No, I haven’t done a Mungowitz on my dwindling band of readers… I just spent the weekend in Memphis visiting my mom and my grandparents and didn’t really feel like blogging much. Not that blogging would have been anything other than excruciatingly painful on dialup anyway.

On the other hand, if you haven’t visited the other place in a while there’s a couple of new(ish) posts there.

In Borders today (I had a 25%-off email coupon that expires Sunday), I saw a new book by Larry Diamond, Squandered Victory, on the shelf. I was sorely tempted to buy it, even though I already had picked out something I was using the 25% coupon on.

Good thing, too, since when I checked out, I got a coupon worth 30% off a single book purchase next week. Now I just wish I was flying somewhere so I’d be forced to read all the books already in the queue.

Michelle Dion offers some sound advice to those instructors who want to reduce student lobbying for grade changes, inspired partially by this WaPo op-ed from earlier in the month.

I think a well-defined, clear grading policy is key; while I don’t do everything Michelle does (I don’t have enough time in my life to track attendance, and anonymous grading is unlikely to work in small classes anyway—even if I had the TA support to do it), I always make it clear at the outset what assignments are worth. It doesn’t eliminate the complaints, and sometimes I do make clerical errors that would lead to legitimate complaints anyway, but it does reduce them somewhat.

I suppose RINO is as good a label for me as anything else, so long as I don’t have to pretend to like über-RINO John McCain. Not that liking someone is a prerequisite for getting my vote, mind you: ask John F’ing Kerry. So, I’m in.

Not having analyzed the data (a big caveat for a social scientist, mind you) I’ll agree with the critics who aren’t buying the evidence from a Heritage report that suggests that “abstinance pledge” programs work. Not that the story makes that much sense, since it’s clear the author doesn’t actually know anything about social scientific research and just relies on an expert and the authors of the original study to rebut the paper.

But Matthew Yglesias’ critique really goes off the rails. First he complains, “the study was not peer-reviewed, is unpublishable in real academic journals, uses an unreliable data source, and only supports the conclusion when you use a non-standard test for statistical significance.”

The first two critiques are bizarre, since (a) it has never been submitted for peer review and (b) we don’t know whether or not it’s publishable, since submission for peer review hasn’t happened yet; the lack of publishability is an opinion expressed by someone in the article, not a factual statement. They don’t use any “non-standard test”; they use a p-value of 0.10 as their cutoff, which isn’t the traditional 0.05 and not quite as convincing as 0.05, but isn’t inherently invalid either, and confidence levels aren’t tests (examples of tests are “t” tests and “Wald” tests; p values are the results of statistical tests).

The only critique that’s even vaguely valid is that the data source is unreliable, as it relies on self-reporting by respondents of their behavior. This is a problem, to the extent you believe that people who have signed abstinence pledges are more likely to lie about their sexual activity than those who haven’t. I’ll concede that it’s possible that that’s the case. Mind you, Heritage didn’t come up with the data—HHS did—and trying to get people to accurately self-report anything is harder than it looks.

Then Yglesias turns and goes completely bizarro:

The only newsworthy information in the story is that the Bush Department of Health and Human Services has decided for some reason to start contracting out research on controversial questions to an ideological think tank that is non-partisan in name only, rather than to proper independent analysts.

There is no evidence in the story that Heritage was working under any sort of HHS contract. On the contrary, Heritage appears to have analyzed data, produced under HHS and CDC contract, which is in the public domain.* They then presented their results at a government-sponsored conference. The next step would be to fix any problems in the paper (and the article suggests there were some), and then submit the paper to a peer-reviewed journal. That’s how social science is done.

Now, mind you, it might be premature for the New York Times to be calling attention to this story, but given public interest in the issue—and the Times’ possible interest in discrediting this evidence, not that I’d suspect the paper of having an ideological bias in its reporting decisions—I’m not sure I can fault them for covering preliminary results that (potentially) rebut a serious critique of administration policy.

* If the CDC had helped fund either analysis, it would be traditional for the studies to acknowledge the funding at the beginning of the paper in a note. I think it’s more likely that the Times meant to say that the CDC helped fund the HHS survey, not the Heritage study.

Michele, posting basically the same thing I wrote in comments to this post by someone in the “non-reciprocal linking” school (exponded at length here), except it disappeared into the ether:

I don’t really care what YOUR etiquette/rules for trackbacks are. I know what MY rule is: Don’t trackback to my posts unless you’ve linked/referenced them. I see no reason for someone to go through the trouble of sending a trackback which basically says “hey, I’ve written about the same thing as you, but I didn’t reference your post on it at all. However, I’m going to use this nifty automated feature to leave a URL to MY post on your blog!” That’s just god damn RUDE.

I also HATE when trackback is used as a feature to say “I wrote about a subject that you seem to care about and instead of emailing you a note to say hey, check out this post, I think you’ll be interested in it, I’ll just lazily send off a trackback to a completely UNRELATED post of yours, most likely your most recent post, thereby informing you that I’ve said something I consider important and leaving a URL to my very important post in your completey UNRELATED post!”

See where I’m going with this? Stop doing it. It’s arrogant. Take two freaking minutes to send an email. Or don’t trackback at all.

I will delete any trackbacks that don’t reference the post they track. Don’t be an such a self-absorbed ass all your life, ok? Show some manners.

That’s my policy too… if you bothered to find the trackback URL, you’ve already found out how to link to my post. Or, to put it another way, if you want me to send you some of my readers, the least you can do is send me some of yours too. Frankly, to not do so isn’t just rude—it’s spamming, and just because you’re not selling something doesn’t make it not spam.

I feel like I actually achieved something this morning—I finished packing all the books in my office, except the ones I’m using for classes this summer (and the ones I’m bequeathing to my successor):

Now I get to deal with the shelves full of books at home.

I just uploaded a bunch of photos from my hooding ceremony last year and a family picnic to Flickr; most of the pictures were taken by my dad on his 35mm film camera. Hope you enjoy them…

Orson Swindle of Every Day Should Be Saturday, on being a pundit:

[P]unditry’s like going to a small liberal arts college-soon enough, everyone goes to bed with everyone.

Sadly, this statement is untrue if you read “going to” as “teaching at.” Then again, judging from some accounts, I may be an outlier in this regard.

As mentioned in comments below, I obtained a 2-liter bottle of Coke Zero at Brookshire’s today. My first impression of the beverage is that it’s very good—you’re not likely to confuse it with Coca-Cola Classic, unless you just haven’t had a Coke in a long time, but it’s not in any way similar to Diet Coke and I really couldn’t discern any aftertaste. I also think it’s better than C2. I think Coke has a winner here.

It also makes a very good mixer with Bacardi Gold—too good perhaps.

Ping.

Move along, nothing to see here…

Ugh.

Mungowitz announces his departure from non-anonymous blogging and Michelle Dion takes the opportunity to shoot a promo on him. Are we seeing the beginning of a heel turn for Mungowitz, with Hollywood “Grease” Mungowitz donning a goatee and strutting down the ramp with some hard rock entrance music? Or is he going to turn face and stop tormenting the retail minimum-wage-slaves of the Triangle? Inquiring minds want to know.

As reputed Klansman Edgar Ray Killen goes on trial for his role in the Philadelphia Three murders, the U.S. Senate decided to apologize for its complicity in Klan terrorism, which I suppose would be a more meaningful gesture if more than 6% of the Senate had shown up for the vote or if either senator from Mississippi, a.k.a. Lynching Central, had co-sponsored the bill. Steven Taylor has more thoughts on the belated apology.

Mind you, I’m not sure which is worse… the locals who are ignorant of the past or the non-locals who are ignorant of the present.

First I’d heard of this: one of the alma maters forced out its president over the weekend after a rocky start to his tenure:

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology President Jack Midgley resigned over the weekend after months of criticism from students and staff and two votes of no-confidence.

The business executive arrived on the Terre Haute campus amid high hopes he could successfully replace Samuel Hulbert, who retired after leading the college for 28 years.

Midgley didn’t last a year.

Ouch. Even I lasted longer at Rose…

Apparently, someone at Coca-Cola had the brainwave of making a beverage that tastes exactly like a combination of three ingredients:

• Carbonated water
• Caramel food coloring
• Splenda

This beverage has absolutely no discernable flavor other than that of sugar water. Now, if you like sugar water, Diet Coke with Splenda is the beverage for you. Me, I’m just hoping Coca-Cola Zero actually manages to taste non-awful, although I have to say that the relaunched Pepsi One isn’t a complete travesty, though, regrettably, on the wrong side of the Coke-Pepsi divide for my palate.

I just bought a round-trip ticket from RDU to BWI for Labor Day weekend for APSA in Washington for $69.40, including taxes and everything.

Of course, I’d rather not be going to APSA in the first place, but my third consecutive year on the meat market doesn’t leave me with a lot of choice in the matter.

Monday’s Washington Post reports that conference negotiators are finally getting somewhere on the renewal of the federal transportation authorization bill, which expired 21 months ago. The reason for the sudden burst of progress: members of Congress are sick and tired of wrangling over the bill:

“I just want to get it all over with,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said as final negotiations began Thursday.

At stake are around $290 billion in road, rail, and transit projects over the next six years (well, four years and three months, at this point). The same article also reports that the Senate may actually come up with a workable compromise on the energy bill. The stars must really be aligned this month or something…

Also on the roads beat, an interesting article on the trend toward building more toll roads recently appeared on Wired News. One such project is North Carolina’s proposed Triangle Parkway, an extension of the Durham Freeway south to the I-540 Western Wake Expressway through Research Triangle Park.

Ethanol is all over the news today; today’s New York Times has a piece noting the newfound popularity of gasohol in the Midwest due to high oil prices, while yesterday’s Clarion-Ledger finds some folks looking for a $8 million handout so Mississippi too can get on the ethanol-producing bandwagon (can you say beef plant?).

I must say I’m a little bit surprised at the news that Mike Tyson lost his fight tonight in Washington against unknown opponent Kevin McBride after quitting at the end of the sixth round. While there’s no doubt Tyson is no longer at the top of his game, pretty much everyone expected him to make short work of McBride nonetheless, although most would have figured that he’d be in trouble if he couldn’t make a knockout early… and that’s exactly what appears to have happened.

James Joyner recaps Tyson’s career; Tyson just never was the same fighter after serving the sentence for his rape conviction—as the AP piece points out, he hasn’t beaten a top opponent in 14 years, and his career has been increasingly bizarre since his time in the big house.

More than Tyson needed this fight, though, one suspects heavyweight boxing needed it; Tyson’s promise this week to “gut [McBride] like a fish” gave boxing its first real sizzle since he was in his prime in the 1980s, and the sport—embattled by corruption, a lack of stars, and a public image that makes Big Tobacco’s look good—needed the sort of buzz that Tyson can generate. Tyson at least has the gift of gab to eventually carve out a George Foreman-type role for himself in pop culture; boxing, though, may now be in terminal decline.

Edgar Ray Killen is set to go on trial in Philadelphia, Miss., for his alleged role in the “Philadelphia Three” murders on Monday, and the predictable flood of worldwide media coverage has materialized; probably the best pieces I’ve seen are from the New York Times and Canada’s National Post.

However, neither story makes it clear why Killen wasn’t tried again after his 1967 federal criminal trial that ended in a 11–1 hung jury; you’d think that an 11–1 jury vote would be a pretty strong indication that a second trial would have ended in a conviction… does anyone know the answer?

OFJay has a couple of thoughts worth responding to:

Why is it that Trek fans absolutely, positively, demonizingly hate Voyager? It’s as if that show had no merit whatsover either as a Trek show or as a TV show. This inquiring mind would like to know.

I don’t know that fans necessarily “hate” Voyager, although most would probably have it tied with Enterprise for the nadir of televised Trek. I think the main problem with the series is that televised science fiction had “grown up” since The Next Generation came on the air, as more sophisticated shows like Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 were out there, and Voyager quickly settled in as essentially redoing TNG with an inferior cast; its oft-discussed failure to deliver on its premise left it in the position of having less intelligent things to say about pushing the limits of Trekkian ideology than DS9 did in the comparatively “safe” confines of the Alpha Quadrant.

That said, there were lots of elements of Voyager that really worked, and some of the best hours of modern Trek were on the show. It just never added up to much of anything more. (This critique probably also applies to Enterprise.)

It’s been less than a month since the season ender for House but I sure miss that cranky doctor. And the “tall dark one,” the “little girl,” and the Aussie that “would run like a scared wombat.” Also Lisa Edelstein, who played a post-op transvestite in Ally McBeal and a real woman in the last season of The Practice. At least they’ve signed it on for a second season.

Indeed, despite the occasional gore (something I’m really averse to), House M.D. is probably my favorite network show these days. Greg House is probably the best unlikeable character on TV since at least early Andy Sipowicz, and possibly even Basil Fawlty. Add my thing for Sela Ward and you have must-see TV in the fall.

I decided to go out for a drive today down the newly opened stretch of the Trace around Jackson, and ended up taking a bunch of photos (although none of the Trace itself). The highlight of the set, by far, is my favorite billboard in Jackson:

Of course, there are lots of others in my Flickr photostream, mostly from downtown Jackson but also a few from Raymond, the other county seat of Hinds County.

Now, ordinarily I’d be highly supportive of evidence supporting my fundamental beliefs, but this New York Daily News piece from yesterday (þ: memeorandum), subtitled “Ready for a real relationship? Ditch the pretty boys and grab yourself a geek,” is stretching credibility just a tad, largely because of the poster children it chooses for this phenomenon:

• Jordan Bratman, a music executive
• David Arquette
• Tiger Woods
• Adam Brody (from The O.C., a show I’m proud to say I’ve never seen)

So, we have two actors (granted, one of them is a low-rent Tom Green, but still…), a media mogul, and one of the richest athletes in the world. Can anyone find another possible causal factor that might explain why attractive women might be interested in these guys?

Shawn points to Joe, who in turn points to an OC Weekly piece by Greg Stacy that attempts to explain what the hell Gwen Stefani is talking about in her hit single “Hollaback Girl.” Mind you, I’m still confused…