In Thursday’s New York Times, columnist David Pogue gives a pretty favorable review to Amazon.com’s new e-book reader, the Kindle. Certainly the idea of having a tablet on which I can carry around all the journals and books in my office is pretty darn appealing—if the content were there, for either Amazon’s offering or Sony’s Reader. Thus far, though, the offerings seem to be targeted more to bookworms than people who read hundreds of pages a week because they have to.

I guess a mix of Google Scholar, Google Books, an e-Reader, and affordable access to content—I’m not going to pay good money to read articles and books that I’m entitled to free or inexpensive access to already as an academic researcher—combined with the convenient access to content in Kindle is what I’m looking for. Maybe Amazon can deliver that for academics in the future; until then, I’ll probably be taking a pass.

For your amusement, here’s a link to my flyer for my public opinion and voting behavior class in the spring. Enrollment is currently at 14/25; hopefully I can get it to the max going into the semester, so it stabilizes around 20–22 once the drop period passes. Southern politics in the spring is already maxxed out at 35; the 8 am American politics class is lagging well behind, but I’m not sure if freshmen have registered yet (early MWF classes in general don’t have great enrollments, it seems).

ICPSR apparently has a new brochure they’re sending out to potential donors to the Warren Miller Scholars Fund, featuring a lengthy quote from yours truly. It’s always a real honor to be mentioned alongside one of the giants who laid the groundwork for modern public opinion and voting research, the basic concepts from whose work (along with that of his collaborators like Philip Converse and others who worked in the same era like V.O. Key and Anthony Downs) permeate pretty much everything I do as a teacher and a scholar, and it’s always a big challenge to measure up to that comparison.

In retrospect, maybe that’s the quote I should have given them for the brochure. Live and learn.

On the rumor blog, someone came up with a new game for the November “no interview” blahs: list the three jobs you most wanted that you applied for this year that you wanted but didn’t get interviews for. Post your contributions there, not here.

Well, it turns out I’m not teaching Congress after all in the spring; instead, for a variety of reasons too boring to go much into (mostly having to do with distribution requirements within the political science major), the king of the schedule and I decided that I should teach POLA 618, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior, instead.

A book list will be forthcoming. Hopefully I can intercept things before the bookstore orders a bazillion copies of Unorthodox Lawmaking et al.

This explains that. My inner spidey sense wonders if it would have passed in Orleans Parish post-Katrina; my eyeballing of the precinct numbers says no.

I ended up doing more of a book overhaul than I planned for the spring. The least change: American Government got all four books I mentioned in the previous post.

I ended up with a net add to Congress, bringing the grand total up to seven books. I will probably emphasize Analyzing Congress as the primary readings for the subjects it covers and demote the overlap in Congress and Its Members to supplemental readings, but I couldn’t get rid of the interbranch and policy stuff from the latter. Other than edition updates, I added a new CQ book, All Roads Lead to Congress, as a complement to Sinclair’s Unorthodox Lawmaking. Never before have my professional interests and hobbies intersected so well.

Southern politics ended up with a net loss in the requirements column and a hold on the total book list length. Jettisoned are Woodard’s The New Southern Politics—I could justify it in a course on contemporary southern politics, but my class isn’t quite that, instead being more of a “REP + parties in the south” syllabus—and Bullock and Rozell, the latter just simply because the group presentations make their readings redundant. Added to the required readings is Black and Black’s Rise of Southern Republicans, because I realized this semester that my readings really didn’t cover anything between 1985 and 2000, especially with Woodard ditched. Bass and de Vries’ Transformation of Southern Politics makes the “recommended” list, joining Key, since I decided to add some reserve readings from it.

Next stop: syllabus tweaks.

Laura at 11D interacts with her baby-sitter and discovers a certain lack of rigor in courses at a local community college, leading to the following inquiries:

More students are in college than ever before. But how many of them are getting degrees that mean something? Why aren’t they ticked off that they are spending thousands on empty degrees? Why are the colleges not enforcing some rigor?

I’m sure Prof. Karlson would attribute many of these problems to the “access-accommodation-remediation-retention” model being followed at the lower and middle tiers of contemporary academe, but I’m not sure the fault isn’t in ourselves and the incentive to overindulge our students. My observation, which I posted at 11D, follows:

I think to many kids, college education these days is all about getting the credential, even at good schools (several different departments I interviewed with last year had the same observation, including at some very good schools). The fact that they don’t have to work very hard, or the expectations are low, is a feature, not a bug. Coupled with the over-reliance on student evaluations in decisions on faculty retention, tenure, and promotion, the incentive structure for faculty to teach rigorous courses just isn’t there.

I’m sure there’s more to the story than the demand side of the equation—certainly there exist departments and colleges where there is no institutional commitment to maintaining a high quality of instruction, and the AARR model isn’t blameless either—but students who don’t demand good classes probably won’t get them.

I just found out that my presentation proposal for the 2008 APSA Teaching and Learning Conference in San Jose next February was accepted. Now I just need to figure out how to get away from school for the weekend.

You can now subscribe to comments in your feed reader of choice on most Blogger blogs in Firefox by going into the particular comment thread and clicking on the little “feed” icon and choosing the last “Atom” feed listed. (There is also a direct link at the bottom of some, but not all, Blogger blogs to do this.)

I also updated the market paranoia PSA recently, with links to all the rumor blogs I know about and the current and 06–07 wikis. As always, I remind readers that I am not the proprietor of any of said blogs or the wikis.

Prof. Shugart reports on the failure of the Ontario ballot measure which would have changed to a mixed electoral system, previously discussed here. As it happens, I ended up weaving a bit of his analysis into my (8 a.m.!) lecture on demands for electoral reform in plurality jurisdictions—the topic of the bulk of Chapter 2 of David Farrell’s Electoral Systems textbook.

In seeming parallel with Prof. Shugart’s thoughts, I note that this month’s PS symposium on electoral reform in the states omits any article-length discussion of alternative electoral systems. Certainly the emphasis on this side of the 49th parallel is on (seemingly) nonpartisan administration and redistricting issues, rather than any perceived unfairness of plurality elections per se.

The upside of having taught everything under the sun in American politics (well, except parties and interest groups and the presidency) is having zero new preps in the spring. Maybe I’ll have a double upside and not have to spend 50% of the semester on airplanes like I did last year.

The lineup: American Government, Southern Politics, and Congress. For my own sanity and to free up some more time to work on research, I expect minimal tweaks from the last time I taught these courses.

The most likely changes for Congress are culling a book (it’s between Congress and Its Members and Congress Reconsidered, most likely the former due to overlap with Analyzing Congress, even though I may sneak back in some of the inter-branch relations material from the former) and replacing one Fenno book with another (out: Congress at the Grassroots, in: Congressional Travels).

For American Government, I may ditch The Right Nation in favor of bringing back Fiorina’s Culture War, or I may figure out a way to use both. I’m about 98% sure I’ll be sticking with The Logic of American Politics and its companion volume, Principles and Practice.

Except for some syllabus reordering, I’ll probably stick with my current Southern Politics readings.

A tale of two (or possibly more) morons:

• Apparently fake hate speech.
• Apparently real hate speech (although I can’t quite figure out how staging a walkout of classes functions as a plausible protest of anything that didn’t take place in that particular classroom).

In response to an Orin Kerr post about a grade complaint lawsuit against the University of Massachusetts, Megan McArdle asks why professors use curves in the first place:

[W]hy do faculty, particularly at the undergraduate level where the task is mastery of a basic body of knowlege, set exams where the majority of the students can’t answer a majority of the questions? Or, conversely, as I’ve also seen happen, where the difference between an A and a C is a few points, because everyone scored in the high 90’s? Is figuring out what your students are likely to know really so hard for an experienced teacher?

I’ve spent a lot of time the last four years looking into psychometric theory as part of my research on measurement (you can read a very brief primer here, or my working paper here), so I think I can take a stab at an answer. Or, a new answer: I’ve blogged a little about grading before at the macro level; you might want to read that post first to see where I’m coming from here.

The fundamental problem in test development is to measure the student’s domain-specific knowledge, preferably about things covered in the course. We measure this knowledge using a series of indicators—responses to questions—which we hope will tap this knowledge. There is no way, except intuition, to know a priori how well these questions work; once we have given an exam, we can look at various statistics that indicate how well each question performs as a measure of knowledge, but the first time the question is used it’s pure guesswork. And, we don’t want to give identical exams multiple times, because fraternities and sororities on most campuses have giant vaults full of old exams.

So we are always having to mix in new questions, which may suck. If too many of the questions suck—if almost all of the students get them right or get them wrong, or the good students do no better than the poor students on them—we get an examination that has a very flat grade distribution for reasons other than “all the students have equal knowledge of the material.”

It turns out in psychometric theory that the best examinations have questions that all do a good job of distinguishing good from bad students (they have high “discrimination”) and have a variety of difficulty levels, ranging from easy to hard. Most examinations don’t have these properties; the people who write standardized tests like the SAT, ACT, and GRE spend lots of time and effort on these things and have thousands of exams to work with, and even they don’t achieve perfection—that’s why they don’t report “raw” scores on the exams, instead reporting “standardized” scores that make them comparable over time.

If you go beyond simple true/false and multiple choice tests, the problems become worse; grading essays can be a bit of a nightmare. Some people develop really detailed rubrics for them; my tendency is to grade fairly holistically, with a few self-set guidelines for how to treat common problems consistently (defined point ranges for issues like citation problems, grammar and style, and the like).

So, we curve and otherwise muck with the grade distribution to correct these problems. Generally speaking, after throwing out the “earned F” students (students who did not complete all of the assignments and flunked as a result), I tend to aim for an average “curved” grade in the low 80s and try to assign grades based on the best mapping between the standard 90–80-70–60 cutoffs and GPAs. It doesn’t always work out perfectly, but in the end the relative (within-class) and absolute grades seem to be about right.

Update: More on grading from Orin Kerr here.

Using the SWIPE Toolkit, I found out what Big Brother knew about me in Chicago due to the barcode on my name tag:

103396//CHRISTOPHER/LAWRENCE//TULANE UNIVERSITY/309 NORMAN MEYER BUILDING//NEW ORLEANS/LA/701185698/UNITED STATES/5048628309//3149771462/C$N$LAWRENCE@GMAIL$COM/APSAPM07/

Nothing you couldn’t have figured out with Google, I suppose.

Via Megan McArdle: are you smarter than a freshman at Harvard?

The big football news this week is that everyone’s (well, everyone except Bill Simmons’) least favorite football coach, Bill Belichick, was caught having an assistant coach videotape defensive signals in Sunday’s Patriots victory over the New York Jets. Speculation about a penalty ranges from draft picks to a Belichick suspension, but to my mind Roger Goddell should be looking to how the NCAA, NASCAR, and soccer leagues around the world punish cheaters: hitting teams in the only thing the Patriots and their owner Bob Krafft really care about—standings and the win-loss record. Make the Pats forfeit their win over the Jets, or force them to—at best—be the #6 seed in the playoffs, in effect forfeiting a potential bye and playing all their games on the road (assuming they qualify), and the sartorially-challenged self-declared football genius will curb his misbehavior much more quickly than if threatened by mere fines or a meaningless sideline ban.

The big higher education news is SIU president Glenn Poshard’s apparent plagiarism in both his master’s and doctoral theses. If SIU‘s board of trustees had any guts, not only would they can the guy, they’d also revoke his degrees. Unfortunately, being an administration stooge seems to be an essential qualification for board membership at many universities, including at SIU and now at Dartmouth too.

I finished up some revisions to a manuscript and sent it out for review today—one down, two or three more to go.

Any apparent correlation between this burst of productivity and my need to send out job applications in the next couple of weeks is spurious at best.

I got back from APSA in Chicago last night, after a relatively uneventful conference; most of the highlights involved locating the best bar specials on Goose Island 312, although I think I had a few good interactions at the meat market and got a couple of leads on other jobs. It was nice seeing a few old friends here and there, mostly all-too-briefly; with the exception of Frequent Commenter Scott and his grad school buddy John, I didn’t spend much time with anyone except Marvin and a few of his grad students at dinner Thursday, and Dirk and his family, who hosted a nice lunch for me and a couple of friends out in the ‘burbs on Sunday. (Particular apologies to Michelle, with whom I only interacted via cell phone.)

Alas, nobody seemed to take me up on my suggestion of creating a scene at the registration desk when their name tag appeared bearing the mark of the beast. One of these days I’ll figure out how to create mass mischief at APSA, but not this year.

Via Ralph Luker: a warning on plagiarism from Dan Todman that begins thusly:

In 1641, William Ward, a Catholic priest, was executed in London:

He hanged till he was dead for he was ript whilst he did hang & being cut downe his members being cut off & cast into the fire, the Executioner ript him up and tooke his heart & threwe it into the fire which lept out againe & no man toucht it till the Executioner a goodwhile after threwe it in againe, his head and quarters were brought backe to Newgate & boyled & are to be set upon 4 gates of the Citty. (1)

Anybody who could inflict this sort of suffering and despoliation on another human being was plainly motivated by enormous passion, anger and fear. Yet most historians would consider this too light a punishment for those found guilty of plagiarism.

It almost seems Old Testament enough to fit in my southern politics syllabus, the latest iteration of which is online here (how’s that for a segué?).

I’m still working on my Introduction to Politics syllabus, but finishing that—and all the rest of the ambitions I had for a productive day—went down the tubes when I got stuck trying to diagnose why my office computer keeps hanging up completely. What I’ve figured out so far:

• It happens in both Windows and Linux, unpredictably.
• The computer spits out a bunch of weird USB errors on startup in Linux.
• I originally thought it had something to do with my USB KVM switch (how I switch my keyboard, mouse, and monitor between the Dell junker provided by Tulane and my computer that actually has the power to do anything beyond web browsing), but I didn’t hit the switch the last time it crashed.
• I don’t think it’s the hard drives. Diagnostics on them have turned up nothing.
• It only seems to crash in Windows or in X; I have yet to see it crash at a Linux console prompt (which would probably be the only way to diagnose the crash from error messages, alas).

I think it’s probably something hosed in the on-board USB controller, which probably means I’ll be investing in a new motherboard. Lucky me.

Michelle Dion has posted her thoughts on the recently-concluded political methodology conference at Penn State. I’ll echo her kudos to the organizers among the Penn State faculty and grad students, most notably Burt Monroe (who took time out to check in with the participants over the course of the meeting) and Suzie DeBoef. I also got some useful feedback and interest regarding the poster, which will be strong motivation to finish up the paper and get it out to the Working Papers archive and off to Political Analysis.

Like Michelle, I do wonder sometimes about the ability of the “core group” to reach out to the practitioners who don’t attend PolMeth and whose dues support the viability of the section and its journal. Notably, there has been some discussion of the section getting more actively involved in the Teaching Research Methods track at the APSA Teaching and Learning Conference, although I wonder if there is an awareness of what that track has done in the past on the part of the appointed committee (I’m pretty sure none of its members have been within 100 miles of a past TLC, and only one represents a non-research-oriented department), which may make for some interesting toe-trampling over the next few months.

My departure from State College was rather more eventful than one might have hoped; Northwest cancelled my 6:00 a.m. flight to Detroit and rebooked me on Delta via Atlanta, an airport which I’m pretty sure is foreseen somewhere in Dante’s works. As a special bonus I also got to enjoy the thrill and excitement of being SSSS'd by TSA. The good news is that at least I made it back in one piece.

Anyway, back to packing; Dad arrives tomorrow and I’d like it to look like I’ve made at least a modicum of progress here.

The poster presentation today went moderately well, all things considered, and a few people indicated interest in seeing the completed paper in the near future. Compared to the other projects on my plate, that may be comparatively easy to do.

The only real extension I want to do for now is to tweak the R simex package to allow the error variances for covariates to be different between observations; I also think I can cleanup the call syntax a bit to make it a bit more “R-like,” but that has less to do with the paper proper—except cleaning up the call syntax will make it easier to implement my tweak.

Since I have a lovely 6 am flight tomorrow, I’ve spent much of the afternoon packing and getting ready for the trip back to St. Louis; I’ll probably wander towards the closing reception in a little while, once everything’s close to organized for the morning.

Via Jacob T. Levy, an article at Inside Higher Ed about a report by an APSA panel on coauthorship norms in political science (the original report is here). For those calculating their own Nolan scores at home, I’ve heard vague rumblings that a co-authored piece typically “counts” as 0.75 single-authored pieces.

This post by Richard Vedder about Elon University’s choice to assign the book version of the movie version of Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth makes what at first blush might be an eminently sensible point:

Universities who want to promote truth should select middle-of-the-road objective accounts (Steve names one or two). Or, if the goal is to invite debate on the issues, why not assign both Gore’s book and Chris Horner’s? Or some of Steve’s own work on the issue?

I think the answer here is twofold: first, Gore’s book (or at least the movie) is in the news, which creates an incentive to read it that would not exist for “middle-of-the-road objective accounts” even on the same topic—the dirty little secret of “summer reading assignments” is that I doubt 10% of students actually complete them outside the most elite institutions. And second, part of being a good student is developing critical thinking skills; the purpose of asking students to read the book is not to impose politically correct thinking on them, nor is it to have students uncritically accept the entire work. If Gore’s book is “weak on fact and objectivity,” surely college students can be expected to find those weaknesses and judge for themselves whether or not those faults undermine Gore’s argument. That is the core of what a liberal arts education is all about.

The standard “I have applied for jobs at Elon and might do so in the future” disclaimer applies.

Well, except for the “printing the poster” part, but I have a hookup for that.

It’s a little light on the pretty graphs and way too heavy on text, but I don’t think I had much to graph that would be worthwhile. And the text is important; or, at least, I think so, since I wrote it. And it’s probably halfway to being a paper, particularly once you put back in the stuff I commented out to get it to fit on a (really really big) page.

For my readers who won’t be in State College—or, for those who will and don’t feel like dropping by the faculty poster session—you can check it out here. It came out surprisingly well, considering that as of 48 hours ago I had approximately nothing after thinking I’d hit a brick wall.

The real geeks will be interested to know that this is the first time I used XeLaTeX, the fontspec package, and the sciposter documentclass. The body text is set in DejaVu Sans Condensed and fixed-pitch text is in Inconsolata, which are two of my favorite typefaces (and beat the hell out of the defaults, which were Helvetica and Courier).