum.

Update: It turns out that Mr. Alexander attends Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, better known as “the place where I-12 and I-55 intersect.” Trivia point: SELU is part of the burgeoning “University of Louisiana” system,† but didn’t adopt the name (unlike UL-Lafayette and UL-Monroe).

The California Yankee has been keeping up with developments in the rather unusual Supreme Court case known as M. K. B. v. Warden, et al..

Link via VodkaPundit, who has two theories on why the case is being hidden from public view. Also see the New York Times account by Linda Greenhouse (linked by Ca. Yankee in another post).

Try as they might, MoveOn.org’s webmasters seem to have trouble keeping “Bush=Hitler” videos off their website. Matthew Stinson thinks the organization is rapidly becoming the John Birch Society or Council of Conservative Citizens of the left, while One Fine Jay ponders whether or not MoveOn.org is a “mainstream” Democratic organization.

Then again, we all know Bush is the worst Reichschancellor in history, so maybe they have a point…