Julian Sanchez has an interesting economic speculation about why New York radio is so lame:

My guess - pure speculation - is that because current technology and spectrum policy limit the number of FM stations to well below what the New York Market could bear, what ends up happening is that the market is actually able to sustain at a profitable level enough Clear Channel-style top-40 schlock stations that the more interesting independent sorts that pop up in less dense urban areas get crowded out. Imagine every town in America got exactly five movie theatres, regardless of size. Ironically, in the smaller towns, three or four theatres would probably satisfy the total demand for the mainstream Hollywood movies coming out, and one or two would be left catering to the minority that was interested in art-house or foreign flicks. In Manhattan, though, those five theatres could easily sell out every showing of The Punisher or Scooby Doo 2 and still have lines at the door, so with a limit on the number of theatres in place, they stick with plucking that low-hanging mass-market fruit.

Interesting thoughts, but why is Memphis radio so bad? Answer: it wasn't, until George Flinn killed the Pig. We still have WEVL, I suppose, but it seems like every time I turn on WEVL they're playing Celtic music. Shudder.

From CNN:

Judge deals blow to Bryant defense

Judges have been saying that their salaries are inadequate, but who would have thought a judge would stoop to dealing drugs?

UPDATE: Reader Xrlq emails to point out yet another reading of the headline:

Actually, when I first read the headline, I thought of a third meaning: this judge's deals aren't just kinda bad for Kobe. To his defense team, they blow.

Steven Taylor finds John Kerry discussing Vietnam in the oddest of places. My question: does the analogy make Cajuns “Charlie”?

Since Chris is doing it, so will I.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

My result:

Limes are used a great deal in Asian cooking, and the rind can be used to flavor curries, marinades, and dips.

Via Amish Tech Support:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Here’s mine:

Then, thoughtfully, “Actually I’m rather tired of it.”

Faulkner it ain’t.

Laura of Apartment 11D thinks a war is brewing in academe between the parents and the childless:

Is this war new? I think so. With the pressures of the new economy, workers are turning on each other. Everybody else’s life looks better than their own. The parent workers are jealous of their single counterparts who can work uninterrupted, who get a full night’s sleep and a weekend off. The singles feel that they don’t have the excuse of a soccer game to get them out of a departmental meeting.

Since the decision to have kids has been framed in terms of choice, then that means that the chooser has to accept all the consequences. Of course, you could make the converse argument that the childless choose not to have children, and thus have to accept the consequences. [emphasis mine]

I suppose one can make that argument, but given the relative paucity of women beating on my door begging me to be a sperm donor, I think the “choice” aspect here is massively overstated.

On the other hand, the benefits of not having to convince a spouse and kids that (hypothetically speaking, of course) it’s a good idea for your career to spend the next winter digging out from under snow on the wild chance that a tenure line will open up the next year, especially when you’re turning down a tenure-track offer in much warmer climes to do it, probably shouldn’t be discounted…

Stephen Karlson is the latest to note the news that Duke is getting rid of its 8 a.m. classes in favor of 8:30 a.m. start times. He is also the first to note that the students may not actually be the impetus for the change:

[T]he clustering of classes in the 10 am to 3 pm time blocks, which contributes to a space crunch at many universities, reflects in part a revelation of preferences on the part of the faculty. Northern Illinois University wants at least one third of each department’s class offerings outside prime time. That, too, is not as big a problem for a night owl, or for a morning person. One colleague, now retired, would choose the 8 am classes, be in by 5 or 6 in the morning, and gone by 2 or 3 pm.

Given my future status as “low rung on the ladder,” I don’t expect to have my preferred sleep schedule worked into the formulation of the college bulletin. But I will say the way to this political scientist’s heart is to let him sleep in…

Jacob Levy notes that my papers page may be heading towards obsolecence, given that the Powers That Be in political science have joined forces to launch PoliticalScience.org.

Now, if they can only figure out how to make employers actually pay attention to the vitas posted on eJobs, this discipline might well be organized by the time I’m retired.

I planned to post about this Monday when I got my APSA April e-Newsletter, which helpfully arrived in my email box well after half the events it talks about have already happened, but when searching for my name turned up nothing (when I know for a fact there should be some of my stuff in there, at least if it includes—as advertised—papers from APSA 2003 and MPSA 2004), I concluded the site was useless as-is, being an egotistical snob and all.

Professor Bainbridge thinks some branches of government are more co-equal than others:

Reading the accounts of the Supreme Court’s oral argument yesterday on the Guantanamo prisoner appeal, I am struck yet again by the unweening arrogance of the US judiciary. Set aside the substantive merits of the case, of which I believe Justice Jackson’s aphorism “the Constitution is not a suicide pact” more than adequately disposes (see also my friend and colleague Eugene Volokh’s more substantive critique). Instead, consider how offended some members of the Court seemed to be by the notion that any aspect of American life might lie outside their reach. Breyer, for example, complained: “It seems rather contrary to an idea of a Constitution with three branches that the executive would be free to do whatever they want, whatever they want without a check.”

Apparently only the Supreme Court is “free to do whatever they want… without a check.” If five of the nine unelected old men and women on that court agree, they can strike down any law or executive action. And our elected representatives have essentially no power to constrain them other than the impractical route of amending the Constitution.

In actuality, our elected representatives have a great deal of power to constrain the judiciary: they may, for example, limit its jurisdiction, expand its membership (“court packing”), reduce funding, split circuits, and take myriad other actions designed to frustrate the court. Lower court judges can, and often do, defy the clear precedent set forth by the Supreme Court. Congress and the president routinely ignore the intent of Supreme Court decisions like INS v. Chadha. The Supreme Court has no police power to compel compliance with its decisions; President Eisenhower sent the National Guard to Little Rock, not Earl Warren, while President Jackson gave the (figurative, if not literal) finger to the Court when it told him to stop deporting the Cherokees.

Heck, good money says that if the Supremes had done what almost all agree now is the right thing in Korematsu, and said Japanese-Americans were being deprived of their rights by being interred, it wouldn’t have made the least bit of difference. And, should the Court actually agree with the Gitmo detainees’ case, and if the hypothetical Reinhardt decision comes that some detainees should be released, I’m not expecting the administration to be in any hurry whatsoever to comply—more likely, they’ll just ship them off to the Mossad or something.

To assert that “our elected representatives have essentially no power to constrain” the courts is borderline absurd. Congress and the president have plenty of power—they just choose not to exercise it, given that both parties want to have a Supreme Court that is willing and able to do the dirty work of standing up to the voters when they demand “uncommonly silly” laws (that nonetheless get overwhelming legislative support) like flag desecration acts, public morals legislation, and the like.

Update: Brett Marston agrees with me, at least in part, citing additional constraints on the Court (most notably, that it is restricted to ruling on cases on its docket).

While I was off doing better things, apparently some debate arose over whether or not the Hot Abercrombie Chick is really a, er, “chick.” (The hotness and the wearing of Abercrombie & Fitch were not debated.)

I really don’t know what to make of all this. I know better than to think that good-looking women can’t be smart though… and thus my gut feeling is to give Ms. Doerty the benefit of the doubt on actually being Ms. Doerty.

More wackiness from the Bay State gay marriage kerfuffle: now the plan is, remove the judges.

Link via Kate Malcolm.

“Public policy is a government plan of action to solve a social problem.”

“Public policy is a government plan of action intended to solve a societal problem.”

Three guesses which definition was in the textbook, and which was the one I put in my lecture notes. Bonus points if you can make the definition even more accurate by adding a single word.

Tyler Cowen links a New York Times piece on how researchers are using MRIs to look at how voters’ brains react to political ads, and it’s a pretty fascinating piece. Though I must quibble with this graf:

“These new tools could help us someday be less reliant on clichés and unproven adages,” said Tom Freedman, a strategist in the 1996 Clinton campaign, later a White House aide and now a sponsor of the research. “They’ll help put a bit more science in political science.”

Dragging fancy machines into the room has nothing to do with whether or not you’re being scientific. Somehow people have this warped view that you can only do “science” when you’re dressed in a lab coat and goggles and there are a few bunsen burners in the room, which is simply not the case.

Sid Salter had a piece in Sunday’s Jackson Clarion-Ledger on the byzantine structure of Mississippi’s alcohol laws—so byzantine, in fact, that the state tax commission (or the paper) apparently doesn’t know that Lafayette County, with the exception of the city of Oxford, is dry, not wet.

Alex Knapp links a rather amusing parody site, which contains this rather incorrect view of American political development:

The American Democratic system works as well today as it did when the electoral structure was laid out by the founding fathers. In fact, Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams all ran as “Democratic-Republicans”, this party originating today’s Democratic and Republican parties. Not since Zachary Taylor in 1848 has the Electoral College voted a third-party (Whig, in this case) candidate into the White House.

That ain’t exactly how it happened. The “Democratic-Republicans” actually started out—even more confusingly—as the Francophile, agrarian “Republicans,” as in “not monarchists,” with the associated implication that the Federalists* (Anglophile, commercial, concentrated in New England) were. They then became the Democratic-Republicans and finally the Democrats circa 1828, well after the last gasp of the Federalists. Until the late 1850s, the primary opposition party were the Whigs, a party that lacked much of an ideology except, perhaps, being a tad less populist than the Democrats of the time.

The Republican Party, established circa 1854, had no real connection to the Democrats—beyond a membership of disaffected Whigs, Democrats, and assorted other parties who joined to support a fiercely abolitionist platform and the presidential candidacy of John Fremont in 1856.

Still, it’s a cute site…

I still owe David Janes some feedback on his new feedreader (David: I’ll get to it in my Copious Free Time later this week!). In the meantime, download version 1.0.0 for your Windows box and take it for a spin; Jäger takes a different approach than most feed readers, letting your preferred browser handle displaying entries (instead of using an IE or Gecko component internally), but it gets the job done very well.

I’m alive and well back in Oxvegas. More when I’m actually motivated to do anything…

I’m taking a short break at my hotel before heading back to the conference, which I have to say has been a pretty good one for me—I’ve gotten to catch up with some good old friends from ICPSR and elsewhere, met some new ones, and had a few promising conversations about job prospects in The Discipline™. Now off to get a sandwich and head back.

(I saw Dan very briefly yesterday afternoon… otherwise, except for Dirk, it’s been a blogger-free weekend so far.)

Another week, another Hamas leader dies with a generous assist from the Israeli Defense Forces. Funny how that works.

At Cafe Hayek, George Mason University economics professor Russell Roberts quotes James Surowiecki writing in the New Yorker about the Bush administration’s manipulation of economic statistics for political gain:

Statistical expediency and fiscal obfuscation have become hallmarks of this White House. In the past three years, the Bush Administration has had the Bureau of Labor Statistics stop reporting mass layoffs. It shortened the traditional span of budget projections from ten years to five, which allowed it to hide the long-term costs of its tax cuts. It commissioned a report on the aging of the baby boomers, then quashed it because it projected deficits as far as the eye could see. The Administration declined to offer cost estimates or to budget money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A recent report from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers included an unaccountably optimistic job-growth forecast, evidently guided by the Administration’s desire to claim that it will have created jobs.

Prof. Roberts then goes on to praise Bush for this:

[T]his indictment of the Bush Administration is disappointing. I was expecting to read that Bush had leaned on the bureaucrats to redefine unemployment or some such measure in order to look good in November. But except for the BLS example, Surowiecki's examples are examples of where the Administration has made inaccurate forecasts that led to more palatable political results. That's a good reason to ignore most forecasts....

Administration lies are good when they lead to political results that Prof. Roberts likes.

(Link via Marginal Revolution.)

(Updated to correct Prof. Roberts' institutional affiliation and link to Marginal Revolution.)

White House “drug czar” John Walters blamed Canada for a doubling of “pot-related emergency room cases,” explaining that hydroponically-grown Canadian pot is “seven times more potent than the marijuana baby-boomer parents may remember.”

“Canada is exporting to us the crack of marijuana and it is a dangerous problem,” said Walters.

According to Britain’s RAC Foundation for Motoring, one should avoid listening to “Ride of the Valkyries” while driving. Other music to avoid, according to the RAC Foundation: “Firestarter” by Prodigy; “Red Alert” by Basement Jaxx; “Insomnia” by Faithless; and “Dies Irae” by Verdi.

Acceptible music for driving: “Mad World” by Gary Jules; “Another Day” by Lemar; “Too lost in You” by Sugababes; “Breathe Easy” by Blue; and Norah Jones – “Come away with me” by Norah Jones

One should also avoid any music ever featured in a Mitsubishi commercial.

Tim Sandefur takes exception to familiar address among bloggers who don’t know each other:

Can it really be that hard for people to understand that when you don’t know someone, it’s not proper to call him by his first name? There’s no way to point this out without sounding rude in today’s backslappingly Jacksonian ultraegalitarian world, but when I’m tired of ignoring it, and finally say something about it, all I get is a ration of crap. There’s nothing mean or uppity about the rule, folks, it’s just the rule. The rule is, if you don’t know someone, you call him Mr. Soandso, you don’t call him Jim or Bob or Bill—and if you’re publicly speaking to a third person about Mr. Soandso, you call him Mr. Soandso, even if you are on a first name basis with him.

I think that’s true to some extent, but in a lot of ways blogging is like a community—you get to know people in a different way (by reading their posts, rather than by interacting with them), perhaps, but I think it’s awkward to refer to someone whose blogging I read and respect (and hopefully vice versa) on a regular basis using formal pronouns and titles. Heck, there are a few bloggers I’ve never met who I consider friends (of course, there are also folks like Dean & Rosemary Esmay and Mike Hollihan and Len Cleavlin who I have met in person, though only because of blogging).

There is also a certain carryover from academe, where it is considered generally collegial to refer to eschew titles—the hierarchy is enforced in other, more subtle ways instead.

As far as I am concerned: I’m Chris (or Christopher if you’re my parents), and you may call me that, although I’ll certainly forgive, and wouldn’t dare correct, anyone who insists on “Doctor Lawrence” or the (technically incorrect, at least for now) “Professor Lawrence” for reasons of upbringing or an interest in maintaining the tu-vous distinction for other reasons.

My panel this morning ("Public Support for the Iraq War") was surprisingly well-attended (at least, compared to panels I’ve presented on in the past), and we had a good discussion despite the absence of our original chair/discussant due to a family illness.

You can browse the MPSA paper archive online; my panel was Section 13, Panel 13 (I can’t figure out how to make a direct link that won’t break); of course, if you’re only interested in my paper, you can get it here.

Dan Drezner takes a look at John Kerry’s “new and improved!” misery index:

Every index can be challenged on the quality of the data that goes into it, and the weights that are assigned to the various components that make up the overall figure. A lack of transparency about methodology is also a valid criticism. For example, in my previous post on the competitiveness of different regions in the global information economy, the company responsible for the rankings provides little (free) information on how the index was computed. That’s a fair critique.

Even when the methodology is transparent, there can still be problems.

This is a subject near-and-dear to my heart. In quantitative social science, your econometric model is only as useful as your indicators; a crappy indicator renders the whole model essentially useless.

Unfortunately, our ways of dealing with the problem of how well an indicator reflects a concept leave a lot to be desired; “face validity”—which boils down to “I think the indicator reflects the concept, so we’ll a priori assume it does”—is relied on, even by good scholars, to an extent that will make you blanch. Even seemingly obvious indicators, like responses to survey questions, are often woefully inadequate for measuring “true” concepts (in the case of public opinion research, attitudes and predispositions).

Building an index helps with some of these problems—if your measurement error—but introduces others (like ascribing valid weights to the items, as Dan points out). A few cool tools, like factor analysis and its cousin principal components analysis, are designed to help in finding weights, but even they have problems and limitations, most of which basically boil down to the fact that human judgment is still involved in the process.