If I’m not careful, I may get addicted to Woot!; I’ve already gotten a rather nice set of Bluetooth headphones to use with my laptop and a better set of computer speakers, both at bargain-basement prices.

Your exercise for the day: fisk this piece mercilessly. Here are two whoppers in the space of one paragraph to get you started:

Faculty members decide what they want to teach and when they want to teach, if, indeed, they teach at all. This is particularly true regarding undergraduate instruction, which is something of an afterthought on many campuses. Faculty members typically spend fewer than 200 hours a year in the classroom. That amounts to just five 40-hour weeks.

Let’s see… in my current job, I get to decide exactly a third of what I teach (in previous jobs, it was even less, and I’ve been offered jobs where I would have had no choice whatsoever); nobody asked me when I wanted to teach; and nobody gave me the option of not teaching. I spend well over 200 hours a year in the classroom, time that doesn’t count office hours, responding to student phone calls and emails, class preparation time, research obligations, department meetings, service obligations, and attending co-curricular and extra-curricular student events. I don’t actually get paid for one quarter of the year, during which I am essentially unemployed but am expected to work on research anyway. A whole month’s salary went out the window to pay for my move to Missouri. My future employability is largely determined by whether or not three other individuals’ letters of recommendation say better things about me than other peoples’ letters. It’s really cushy.

I could easily double my salary in private industry, with the sole disadvantage of being stuck behind a desk for an arbitrary number of hours per week. Instead, for some reason I cannot fathom, I have spent the last three years competing with other people who—to a person—have a more prestigious doctorate than I do to find a job that is exactly like the one described in the previous paragraph but has slightly more job security—although not near as much as the typical corporate white collar position, at least for anyone who is at least mildly productive.

The really insane part is that I wouldn’t trade what I do now for the world.

þ: Margaret Soltan.

Before watching Talent-McCaskill on TiVo-delay, I need to make two very important points:

• Claire McCaskill doesn’t look anything like her picture.
• I am too sober to watch this crap, even though I was cruel and sadistic enough to make my American politics students watch it and write an essay for extra credit.

More thoughts when some braincells are numbed enough to listen to these twerps.

The Kitchen Cabinet is back up and running after a lengthy haïtus (albeit one punctuated by occasional movie reviews).

My presentation on measuring political sophistication with item-response theory models is here; it’s something of a work in progress, as I haven’t put together the pretty graphs for the American NES data yet.

Everyone’s favorite “do as we say, not as we do” left-wing advocacy group, ACORN, which is usually in the news for its shabby treatment of its own employees while advocating higher labor standards for everyone else, is in trouble here in St. Louis after around 1500 potentially fraudulent voter registration cards were discovered in recent weeks, many of which have been traced back to canvassers hired by the group.

KWord imports PDF files. I wish I’d learned that before I shelled out $50 at Office Depot for a Windows program that did the same thing.

E. Frank Stephenson on evidence that various New York politicians sought to promote their candidacies through the publication of private college guidebooks with their pictures on the cover:

One more data point for the public choice view of politicians over fantasy that pols are selfless public servants.

I didn’t realize that public choice had some sort of a monopoly on considering politicians as having baser motives than serving the public good.

The New York Times reports on the bizarre case of Democratic party operative Ike Brown of Noxubee County, Mississippi, who faces a federal lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act for suppressing the voting rights of whites. Probably the most fascinating passages in the article, which read like something out of a 1960s era lawsuit with the races reversed:

Mr. Brown is accused in the lawsuit and in supporting documents of paying and organizing notaries, some of whom illegally marked absentee ballots or influenced how the ballots were voted; of publishing a list of voters, all white, accompanied by a warning that they would be challenged at the polls; of importing black voters into the county; and of altering racial percentages in districts by manipulating the registration rolls. ...

The Justice Department’s voting rights expert is less reserved [than local white residents]. “Virtually every election provides a multitude of examples of these illegal activities organized by Ike Brown and other defendants, and those who act in concert with them,” the expert, Theodore S. Arrington, chairman of the political science department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, wrote in a report filed with the court. ...

There are so few whites in the county, Mr. Brown suggests, that the tactics he is accused of are unnecessary to keep blacks in office.

“They can’t win anyway unless we choose to vote for them,” he said with a smile. “If I was doing something wrong — that’s like closing the barn door when the horse is already gone.”

Of course, the key point of practices like the white primary in most of the South wasn’t to prevent blacks from outvoting whites per se—even in the early 20th century before extensive outmigration of African-Americans, whites typically outnumbered blacks in most counties outside the “black belt” plantation counties—but instead to ensure that blacks and lower-to-middle class whites would not form cross-racial voting coalitions in support of white or black candidates that would displace the local elites from office.

Assuming white block voting for white candidates, even in a county that’s 75% black like Noxubee white candidates could win elections with 30–40% black support depending on the turnout ratio… so, if techniques like pressuring blacks through appeals to racial solidarity to also block vote against white candidates breaks down, the illegal tactics Brown is accused of orchestrating would be very helpful in maintaining and/or expanding control of elected offices.

þ Rick Hasen.

Nice to see NBC getting in on the act of insinuating gay men are all pedophiles:

Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) took two male pages with him on a three-day camping trip in 1996, former congressional pages and National Park Service officials tell NBC News. The pages, who were 17 at the time, went rafting and camping with Kolbe in the Grand Canyon over the July 4th holiday that year.

A spokeswoman for Rep. Kolbe confirms the overnight trip but says that the pages did not travel alone with Kolbe. The congressman’s sister was on the trip, along with office staffers and several Park Service employees, says Kolbe spokeswoman Korenna Cline. Gary Cummins, the deputy superintendent of Grand Canyon in 1996, tells NBC News that he also was on the trip with Congressman Kolbe. He confirms that two young men were on the trip with Kolbe, as part of a larger group. ...

Congressman Kolbe is the only openly gay Republican congressman. He has been active with the congressional page program for years, and was himself a page in 1958 for Sen. Barry Goldwater.

I didn’t realize the congressional page program was designated as the feeder program for the DC chapter of NAMBLA. Thanks for the memo, NBC.

I look forward to similar NBC exposés about every other instance in which a gay person went camping with a large group including at least one person under the age of 18.

Inspired by the discussion of ‘Moneyball’ hiring in economics at George Mason, we have discussion of whether this is a good way to build a department from Dan Drezner at Open University and one entry in the burgeoning network of political science rumor blogs. I’ll own up to my contribution to the debate:

The commenter on Dan Drezner’s article makes a good point, in that we’re not really talking about “Moneyball” here [in the blog]—Moneyball is taking people that are undervalued by the market at large (like non-top-X PhDs who may have other indicators of strong potential, or top-X PhDs who look weak due to being in a large cohort) and making the most of them while you can until they find greener pastures (in baseball, free agency; in academe, accumulating the publication record to offset their previous undervaluing and get a higher-positioned job), which fits [Southern Illinois University-Carbondale’s political science department] to a tee. Moneyball isn’t bringing people in for lifetime tenure, which is what most people think a “top-X” department should look like.

It’s not entirely a dead-end strategy… if you get enough ex-faculty out there, your department may look comparatively stronger by word of mouth than one that largely retains its initial hires. Certainly SIU gets better WoM than a lot of other non-top-X departments for that very reason, and over the long term that may build SIU vis a vis other low-to-middling tier PhD departments.

As the commenters at Open University note there are some other key differences between baseball and academe (notably the absence of locked-in long-term contracts, which allows for more “free agent” poaching in political science), but I’m not sure they matter much except for the most “movable” prospects—once on the tenure track, the modal number of job changes is either 0 or 1 in political science. That does suggest, however that departments trying to play Moneyball may need to consider intangibles that might reduce candidate mobility, so they can keep people longer than the market would normally allow.

Obligatory disclaimer: I have applied for positions at SIUC in the past, and have zero offers to show for it (else I wouldn’t be sitting here); whether this indicates some lack of Moneyballing skill on their part, or just good taste, is left as an open question.

Ole Miss–Alabama will be on national TV this Saturday on CBS (presumably in glorious 1080i HD). My inner cheapskate is happy, but the part of my brain that is aware of the Rebels’ abysmal record in Tuscaloosa isn’t—even though Alabama’s record this season isn’t that great in league play either.

Mike Munger contributes a top ten list that pretty much covers everything.

I’m off tomorrow for a day trip over to Columbia to give a talk on measuring political sophistication… so don’t expect a lot of posting from me while I browbeat R and LaTeX into producing my slides this evening.

And, no, before anyone asks: this isn’t a job talk—just a practice run.

Will Baude, Hei Lun Chan, and Amber Taylor (in comments) react to the Veronica Mars season 3 premiere. Like Amber, the things that annoyed me the most about the episode were the incongruities of Hearst College: it’s allegedly a selective liberal arts school, but it seems to be crawling with enough students to be a UC campus and (more incongrously) it has TAs. I can buy a liberal arts college having a criminology professor, though, although the natural homes for such profs like sociology and political science would probably turn up their noses at hiring someone to teach such a shockingly applied topic. But the rest of the episode was engaging enough, in glorious 1080i high definition no less.

As for the rest of my TV watching the past couple of days, I also enjoyed the premiere of Friday Night Lights on NBC; anyone with a brain could see that the starting QB was going to be sidelined, but that’s OK: drama pretty much requires a series to have some adversity, rather than following the template of “best team in Texas goes out and kicks butt, just like everyone expected.” The accents and such didn’t bother me as much as it did Steven Taylor, perhaps in part because I’ve never spent much time in the area and in part because it’s not obvious that the TV show (unlike the book and the movie) is actually set in West Texas—if the town (presumably “Dillon”) were somewhere in the northeastern corner of the state, people would have a pretty thick Deep South accent. Virginia Heffernan even gives it a rave review for the blue-staters who read the NYT, so it can’t be that bad…

Ars Technica looks at a recent study conducted at Indiana that concludes that the Daily Show has just as much substantive content as network news programming—although that may simply be damning with faint praise.

That probably explains why these days I mostly surf Google News and watch very little of either Stewart or Couric.

Here is a list of everything I’m trying my hardest not to work on today:

• Grading methods homework and labs. (did that, alas)
• Grading American politics exams.
• My presentation on measuring political sophistication that I have to give on Friday afternoon at Mizzou.
• Converting the LaTeX version of the Damn Impeachment Article™ into Word format to make the editors of PRQ happy.
• Job applications.

A singularly unproductive afternoon, if I do say so myself.

Tyler Cowen is the latest to observe that extended warranties are a profit center for electronics retailers. The only products I buy extended warranties on these days are laptop computers—I can fix a desktop fairly readily (and usually quite cheaply, thanks to Newegg), but if anything other than a hard drive or memory bites the dust on a laptop you’re basically screwed.

Laptops tend toward the unreliable side; with heavy use and normal levels of abuse, I’m lucky to get through 12 months without some sort of failure. I’m also a complete klutz… I’ve fried two laptops with liquids over the past four years, making an accidental repair plan pretty much a necessity.

The extended warranty isn’t a complete panacea; I’ve had repaired laptops come back with the wrong power connector and the wrong motherboard (I recently sent off my Compaq V4000T for repair with an ATI Radeon X700 graphics chip, and it came back with an Intel i915GM, a decidedly inferior part). But it beats shelling out $1000+ every 18 months.

Saturday night’s Ole Miss–Georgia game reminded me somewhat of the 2003 contest between the Rebels and LSU, which also saw the Rebels’ QB falter in a late comeback effort after a close-run contest. Certainly the atmosphere at Vaught-Hemingway was comparable.

That said, not even Brent Schaeffer’s biggest boosters would say he’s the next coming of Eli Manning, and the 2003 LSU contest had much more on the line: a berth in the SEC title game and LSU’s national championship prospects and unbeaten record. Instead, this contest saw our prospects at bowl eligibility slipping further away, with the Rebels needing to win 5 of 7 just to have a shot at going to a bowl for the first time since the 2003 Cotton Bowl contest.

Realistically, I don’t see the Rebels making a bowl, despite the marked improvement in play on both sides of the ball since the Missouri contest—and had the Rebels played as well in the previous three contests as they did last night, we would be looking at a rather dangerous 3–2 or 4–1 squad with the whole division ahead rather than a team that will be lucky if it bests last season’s three win mark.

Update: Clarion-Ledger Ole Miss beat writer Robbie Neiswanger has more on this theme at his blog.

EDSBS has dug up a song about Ed Orgeron. If only football coaches got entrance music like professional wrestlers do…

It would figure that the one day that my monthly Metrolink pass wasn’t in my wallet (I’m 99.8% sure I left it in the pocket of the trousers I wore Tuesday, after I used it on the bus to save myself the uphill walk between the Grand station and Lindell) would be the day that I lucked into bumping into a fare inspector between CWE and Grand. I am now officially annoyed.

Now the only question is whether the time and hassle canceling class on my court date so I can go plead my case to a judge turns out to be worth avoiding the fine.

EDSBS reports on the latest Orgeron rumor making the rounds. I’d normally believe the rumor was true, but the idea of Ole Miss chancellor Robert Khayat deigning to go down to the Oxford police station blows much of its credibility out of the water.

Jeff Gill perceives some salutary changes in the labor market for political methodologists:

Last Fall I counted 51 faculty methods jobs posted in political science. I paid close attention because I was on a relevant search committee. This was particularly interesting because equilibrium in past years was about five or so. Right now there are 39 methods jobs posted (subtracting non-tenure/tenure track positions). Now some of these are listed as multiple fields, but one has to presume that listing the ad on the methods page is a signal.

Apparently we have US News and World Report to thank for fundamentally changing the labor market by making methodology the fifth “official” field of the discipline. A number of (non-methodologist) colleagues believed that I must be exaggerating since an order of magnitude difference seems ridiculous. Actually, it turns out that I was underestimating as Jan Box-Steffensmeier (president of the Society for Political Methodology and the APSA methods section) recently got a count of 61 from the APSA. I think their definition was a little broader than mine (perhaps including formal theory and research methods jobs at undergraduate-only institutions).

So an interesting question is how quickly does supply catch up to demand here? My theory is that it will occur rather slowly since the lead time for methods training seems to be longer than the lead time for other subfields. This is obviously good news for graduate students going on the market soon in this area. I’m curious about other opinions, but I think that this is a real change for the subfield.

I concur in part and dissent in part.

I am less convinced that we can attribute this change to US News (although I’m not one of those academic US News haters) than simply to the broader market: people with superior methods training are more likely to get jobs than those who don’t have it, which means that methods training is more important at the graduate level—and increasingly the undergraduate level too. The booming enrollments at the ICPSR Summer Program, including from top-ranked schools that traditionally considered their own methods training sufficient for graduate students, are indicative of this trend as well.

As far as the supply-demand equilibrium works, I think there is a perception out there (perhaps unfair) of the existence of a methods clique—one, that if it exists, I am decidedly not a part of. Thus far, in-clique supply seems to have been sufficient to satisfy demand; we—and perhaps during this hiring season I—shall see whether this continues to be the case. My perception is that high demand is somewhat illusory; several unfilled methods jobs in the past two years have not reappeared, suggesting that filling these jobs is less of a priority than one might think.

The broader issue is a question of definition: what is a “methodologist”? As someone who generally doesn’t live to maximize my own likelihood functions, I’d self-identify as an applied method0logist at best—and certainly don’t consider methodology my primary field of inquiry; tools are great, but I gravitate toward more substantive questions.

As for why Gill thinks “research methods jobs at undergraduate-only institutions” shouldn’t count, I really wouldn’t hazard a comment. But I do think that if he wants to increase the supply of methodologists, getting more undergraduates (particularly at BA-granting institutions like liberal arts colleges) in the pipeline early so they can do advanced work out of the gate at the graduate level would seem to be a key part of the strategy.

We suck. Even worse, State eked out a win in OT against UAB.

I have a feeling that even Ron Franklin won’t be able to make next week’s Ole Miss–Georgia contest tolerable to a national viewing audience.

Never before has a single photograph been the subject of such debate.

First, we have a debate over whether or not the woman standing in front of Bill Clinton is posing to accentuate her chest. Then we have a debate about why whitey seems to have invaded Harlem.

I really don’t care, I just find this all incredibly amusing. And, for that matter, stupid.