Pieter Dorsman reasons by analogy between Andres Serrano’s infamous “Piss Christ” and the recent controversy over the caricatures of Muhammad that appeared in a Danish newspaper and are now spreading across Europe’s media outlets.

My new shows for January (excluding My Name Is Earl) include two Ed alumni and a cute thirty-something who wears glasses:

• Dabney Coleman and Hugh Bonneville thus far hold the only viewer interest in CBS‘s Courting Alex, which also features Ed’s Josh Randall as Jenna Elfman’s sorta-kinda-boyfriend. Meh.
• Tim Cavanaugh (i.e. Ed his own self) headlines Love Monkey (also on CBS), which isn’t half-bad thus far. And it’s fun to see Judy “Spring Break!” Greer from AD in another show.
• Finally, Lisa Loeb (one of my favorite glasses-wearing thirty-somethings) stars in the reality show #1 Single (on E!) as, er, herself looking for love in all the wrong places (i.e. not anywhere near Durham). I haven’t gotten to this one on the TiVo yet, but I am assured it is good.

All three shows, incidentally, are set in New York City. What are the odds?

Serrabee comments on a list of “10 things every single girl must own.” I’m not sure anything on that list (at least, of the things that are supposed to appeal to guys) would really impress me, but then again I may not be typical of the single male population.

Modern computer processors have this feature called “speculative execution,” in which they try to guess which code path is more likely to be executed, and actually go ahead and execute that code before seeing which path is taken. This is a perfectly sensible strategy; however, if the prediction is wrong, the computer has to “undo” all that work and take the other branch.

Today I engaged in a little speculative execution of my own by putting in the paperwork to teach my (hypothetical) research methods class in the fall in an Interactive Computer Classroom. It’s not a huge investment by any stretch of the imagination, but every little commitment edges me down the path of spending another year in Durham. And given the state of the job market these days (and perhaps my generally picky nature), the chance of a branch misprediction seems rather low at this point.

Econ prof James D. Miller think colleges need to “fight” RateMyProfessors.com. I don’t know if it needs fighting, per se, but I’d say it’s only marginally valuable. For example, here at Duke I’m allegedly easy but at Millsaps I was easier yet was considered tough (and had the grade distribution to prove it—my classes were consistently below the college’s mean GPA).

That said, I don’t mind student-centered evaluations and have even lauded one effort to compile such things here at Duke, where the “official” evals for last semester are apparently so shrouded in secrecy that I still haven’t seen them 6 weeks after turning in grades. And I don’t even mind student evals in general, although they almost certainly were a factor in my failing upward in the academic universe.

Though, as a political scientist looking for a job, the mentality noted by this commenter (allegedly a faculty member in my field) is somewhat disturbing:

I have been to two academic conferences within the year (academic year 2005–06) where colleagues were running tenure-track job searches (political science) and when I made recommendations regarding two individuals who I thought might be a good fit for both jobs, I received subsequent emails that,“after having checked RMP” (talk about unprofessional behavior!!!) there were “concerns” whether either of the recommended colleagues could teach in liberal arts enviornment. Clearly RMP is being looked at by folks on search committees. Don’t believe for a minute that after having looked at RMP folks are not influenced by what they read. And don’t believe that search committee members are not going directly to RMP to, as I was told, “a snapshot” of job candidates. AAUP and the national associations for the various disciplines ought to step in on this debate and come down clearly on RMP and its use in job searches etc.

I have just wasted about two hours of my life trying to figure out how to make R draw a line graph (all I want to do is plot the conditional mean of a variable on the Y axis for certain categories of another variable) to stick in my undergraduate methods lecture for tomorrow—a graph I could have constructed trivially in Stata, Excel, or SPSS in about 15 seconds. This is patently ridiculous.

I am not an idiot; this should not be so hard to figure out. I like R, but it is actively user-hostile (even with Rcmdr and other packages loaded), and until it ceases to be such I will not foist it on my students.

The IR Rumor Mill site has an interesting discussion thread talking about the job market that seems to apply (and range) more broadly than IR.

From the ashes of a Battlestar Galactica episode that even series creator Ron Moore was unimpressed with comes a discussion of the actual economics involved from Timothy Sandefur and Allen Thompson.

Maybe the news that NFL Network will show eight regular-season games in the upcoming season will finally get Time-Warner here in Durham off their collective asses. High-def would be nice, but even the standard-definition channel would make me happy (or happier, at any rate).

Sexual intercourse is alleged to improve public speaking. Factoids like this one (until now, a null set) make me wonder how much better a lecturer I’d be if I had a girlfriend.

þ: PtN.

Apropos the previous post, I give you the American and Comparative Jobs rumor mill (courtesy of first-time commenter Wesley). It’s not quite as organized as the IR version, but it will do in a pinch.

I just found the IR Rumor Mill on Nick’s blogroll. Would that we Americanists had the same thing; at the very least, it would help me figure out whether or not one of the ads that came out today was a new listing or just a readvertisement of a job that first came out in August.

An academic rumor mill, incidentally, is probably one of the few applications of anonymous blogging that I could see myself being involved in. (The idea of anonymity to hide my political views, or lack thereof, from search committees or students or Horowitz’s nitwits seems rather unworthwhile; my Internet paper trail is over a decade old, even without the blog.) Although, since I’ve now mentioned that I might be willing to do such a thing, I’m pretty much precluded from doing so. The net result: less work for me—since, without announcing this prediliction, I’d feel some sort of obligation start one myself. I suppose that should make me happy.

Incidentally, on the (more) complete information front, I got a call today that I’m among the top 5 candidates for a position in the great state of Texas, as well as a solicitation from an ex-colleague to apply for a soon-to-be-advertised position at a Research One, er, Doctoral/Research-Extensive in the Midwest. The latter is not exactly where I thought I wanted to take my career, mind you, but maybe a couple of years on a tenure-track line and a few pubs at such a place—or at least a couple of years of the effects of the natural aging process on my appearance—would make folks on this list take me a little more seriously.

Thomas Smith inquires:

Why would FISA provide for warrantless surveillance during wartime for 15 days only after a declaration of war? This is a very strange provision, if you think about it. There is no reason to expect that the first 15 days of a war would be when warrantless surveillance would be most useful. Or is the idea that in the event of a sneak attack, you might need to begin eavesdropping immediately, but 15 days would give you long enough to line up your applications to the FISA court? If so, that is certainly an outstanding example of Congressional stupidity. It almost seems that the 15 day provision is there to show that the President’s Article II power to surveil during wartime has not been entirely eliminated; that is, the 15 day provision has a kind of place holder feeling to it, more certainly than making any kind of practical sense.

It seems to me that the obvious explanation for the 15-day rule is the same as the explanation for the time-limit in the War Powers Act: it gives Congress enough time to decide whether or not to extend the authority beyond the statutory minimum (just as the WPA gives Congress the time to decide whether or not to continue to delegate its power to conduct military operations to the president). Since Congress apparently did not decide to suspend the FISA warrant requirement beyond the 15-day limit (i.e. on or before September 26, 2001), it is reasonable to conclude that Congress wanted the FISA warrant requirements to be followed beyond that date.

As an aside, I’m amused by conservatives running around treating Article II’s penumbras and emanations like a giant Neccessary and Proper Clause. In re Neagle ain’t exactly a presidential blank check, unlike McCulloch, for good reason. By all means, we should have a debate over presidential surveillance powers, but Smith et al. seem to be suggesting the blank check approach—what my fellow political scientist Steven Taylor, no liberal, has been hammering on for weeks as being completely unacceptable and incompatible with our system of checks and balances. If Democrats have been guilty of simplistic arguments—and they have—so too have defenders of the administration’s approach like Smith, whose basic argument boils down to either “trust us” or vague handwaving in the direction of broad discretionary executive powers that are thoroughly inconsistent with judicial conservatives’ approaches to other parts of the constitution.

Update: There’s more FISA stuff from Orin Kerr.

Looks like Mo Fiorinia may need to write a Canadian version of Culture War? as a companion piece to the American second edition of the same…

So long as they keep Veronica Mars on the air, I’m fine with the proposed merger of UPN and the WB into the oddly-named CW Network. I’d be happier, though, if it showed up in high definition.

Speaking of high def, Universal HD is just a week away from arriving on cable in Durham, which means Battlestar Galactica in all its high definition 1080i glory. Wee hee!

I ran into Nick and one of my devoted band of lurkers yesterday and was reminded that I have been insufficiently social this, er, year or so. So, in order to rectify that, I’m proposing the first annual “Hang Out With Chris and Watch the Super Bowl on his Spankin’ New HDTV Party.” It probably needs a more catchy title, but I’m working with nothing here.

If nothing else, at least it will serve as an excuse to clean up my living room.

Duke’s J.J. Reddick, quoted on himself and his friend, Gonzaga’s Adam Morrison, the leading contenders for the National Player of the Year award:

[W]e’re both competitors and we’re both really, really white.

You don’t say…

The anonymous community college dean proposes no longer requesting recommendation letters in job searches.

All of his points in opposition to letters strike me as valid, but nonetheless I remain unconvinced. Information, no matter the quality, seems mighty scarce in the academic employment process, and at the very least the identities of the letter writers in question might say something about the candidate, even if the letters themselves are rather content-free; even the diligence (or lack thereof) of recommenders in providing letters might be a signal to search committees.

My daily dose of humor was supplied by the original headline for this article, which was “Report cites evidence that US ‘outsources’ torture.” I had brief visions of lines of ex-CIA types outside unemployment offices.

In all seriousness, though, I wonder how much real indignation there is about such things. All societies—including our oh-so-enlightened European allies—have practiced torture (or Gitmo-style “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Torture”) since time immemorial, and while its use has generally been restricted to suspected scumbags in recent history, it still happens, wink-wink nudge-nudge denials, treaties, commitments, ad nauseum notwithstanding.

And, ironically, the incentives for torture may be higher in a democracy than a non-democracy. If the Spanish Popular Party government had waterboarded a few folks to gain enough intelligence to stop the Madrid train bombings (or at least to avoid erroneously attributing the attacks to the Basque separatists), they’d still be running the show. No dictatorship has ever been turned out of office because they couldn’t stop terrorist attacks.

In democracies, when it comes to questions of “us or them,” the constituency for “them” is George Galloway, Michael Moore, Robert Fisk, and a few other demented fools; not the makings of a broad coalition of voters, particularly when you have smoldering ruins as the backdrop of your campaign. Any rational government, left, center, or right, is going err on the side of “us.” And thus, sadly, those of us utopians who’d rather not see torture are probably going to be stuck with it.

One of these decades, I’ll master the black art of taking photos with my camera phone. Until then, here’s the fruits of my labor—a scoreboard shot from the women’s basketball game after the Blue Devils denied Pat Summit her 901st win as a head coach on Monday night:

I’m not going to waste a lot of space talking about the academic bias debate, but I did want to point vaguely in the direction of this post in which Quaker at Crescat Sententia discusses Steven Bainbridge’s post on disparate impact analysis as applied to ideology, and this one here (via Matthew Shugart), although I might be tempted to mock the latter (which, of course, is a parody) by analogy to the protestations of many an employer hauled into court for racial or gender discrimination on the basis of mere statistics, rather than any demonstration of the employer’s involvement in the causal process that led to the hiring differential.

The Rebels picked up commitments from former UT quarterback Brent Schaeffer and Meridian High running back Cordera Eason on Friday, putting an exclamation point on what already was a top-15 recruiting class for Ed “You Need A Hummer” Orgeron. Say what you will about the guy on the sidelines or the practice field, but he at least seems like he can recruit players…

I’d be curious what rival explanations my methods classes might come up with for this graph beyond “the obvious.” At least one structural feature of Congress leaps out at me as a possible explanation… can anyone identify it?

It’d be nice if the trained primates who manage the APSA eJobs service were actually mentally capable of distinguishing between visiting and tenure-track positions when they classify them in the listings.

(For those with eJobs access, I specifically refer to posting 9773, a position at a leading liberal arts college, which quite clearly states it is a “one-year replacement position” yet is classified by these dopes as “Assistant Professor” rather than “Visiting Professor.”)

Negotiations are apparently underway to move Arrested Development to Showtime. I can’t say there’s much else on Showtime I’d pay to watch, but I’d probably spring for it for AD.

þ: The Dead Parrot Society.