Dave Zatz posts on TiVo’s new “Swivel Search” feature that broadens the built-in search for upcoming shows to also look for downloadable TiVoCast and Amazon Unbox programming that meets your interests. The use of tagging in particular looks potentially very interesting.

Add yourself to the priority list here or just wait a while and it will show up on your TiVo too.

Ah, if only this had happened two weeks ago I’d have had something worthwhile to talk about during the last week of my Congress course.

þ (via email): My former student Jim Swift, who now works on the south side of the Capitol.

Except all the dress-up bits, which are fun anyway, and packing up all the books in my office so I can ship them all using the postal service’s library rate to Tulane.

I knew Samuel Kernell had taught at Ole Miss (I had the very pleasant experience of meeting him at a poster session at APSA about seven years ago—he was one of only a handful of people to look at my poster, so we chatted for a few minutes), but I had no idea he was a Millsaps political science graduate. If I’d have known that, I’d have made my intro students there use The Logic of American Politics just on principle.

It's also amazing what completely random stuff that has nothing to do with what you were actually searching for can come up in Google.

“What most professors want is for students to validate their pathetic life experience.” — Michael C. Munger, as quoted in the film Indoctrinate U., via Margaret Soltan’s University Diaries (who is less than enthused by the film overall).

As a contingent faculty member, all I can say is that quotes featured in QotD do not necessarily represent the views of Signifying Nothing, its owners, advertisers, or the potential tenure-track faculty-member who generates all of the content. But it’s still funny…

According to the Times-Picayune, Tulane is on-track to enroll 1400 freshmen in the fall, some of whom will doubtless fall into the clutches of my nefariously evil Introduction to Political Science seminar. The course is still very much on the drawing board, although I think it’s going to include big chunks on electoral systems and democratic competence*—and maybe not much else, since it’s apparently not supposed to be a field survey but more of a “wrestle with a few big questions while you write a bunch of stuff” course.

* This class will be a nice counter-balance to Politics of the American South; I get to teach one class that says “democracy sucks, and Ken Arrow proved it” and another that says “it's really important for everyone to have the right to vote, because that's what makes democracy work.” Woe betide anyone trying to take both classes at once; the cognitive dissonance would be painful. How I manage to survive simultaneously believing both of these things is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out.

I think I’ve become lenient on grading in my young age. Maybe it’s just the non-tenure-track faculty member’s equivalent of senioritis (perhaps vistoritis?), but I’m pretty sure I’m a softer touch in the spring than in the fall. I’m just waiting on a few stragglers and my Congress class’ final exams before I can officially put a nice bow on this semester, except for the bits where I dress in fancy regalia.

Tomorrow’s project: figure out what to submit for my useR! proposal. It’s scheduled at a positively icky time for me, as I expect to be moving right around August 1st, but if I can squeeze it in it’d be both a good experience and nice CV fodder. Ideally I’d figure out a way to repurpose my methods meeting proposal, but I’m not sure it’ll work for useR! (boy that punctuation is annoying) very well, so plan B is to get my R package with epcp and friends into working order and write a paper on that.

I also owe a 900-word encyclopedia entry to Ken Warren by next Tuesday.

Frank Stephenson links a front-page WSJ article on disappearing from Google, which leads off with this tale of woe:

Before Abigail Garvey got married in 2000, anyone could easily Google her. Then she swapped her maiden name for her husband’s last name, Wilson, and dropped out of sight.

In Web-search results for her new name, links to Ms. Wilson’s epidemiology research papers became lost among all manner of other Abigail Wilsons, ranging from 1980s newspaper wedding announcements for various Abigail Wilsons to genealogy records listing Abigail Wilsons born in the 1600s and 1700s. When Ms. Wilson applied for a new job, interviewers questioned the publications she listed on her résumé because they weren’t finding the publications in online searches, Ms. Wilson says. [emphasis mine]

So when Ms. Wilson, now 32, was pregnant with her first child, she ran every baby name she and her husband, Justin, considered through Google to make sure her baby wouldn’t be born unsearchable. Her top choice: Kohler, an old family name that had the key, rare distinction of being uncommon on the Web when paired with Wilson. “Justin and I wanted our son’s name to be as special as he is,” she explains.

First, I’m not sure that naming your son after a faucet company is a good move, no matter how unique the name is. Second, I think Ms. Wilson’s travails might have easily been averted by giving full citation information for her publications on her CV, including her maiden name.

The lesson I draw from this: people (mostly, but not exclusively, women) with established publication records shouldn’t adopt married names for their professional careers. The lesson I don’t draw from this: I should name my firstborn “Moen Delta Lawrence.”

Craig Newmark helpfully links to a website that does a good job of explaining the coming (in February 2009) shutdown of analog over-the-air television transmission in the United States.

Apparently there was a debate among the Republican contenders for the presidential nomination tonight.

If more states keep following Florida’s lead, we may soon thankfully reach a point at which a state sets its primary date to be before the present time, the nomination will be decided (since the primary will have already taken place), and this whole process will be mercifully over. Or maybe I just watch too much science fiction where this sort of causality is commonplace (like this episode of Futurama).

EDSBS’ Mustache Wednesday this week features Mythbuster Jaime Hyneman and his impressive ’stache… although the comment thread is more a discussion of “build team” co-star Kari Byron, who thankfully doesn’t sport a Walrus-style mustache (although she would probably be cute in a beret).

Incidentally, in this post-Imus world, are we allowed to call people who don’t work in the sex industry “pimps” any more? Ruling from the commenters, please.

I am happy to report that I have accepted a visiting position for the 2007–08 academic year in the political science department at Tulane University in New Orleans. I’m not sure exactly what I’ll be teaching next year, but I know it involves an introduction to political science course and some additional mid-to-upper-level courses in American politics at the undergraduate level, which hopefully will include my seminar in Southern politics in the spring semester.

I’m particularly looking forward to living about nine degrees farther south. St. Louis may very well be a great place to live… but not between November and March, at least for this cold weather wimp.

The best thing about teaching research methods is that I get to talk to students about all sorts of different research questions: everything from the relative effectiveness of economic and racial integration policies in public education to the incidence of split-ticket voting.

I’m almost looking forward to a semester (maybe even a year) of not teaching methods—if nothing else, it’d be good not to be pigeon-holed as the “methods guy” for a while. But I’ll miss the methods papers nonetheless.

Jason Kuznicki earns quote of the day honors for this statement; but, you should go read the whole thing:

[T]he state enforcement of private moral conduct almost inevitably produces an even greater moral evil than the conduct we aim to repress. Far from leading to a more moral society, the use of force to police the private conduct of adults achieves just the opposite; in the name of opposing libertinism, the prohibitionists run squarely into something far worse.

The Elephant in the Room by Ryan Sager is an interesting examination of the issues facing the Republican “big tent” coalition in the run up to the 2008 election. The book is well-organized and the writing is clear and concise, advancing a logical argument that the social conservative right and what I might call George W. Bush’s “Christian Democratic conservatism” have alienated the libertarian west, placing the GOP back in jeopardy of returning to permanent minority status in Washington. Definitely a must-read book for anyone wanting to understand the contemporary Republican party—although one would be interested in Sager’s explanation for the continuing popularity of Rudy Giuliani, even with the GOP base.

Boeing Versus Airbus by John Newhouse ought to be a more interesting book than it is, but falls short in a number of irritating ways. Newhouse is an incredibly repetitive writer, and the narrative structure is frustratingly almost-but-not-quite linear. Newhouse introduces one key Boeing executive by thoroughly trashing him, but then spends the next 200 pages apparently forgetting he ever said anything bad about him. As one Amazon review points out, Newhouse never clearly explains why Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas outright instead of just waiting for it to go bankrupt and getting the parts it actually wanted; nor does he address other baffling decisions, like Boeing canning the Boeing 717 (the last iteration of the DC-9) just as it was proving to be a success with Airtran, as most of its competitors were commercial non-starters, and as major carriers were looking to replace their aging DC-9s with more modern aircraft. Newhouse also includes bizarre segues to complain about the Iraq war that don’t seem to have anything to do with Boeing, Airbus, the aviation industry, or anything else on-topic. The occasional insight—for example, that Airbus’ decision to go ahead with the A380 was based largely on the misunderstanding that Boeing made more money from the 747 than other aircraft—is lost in the narrative. Nor does Newhouse spend any time talking about the emergence of competition from below by up-and-coming entrants like Brazil’s Embraer and Canada’s Bombardier, who are successfully attacking Boeing and Airbus’ real cash cows, the narrow-body 737 and A320; instead, he devotes a whole chapter fretting about the potential rise of East Asian manufacturers, who have yet to become a factor. There’s an interesting book about the contemporary aviation industry to be written, but Boeing Versus Airbus isn’t it.

Congress at the Grassroots by Richard F. Fenno, Jr. is one of the books I assigned in my Congress class this semester. If you want to understand how the nature of congressional representation has changed in the past 40 years, this is as good a place to start as any. From a social scientist’s perspective, I’d have liked to have seen more evidence that these two representatives were typical of their time and place, and thus we can arrive at generalizable knowledge from these two cases, rather than simply an assertion in the concluding chapter to that effect. But overall I think it was a very good book… and if I didn’t already have a bazillion readings in my southern politics course, I’d add it there too.

I’m waiting to hear back from one job interview; once that happens, I’ll either have a very tough decision to make, or a very easy one… and even though professionally a tough decision might be better for me, personally I’d rather just have it all be over with for 2007 so I can get on with doing what I need to do for 2008.

I was wondering out loud in my Congress class Friday when the Democratic leadership and the president would get around to actually hammering out a supplemental instead of the kabuki theater approach that seems to have prevailed in D.C. until this point.

Dave Zatz points out a really sweet deal on the HD TiVo Series 3: $500, including a free TiVo wireless adapter. (If you want to give me a referral kickback, use chris (at) lordsutch.com as the referral address when activating.)

Radley Balko takes note of my hometown’s inability to convince a Missouri Court of Appeals panel that an area of downtown Clayton is ‘blighted’. Quoth Balko:

The idea that expensive office buildings there could be “blighted” is laughable.

Indeed; the corner of Hanley and Forsyth is pretty close to the least blighted area in the St. Louis MSA by any plausible definition of the term.

Something for you to do if you’re bored this afternoon: take this survey that allegedly will help me attract (better?) advertising to the blog, or something.

That would be Ruth Sheehan, apologizing for her inflammatory columns at the beginning of the Duke lacrosse “fake but accurate” rape scandal in the Raleigh News & Observer, rather than anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, who as of last report is still emulating a homeless woman in Crawford, Texas.

þ: Craig Newmark.

Paul Gronke and Free Exchange both address how the use of a majority-runoff system in French presidential elections has produced in 2007 a runoff without the presumptive Condorcet winner on the ballot; neither is inaccessible enough to bring the good Marquis in by name, but Free Exchange mentions Ken Arrow and Paul Gronke discusses Gary Cox, which are certainly good starts in that direction.

I spent several years of my life learning to pronounce a proper name like the locals did… but for the next 24 hours, to avoid sounding like a southerner (usually not a problem for me, except for the occasional “y’all”), I have to consciously pronounce the name the way northerners pronounce it—if only so people can understand the proper name I’m using.

Free Exchange notes New York Times reporter Erik Eckholm playing fast and loose with infant mortality statistics to extrapolate ominous trends from what appear to be random year-to-year fluctuations in infant death rates (and a downward-sloping overall trend, to boot).

One might also wonder what effect—if any—Hurricane Katrina had on the 2005 mortality rate. That is, if one weren’t Eckholm, who doesn’t even mention the possibility of a relationship with the largest natural disaster in Mississippi history.

Saturday marked the long overdue wedding of my good friends Alfie and Annie in a lovely ceremony at The Chimes in midtown Memphis, followed by a very nice catered reception next door, where I got to bust out my stunning old-school dance moves to classic tracks like “Baby Got Back” along with some vague efforts on my behalf at ballroom dancing, and a post-reception gathering at Celtic Crossing. Congratulations to the happy couple, pictured below in much less formal attire: