One of the little ways us wanna-be professors make a little side money (a couple hundred bucks a pop) is by reviewing textbooks for publishers. At the moment, I’m reviewing an American government textbook for its n+1th edition, which is nothing unusual, except what they sent me to review is the nth edition—which I already had a copy of at home anyway, since I was planning to adopt it for American government in the fall until O’Connor and Sabato was foisted upon me. So I guess I’m technically “pre-reviewing” it, or “post-reviewing” the nth edition, or something. And, in four chapters, I’ve only managed to come up with about a page of comments (and mostly silly stuff like “Unorthodox Lawmaking rocks, add it to the recommended readings on Congress,” rather than stuff like “only an idiot would write this paragraph”). I guess that means it’s a good book or something, but for $X I think they want more than a page of comments.

Michael Jennings has been taking a crash course in R and S-PLUS programming. I’d still have to say my R is quite weak, for largely the same reasons my Perl is pretty weak—there’s too much overlap with C, which leads to bad coding style.

Probably the moral of the story is either that I need to start working with RPy, or need to figure out how to convince colleagues that becoming more proficient in R (and contributing to it) is hireable/tenurable activity.

Since arriving in Ann Arbor last week, I’ve had something of a curious reaction to the revelation that I have a job. The near-uniform reaction, after hearing the details of the position, is that it’s a “heavy” load—which, given that it’s three courses a semester (or “3–3,” in the lingo) and five* preparations over the year, I suppose is a fair assessment, although it’s something of a godsend compared to the 4–4s at complete backwaters (“Research support? That’s your desk.”) I interviewed for, and the load itself doesn’t account for the relatively small classes or the generally engaged undergraduate student body. It’s enough to put something of a damper on my enthusiasm for starting my job in the fall.

Now, it’s possible that these folks just aren’t attuned to the realities of the academic job market, or perhaps just don’t recognize that for many potential scholars, taking a job at a non-Ph.D.-granting institution is a necessity rather than a preference. But it’s also possible that they’re on to something; is it possible that several years’ training as a researcher and methodologist is pretty much wasted if most of what I do the rest of my career is teach “textbook” political science and bivariate regression to undergraduates? Should I really settle for teaching three classes a semester when I could go elsewhere and teach three courses a year, if the research expectations for tenure are such that I’d end up doing the same amount of work anyway, especially when you account for the lack of graduate assistants?

The decision may, in the end, be made for me—if this past year’s experience is any guide, serious research institutions aren’t exactly clamoring to hire graduates of lower-tier (or even middle-tier) Ph.D. programs. But I suppose it’s something I’ll have to bear in mind this fall.

The CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases has reported that many Americans are getting sick each summer from diseases spread in public pools.

One of the largest pool-related outbreaks in the country happened last August in Lawrence, Kansas, when as many as 600 people may have been sickened by the parasitic disease cryptosporidium. The CDC found that the parasite was spread through local pools, day care centers and people who lived together.

This summer, the Lawrence-Douglas County health department has been trying to help pool operators and swimmers learn how to keep their pools germ-free. The No. 1 message: Don’t swim if you have diarrhea.

Indeed.

Digital Camera Shopper magazine reports that most digital camera memory cards are virtually indestructible:

They were dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child's toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy.

Perhaps surprisingly, all the cards survived these six tests.

Obviously they can only be destroyed by casting them into the volcanic furnace in Mordor in which they were forged.

Glenn Reynolds links a USA Today report on its post-convention poll:

Last week’s Democratic convention boosted voters’ impressions of John Kerry but failed to give him the expected bump in the head-to-head race against President Bush, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll finds.

In the survey, taken Friday and Saturday, Bush led Kerry 50%-46% among likely voters. Independent candidate Ralph Nader was at 2%.

The survey showed Kerry losing 1 percentage point and Bush gaining 4 percentage points from a poll taken the week before the Boston convention.

The change in support was within the poll’s margin of error of ±4 percentage points in the sample of 763 likely voters. But it was nonetheless surprising, the first time since the chaotic Democratic convention in 1972 that a candidate hasn’t gained ground during his convention.

In fairness, the report’s headline (“Poll: No boost for Kerry after convention”) is appropriate, and I’m generally all for the reporting of null results when they are substantively interesting. But I wonder how many readers will really appreciate the meaninglessness of the change in support, given that the disclaimer is after the discussion of the marginals, which show a statistical dead heat and zero meaningful change since the previous poll.

I went to the 11:10 pm show of Dodgeball last night, and found it hysterically funny. Ben Stiller as fitness magnate/doofus White Goodman is clearly the central comedic character (and parry to Vince Vaughn’s slacker straight man character), but I found the pairing of Gary Cole (as “Cotton McKnight”) and Jason Bateman (“Pepper Brooks”) as the ESPN8 commentary team the perfect send-up of sportscaster pretentiousness and inanity. Plus, you’ve got to applaud including a bar named “The Dirty Sanchez” in a PG-13 film.

I’ve posted a review of Reiner Knizia’s game Modern Art at Settling Catan.

As James Joyner notes, Nomar Garciaparra was traded from the Red Sox to the Cubs in a 4-team deal that would seem to put the Cubs in a pretty good position, but which looks to David Pinto like something of a firesale for the Sox—even though they did get Doug Mientkiewicz and Orlando Cabrera in the deal.

I suppose this also means that Jimmy Fallon will have to learn to play another character than “annoying Boston guy who screams ‘Nomar’ and makes out with Rachel Dratch at the drop of a hat.” But given SNL’s track record on such things, maybe not…

Nick Troester (apparently, it rhymes with “toaster”) is under the impression that last evening’s events fall under the Chatham House Rules. My personal perspective is that it’d be hard to enforce those rules, considering that all activities took place in public venues, but I’m still leaning toward relative confidentiality, if only for the sake of the honor of our mixed company (or at least for my continued employment).

I will, however, note that Kevin, Leslie, and I did make it to the ICPSR picnic on Saturday, something that cannot be said for others of our group.

BTW, I did find my hat… it was in my backpack all along.

Prof. Bryan Caplan revels in his nerdiness at Marginal Revolution.

In case you haven't guessed, yes, I consider myself a nerd. I'm such a nerd that I worry that my sons will fail to embrace their nerd heritage. The best game show in history, Beat the Geeks, began by asking each contestant "What's the geekiest thing about you?" I still wish I could have been a contestant just to give my response:

"I am the Dungeon Master for an all-economists' Dungeons and Dragons game."

Beat that, geeks!

That sounds like a challenge to me. Or perhaps a new blog-meme. Okay, here’s the geekiest thing about me:

I met my wife because we were both subscribed to a Sandman fanzine entitled Dream Lovers.

And to tie it all together, here’s a blast from the past: a mailing list discussion on free will from 1995 between Caplan, me, and several others. In the midst of this discussion, I announce my engagement. Wow, it’s been nine years.

IIRC, Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, founder of the Wikipedia, was also a member of that mailing list. Although maybe that was a different philosophy mailing list.

Chip Taylor solicits comment from political scientists on last weekend’s New York Times Magazine piece on the efforts to create a Democratic-leaning interest group infrastructure to rival the similar arrangements on the right. He writes:

That made me think about the Reform Party. After Perot was done dabbling in presidential politics, the Reform Party infrastructure was left with no real leader or agenda. It did have state and local party officials across the country, ballot access in many states, and eligibility for at least one more round of public funding for its presidential candidate.

Consequently there was a struggle between Buchanan and his organization and (if memory serves) the Natural Law Party apparatus (such as it is was). Neither was exactly committed to the principles of the Reform Party (to the extent that they existed); they were after the political assets of the Reform Party organization.

Now, I’m not saying that the Democratic Party is anywhere near the empty shell the post-Perot Reform Party was. But it seems that to the extent it is composed of coalitions of disparate interest groups, it is more vulnerable to a “hostile takeover.”

I wrote about this topic late last year:

With the institutional power of American parties in rapid decline relative to both candidates and interest groups (witness George Soros’ large donation to MoveOn.org, rather than the Democrats), thanks to the incumbency advantage, widespread adoption of open primaries, and McCain-Feingold, it seems likely that the United States will see more of these fights for the heart and soul of the party, as candidates and interest groups try to gain control of the remaining institutional advantages of the major parties—their automatic access to the ballot and their “brand recognition.” Why build a third party from scratch when you can just hijack the Republicans or Democrats?

More broadly, I think American politics has moved away from the system of parties articulating voter preferences (articulated in part here by James Joyner) to a system in which interest groups are the primary vehicle for public influence of the political process—with electoral competition something of a vestigial sideshow, necessitated more by constitutional requirements and the need for some elected oversight of the bureaucracy than it is required for functioning representative government. I don’t know that the central thesis here is anything too original—go read Schattschneider or Dahl—but I think political actors have finally come to recognize this reality in a way that they didn’t before, prodded largely by the search for loopholes in campaign finance laws and continual weakening of the institutional position of political parties in the system.

I think Bryan Caplan has really stepped in one here:

Larry Bartels has gotten national attention for his work on Bush’s income tax cut, inheritance tax cut, and public opinion. (Here is the full article; here is the digest version; here is what Alex Tabarrok had to say about Bartels). Bartels’ main point is that public opinion verges on contradictory: the public believes that inequality has gone up, agrees that inequality is bad, agrees that the rich should pay more taxes, BUT still supports two tax cuts that mostly benefit the rich.

Bartels is right, although since I belong to the tiny minority of people who favors however much inequality the free market delivers, for once I have to celebrate the public’s folly.

What Bartels does not seem to realize, however, is that the contradiction he laments is only one of many. [emphasis added]

I suspect very strongly that Prof. Bartels does realize this, as he is one of the foremost experts on public opinion in American politics. Mind you, Caplan’s broader post is a nice primer on the contradictions in public opinion that political scientists have known about (and attempted to explain) since the 1960s—contradictions that Bartels, and any other political scientist studying public opinion, would be well aware of.

Tyler Cowen calls on Dan Drezner to self-assign p values to his fence-sitting. My gut feeling is that this approach would be ineffective; based on the cognitive psychology literature, I’d have to conclude that Dan is probably not the best judge of his own objective probabilities. Instead, I recommend employing content analysis of Dan’s posts to arrive at estimated p values at given points in time, or using a panel of raters, or some other more accurate technique.

Incidentally, the only p value I have a good handle on for myself is that p=1.00 that, on election night, I will be sitting with my undergraduate methods class at some venue with available libations making fun of Brokaw, Rather, and/or Jennings on the big-screen as they call (and uncall) states. Assuming the dean doesn’t put the kibosh on the short field trip, that is…

Here’s my lame-ass election prediction: Kerry wins. And you can take that to the bank. At least, you can take it to the bank that you took my “Dean will be the nominee and Osama (not to be confused with Obama) will get a woody” prediction to (I suspect the tellers there aren’t that bright).

Now if I can just buy the Kreskin outfit and crystal ball prop from the local magic supply store, I’ll have some real respect in this discipline.

Eugene Volokh, defending the legal profession from charges that the This song is your song controversy is all the lawyers’ fault, writes:

But at most what we have here is a few special lawyers-by-training -- many of whom are no longer even lawyers in private service, but are lawmakers of one sort or another -- making unsound decisions. We do not have some general ethical failing on the part of the legal profession as a whole.

I don’t have anything substantive to say about Prof. Volokh’s post, but this does give me an opportunity to advance a linguistic mission of mine: to bring about a distinction between the words lawyer and attorney.

Now I’m not claiming this is distinction is found standard American English, but I think it would be a good distinction to make.

If we make the distinction, a lawyer is a person who has a certain professional training, whereas an attorney is a person, usually a lawyer, who represents people in their legal affairs.

An attorney is not necessarily a lawyer. Judges and law clerks are almost always lawyers, but (at least in the federal judiciary), they are not permitted to be attorneys. And someone who decides to represent himself in a legal matter is his own attorney, even though he may not be a lawyer.

We may make a similar distinction between doctor and physician. Senator Bill "Cat Murderer" Frist is a doctor, since he has a medical degree, but he is no longer a physician.

I just received the first UUEncoded email attachment I’ve seen in about half a decade. Now I have to remember how to decode one of the bloody things.

The part of “Chris” in this post is being played by someone else. The opinions expressed in this post are not Chris’s, particularly if you are looking to hire a methodologist… in which case, Chris’s vita is linked over there to the right, so read it and skip the rest of this post, which will be of zero interest to you.

For the individual in the San Francisco Bay area from a Comcast IP who did a Google search on “Political Methodology ph.d placement rate”: abysmal, if you generalize from an n of one—but pretty good if you consider a visiting position and spending another year desperately avoiding a tenure-track job with a 4–4 load or worse “placement.” Suffice it to say anyone actively looking for a real methodologist who can publish and teach Ph.D. students (as opposed to an Americanist they can also dump undergrad methods on) isn’t going to be happy with me—never mind that that’s what I’ve been trained to do.

On the bright side, your chances are probably much better if you manage to attend a top 25 Ph.D. program. So polish up those GRE scores!

Silly observations that don’t really deserve their own posts:

• Yesterday in Ann Arbor was cold, rainy, and dreary—to the extent I actually had to switch on the heat in my apartment last night, lest I freeze to death (good thing I decided to have the gas switched on after all). Today, on the other hand, it’s around 80° and sunny, and supposed to stay in the 80s through the next week or so. Weird.

• Maybe I’m getting old or something, but there’s something very disturbing about a current pop hit which has a chorus about a sexual technique. Particularly when it’s performed by someone best known for singing the theme to Disney’s “Kim Possible.” (What may even be more disturbing is I can’t figure out what sexual technique it is.)

• Not to start a big brou-ha-ha like the recently-raging conflict over the relative “hotness” of libertarian women, but I‘ll put any five randomly selected young Mississippi women (18–35) against a comparably-selected slate of native Michiganders any day.

• Would anyone know who Ashlee Simpson was if it weren’t for her sister?

Via Amber Taylor, I learn that the party’s vice-presidential candidate, Richard Campagna, has a Ph.D from a diploma mill, thus moving the party to a position formerly only occupied by the loons of the Natural Law Party and its advocates of “transcendental meditation.”

There’s something very nice about not having access to a television this week. Others, however, are less fortunate.

I may have to deliberately take my TV out of order when I get back to Jackson so I can avoid the Republican convention too.

Stephen Taylor, the proprietor of the real PoliBlog™, points out the folly of leaping from punchcards to touchscreens—particularly by county election administrators whose general track-record of competence was pretty poor to begin with.

Plus, as an added bonus, it would have spared us the conspiracy-mongering claims that Diebold cares who wins the election.

I can’t quite figure out why the bit-error rate of the terrestrial signal from a XM repeater seems to float in and out of tolerance; most of the time, it is right around 3, but it has short bursts up to 25—what’s annoying is that anything over 10 makes it lose signal. (It also only seems to produce a usable signal if I put the antenna within a 10 square-inch area of my office.)

Maybe next year (if I return) I should request a south-facing office.

The drawback of wearing your heart on your sleeve (or your blog) is letting your emotions take you somewhere you don’t want to go in public. Case in point: Andrew Sullivan’s virtual endorsement of John Kerry, apparently motivated by the elephant in the room that James Joyner points out—the president’s position on same-sex marriage, something that Sullivan doesn’t bother mentioning in the column, but looms over the whole discussion for anyone familiar with Sullivan’s tireless crusading on the issue. Whatever one’s feelings on Bush’s handling of the issue (and, there, I’m largely in agreement with Sullivan, though I do lack the personal self-interest angle), wishing John Kerry were conservative isn’t going to make him conservative, as Stephen Green points out, and it’s disingenuous for Sullivan (or anyone else who genuinely considers themselves conservative) to believe otherwise.*

That said, I think it is reasonable to suspect a hypothetical President Kerry, if his election is unaccompanied by a return to Democratic control of Congress, will be forced by circumstances—namely a hostile Congress—to govern more conservatively (at least on the fiscal side of the ledger) than Bush has. But I don’t think Kerry’s instincts will be conservative, or even moderate for that matter, and in the areas of policy where there isn’t a strong check by Congress I think he will move in an unabashedly liberal direction.

I managed to get my gas and electricity switched on around noon, thus ending my long, semi-homeless saga since arriving in Ann Arbor. (Thanks to the kindness of an acquiaintence and his roommate, I at least had a roof over my head last night, gratis.) Now I’m dealing with accumulated spam email.