It’s just as well that I have labs on Thursday and Friday for my methods students; I think they may be too traumatized to understand the lecture on the difference of proportions and chi-square tests. Hopefully they will recover for next week.

Greg of Begging to Differ provides an update on the whereabouts of writer-director Whit Stillman, whose films Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco (which seems to be out of print) rank among my favorite films of the 1990s; I’d have to agree with Greg that Barcelona is my absolute favorite of the three, but all three movies are definitely worth renting.

Well, at least now I feel better about the news that the Intel Mac mini has an integrated graphics chipset (þ: Ars Technica).

Mind you, since I wasn’t really planning to run games on it—that is, after all, why I have an Xbox—it didn’t really bother me in the first place. I may end up upgrading the RAM from the default 512MB sooner rather than later, depending on how much of a memory hog fetchmail, Apache, and the blog end up being, but waiting around for Apple to install a memory upgrade before shipping it didn’t exactly appeal to me.

Stephen Jessee and Alexander Tahk, two Ph.D. candidates at Stanford, have put together a website that attempts to estimate the ideological positions of Samuel Alito and John Roberts from their votes on the Supreme Court this term.

Perhaps the most interesting result thus far is that Roberts’ estimated ideal point (position in the unidimensional ideological space) is virtually indistinguishable from that of his predecessor as Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, although that is of course subject to change as more cases come along. (The Alito estimates seem to solely reflect the uninformative prior that Jessee and Tahk have placed on him thus far.)

Is it just me, or does the combination of an hour-long research presentation and teaching a 75-minute undergraduate class seem like a bit much for a campus interview? I guess teaching other peoples’ classes is just karmic reward for cancelling my own classes while on these junkets interviews.

In other “interview follies” news, I’m currently playing email tag to arrange another phone interview for a one-year job in the Midwest. As it turns out, today is also a crunch day in the Spreadsheet of Death, with about a half-dozen application deadlines spread around the next week or so—my part in these applications is all done, but presumably this is the point where serious application triage begins at the recipients’ ends (and, from a self-interested perspective, where competing offers might be most useful).

Finally, my name showed up in an ad in the campus newspaper today; to my disappointment, I was not identified as a member of David Horowitz’s enemies list in the SAF’s full-page ad—instead I was merely being recognized as one of the honorees at this evening’s HOPE Banquet.

Thanks to the IRS’s massive overwitholding, I’ll be helping stimulate the Chinese economy (and the share price of AAPL) with the purchase of one of these for the living room so I can finally get rid of the ancient Pentium III/450MHz in my study and put the blog on the right—i.e. wired to the cable company—end of the wireless bridge in my apartment.

Congrats to Jacob T. Levy on his new position at McGill University in Montréal.

My inner debate for the evening: spend another three or four hours grading midterms myself (I’m done with the Tuesday-Thursday section’s, but still need to do the Wednesday-Friday section’s), or live down to my newfound reputation as being “horrible at getting back assignments to students on time”?

Then again, once the methods kids see their midterm grades that reputation may be the least of my concerns…

InsideHigherEd reports that the new basic Carnegie classifications are out today, which no doubt will increase the sales of Maalox on college campuses across the country; look up the new status of your favorite institutions here.

Only one of my students was apparently aware of Paul Simon’s song “You Can Call Me Al” from Graceland; it came up when we were trying to figure out what to call Al Gore’s dad. Some didn’t actually know who Paul Simon is—the ex-senator or the singer.

Of course, I couldn’t manage to pronounce the name of Al Senior’s fellow senator Estes Kefauver, so I guess we came out even on this score.

Mr. Baude on the Federalist Society Symposium in New York:

Why do women keep dragging me towards the bar?

I’m sure they’re only interested in Will’s thoughts on sovereign immunity.

At conferences, usually it’s Dieter or Scott who ends up dragging me towards the bar (at ICPSR, it was more the lure of karaoke; I do an interesting interpretation of Foreigner’s Cold As Ice). The implications of that are rather disturbing.

There’s a point after every job interview (good or bad) when you realize that you’re probably not going to be offered the job, and you can go back and pinpoint that moment.

At Slippery Rock, I’m pretty sure it was around the 6th time that morning I’d heard a different person in the department discuss their fealty to the Unitarian Universalist Church. I’m pretty sure my body language gave my feelings about being indoctrinated into the local cult of personality away.

At Millsaps (where I did get the job, proving my spidey sense is fallible) it was during the campus tour when I made a joke (after having seen about 30 female undergrads and 2 males) inquiring whether or not the school was actually coeducational—I don’t think my guide realized I was joking and looked at me like I was an idiot.

At Lawrence, it was at dinner the second night at a Greek restaurant with the three members of the department who weren’t on leave. I am pretty sure my answer to a question about mentoring undergraduates who planned to go to graduate school went over like a lead balloon—I believe my exact thoughts were that it would be a complete waste of their time unless they went to a top-25 institution.

At the place I was ultimately offered the job last fall, I’m pretty sure it was in the car ride back to the airport when I rather stridently stated my opposition to their reopening their master’s program (dovetailing with the previous paragraph’s theme). Again, I got the offer, but I doubt this conversational gem helped.

Today, I think it was during the teaching demonstration (which, in theory, was going to be a discussion of public opinion and why it matters in democracies) during which through absolutely no fault of my own the name Noam Chomsky came up. In retrospect, that may have been the time to flee the room, because the discussion was already headed downhill and I hadn’t quite realized it yet. Everyone was very nice, but that was just a teeny bit weird. The good news is that the flight back from [Redacted Rust-Belt City] was uneventful.

The moral of this story: don’t have opinions (and certainly don’t have unapproved opinions), and don’t have a personality, and you can get a job.

The Dean Dad has stirred up some controversy at InsideHigherEd with an op-ed supporting getting rid of tenure.

I’m not entirely sold, but I do think that the institution of tenure (coupled with the norm of rarely firing professors before tenure review) does seem to encourage highly risk-adverse behavior by employers. It probably also depresses salaries substantially. On the other hand, there are serious academic freedom arguments—at least for people who have gotten tenure—that support the institution, so I am somewhat torn.

A commenter asks:

Care to share any sage advice on the dissertation process (how to get it done, considerations in selecting an outside committee member, etc)? Since you’ve already gotten the Ph.D. I thought maybe you’d have some good insights…

There have probably been dissertations written about writing dissertations; Getting What You Came For is a fairly standard reference, and one I recommend. That said, specific advice from my little corner of the universe follows:

• Getting it done: there’s an adage that once you really start working on the dissertation, it will take six months to write. I wasted most of the latter half of 2001 (from my comprehensive exams in September/October) and early 2002 putting together what may be the worst dissertation prospectus known to man. I then fiddled about with a conference paper or two that would eventually comprise the substantive dissertation chapters for about a year. Finally, in May 2003 the catalyst arrived: I went to a family reunion and decided the collective prodding of the PhDs in the extended family was enough to make me write… and so it was; I defended the first week of December 2003, and my PhD was conferred on the 13th, the day before my birthday.
  On days I decided to write or do data analysis—and this happened in fits and starts—I would go and make myself work in the library to minimize distractions, even if I was only going to play with R or Stata. Most people recommend formally setting aside time to write, and it’s something I agree with—and wish I did more of now.
  I also think you need to be in the right psychological state to write. Even if you’re not prone to psychological disorders (and a friend of mine who’s a psychologist says that really smart people are particularly prone to these problems, for reasons not fully understood), a bit of therapy during the writing process—if only so you have someone neutral to complain about your advisor to—is a good thing.
• Outside member: I lucked into a good choice by happenstance: my final semester taking classes, I had a multivariate stats class in the pharmacy administration department and met a prof over there with whom I established a good rapport. He turned out to have valuable comments on my work, even though it was pretty far afield from him substantively. Having an outside member who you can trust is a nice security blanket. Don’t do what Frequent Commenter Scott did and end up with some externally-imposed outside member who you have no prior relationship with. I don’t have any experience with having someone from the same field but a different institution on the committee (and I’ve never served on a committee in either capacity), so I can’t speak to that.

On the prospectus itself, I’d recommend having a clear idea of what you’re doing and why before writing it. In my case, I put together a half-assed cut-and-paste job from the lit reviews of some papers and it showed—the fact that nobody bothered to tell me what they wanted in the prospectus was no excuse for me not finding that out for myself. If I’d had a clearly thought-out prospectus, I’d probably have finished much earlier. Admittedly, in my case, I was still young when I got done, but it would have been nice to be younger. Oxford’s nice enough, but getting out of there a year earlier would have been helpful (for my wallet, if nothing else).

Last, but not least, expect things to change throughout the dissertation process. Originally I thought I was going to do an experiment in one chapter and focus more on heuristics throughout the dissertation; in the end, it ended up being more about information processing and cognitive sophistication and their roles in attitude formation, opinion articulation, and behavior, which turned out to be a far more interesting topic and one that seems relatively underexplored in the literature, although a lot of really smart people seem to be getting at the edges of these questions—I like a lot of Alvarez and Brehm’s work, as well as Jon Krosnick’s. (But I digress in a very political-sciencey direction.)

On the plane trip back from Washington to Durham today, I started reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (in my haste to pack for the trip, I forgot to bring any reading material for the return trip, so I had to make an excursion to Barnes and Noble in Washington to pick up something to read yesterday afternoon), and about 20 pages in felt tempted to exclaim out loud that this sounded a lot like Mark Granovetter’s American Journal of Sociology article on the strength of weak ties—a theory that is surprisingly underdiscussed in the public opinion literature, at least by political scientists. I only came across it in my graduate “classic texts in American politics” seminar taught by Bob Albritton, which I affectionately refer to as the Magical Mystery Tour.

Incidentally, Friday afternoon in my southern politics seminar I brought up another Gladwell theme by talking briefly about Tom Schelling’s work on how patterns of segregation spontaneously emerge from individual actions that aren’t strongly discriminatory on their face.

Spending today listening to presentations at the Teaching and Learning Conference has reinforced my prior belief that I would be happiest teaching at a private liberal arts college—I was intrigued by the interesting (dare I say cool) things being done by professors of research methods at Birmingham-Southern and Richmond. It could just be coincidence; I don’t know. But in the absence of definite competing opportunities, I’d probably accept an offer from a different sort of institution, particularly one offering a modicum of job security.

As far as the competing offers question goes (a situation I have yet to be in), I still haven’t worked out for myself the transitive ordering between “one-year job at a liberal arts college, narrowly-defined*” and “tenure-track job somewhere else”; it’s something I’ve pondered before and not really gotten any good advice on.

At my first ever campus interview, the chair of a ninth-tier combined department once tried to sell me on the idea that any tenure-track job (versus a one-year gig) was a signal of status to other potential employers—I don’t think he was reading my mind (in which admittedly I was simultaneously plotting the quickest exit possible from the godforsaken place, trying to forestall a panic attack); he just was probably used to giving the speech—but somehow I doubt that’s really the case except when comparing among fairly similar institutions.

More fodder for the “Ed Orgeron could sell snow to eskimos” file: the scoop on how Coach O got blue-chip QB Brent Schaeffer to come to Oxford, passing up more prominent programs like Wisconsin and NC State.

This sort of recruiting prowess puts the Ed Orgeron hummer ad in a whole new light… maybe it sells more H3s than I’d have thought it would.

þ: EDSBS.

I know I’ve complained about this before, but it bears reiterating: it’d be nice if someone at ESPN would figure out that a trifecta requires three different things to actually be a trifecta. 40 minutes of Baseball Tonight and 20 minutes of Jeremy Schapp whining is not three separate programs.

My other ESPN observation of the day: is it just me, or is NASCAR getting a lot more respect on the Worldwide Leader this year than last? Mind you, I’d never dream to suggest some newfound financial interest on Disney’s part in hyping NASCAR.

Via Steven Taylor and others:

You scored as SG-1 (Stargate). You are versatile and diverse in your thinking. You have an open mind to that which seems highly unlikely and accept it with a bit of humor. Now if only aliens would stop trying to take over your body. SG-1 (Stargate) 81% Serenity (Firefly) 81% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 75% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 75% Moya (Farscape) 63% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 56% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 50% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 50% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 44% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 38% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 38% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 19% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

And, an apropos NewsRadio quote of the day (vaguely related to memes):

Lisa: If everyone thought you should jump off a bridge, would you?
Dave: If everyone around here thought I should jump off a bridge, they’d probably just get together and push me.

I have to say my favorite part of waking up every day is the opportunity to read headlines like “As schools court professors, Duke strives to retain them” in the Duke Chronicle.

On the bright side, at least I have on-campus job interviews… which is more than I could have said this time last year.

Former Signifying Nothing co-blogger Brock Sides has moved on to Battlepanda in the wake of the end of Dark Bilious Vapors, thus continuing his streak of moving to blogs with ever-cooler names.

The key advantages to not having a girlfriend at Valentine’s Day: it’s quite a bit cheaper, and nobody can complain that you’re spending the evening working on job applications and finishing the Veronica Mars Season 1 DVD set.

The key disadvantage: you can’t email any female colleagues (particularly ones from the vaguely-recalled distant past) to ask for favors relating to said job applications because they might think you might be hitting on them on Valentine’s Day.

Teaching four days a week this semester makes it a real pain to schedule on-campus job interviews without stomping all over my classes…

Stephen Bainbridge inadvertently explains why we’re stuck with two parties of big government (although he doesn’t realize why):

The United States simply doesn’t need two parties of big government. It needs a party that stands for limited government, personal freedom in both the social and economic spheres, rule by elected officials rather than judges, the right to life, and a foreign policy premised on a hawkish realism rather than Wilsonian idealism.

Now, if that’s a platform that would attract more than 20% of the electorate, I’d be stunned. Not to mention that at least two pairs of Bainbridge’s planks are contradictory—one is just a tad more obvious than the other, mind you: the contradiction between “personal freedom in… the social… sphere” and “the right to life.”

Personally, though, I’m more entertained by the prospect of politicians who are willing to limit their own power, especially ones who know that they are more likely to be reelected if they compromise their own principles and indulge the rent-seekers in the electorate. There are maybe a half-dozen Republicans in Washington who believe in truly limited government on a good day, and they’re almost all (with the exception of Ron Paul, who has his own pathologies) on the Supreme Court.