Insurance companies are evil (lessons learned the hard way dept)

Well, if you are a consumer of U.S. Healthcare and "lucky" enough to be "covered" by a PPO/POS Medical plan, I doubt I will need to convince you of the veracity of my title line. If you're not insured and have recently experienced the underbelly of our health-care billing system, you are right.. I am in no position to bitch. Still, given my pathological low tolerance for frustration, I proffer the following tale of woe...

On January 15, 2007 I resided in Morgantown WV while my family's official address of record was Quincy Michigan. Shortly before I was offered my position in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at West Virginia University, my wife learned that she had been admitted into the RN training program at the community college near our Michigan home. She had been on a waiting list for more than a year to enter this program. After mulling the various options available to us, we decided it made the most sense that she and my daughter remain in Michigan where she could attend school and work (for a family business) and where we would have reliable childcare, while I would move to West Virginia.

As an employee of the State of West Virginia, I was given a range of insurance options to chose from. However, there was only one plan that provided any out of State coverage, the Public Employees Insurance Agency (hereafter PEIA). I have neither the time, nor energy, to chronicle my frustrating tales of getting PEIA to provide out-of-area coverage as in network (it involved several forms, validations, secret handshakes, and I think a telephone operator letting slip the secret national network name... but I can't prove any of that). Suffice it to say that we could receive in-network services at Beechstreet affiliated providers.

My coverage is actually quite generous, though not nearly as comprehensive and affordable as MCARE was while we were at Michigan. We $250 individual deductibles or a $500 family deductible, afterwhich the plan pays 80% of allowed costs (and the provider waives non-allowed costs). That's the coverage in theory at least....

Now, back to January 15, 2007. My wife, after consulting with a physician, scheduled an outpatient surgical procedure at W. A. Foote Hospital's Outpatient Surgery Center. Prior to scheduling this procedure, we dutifully confirmed that the physician, and the hospital were in-network providers. I confirmed with PEIA that, so long as we sought out the service at a Beechstreet provider, it would be treated as in network. The hospital and doctor's office likewise assured us that they participate in the network.

There were several billing problems with the surgery...specifically related to lazy claims adjusters at PEIA not bothering to confirm that that my family was authorized to seek beechstreet services outside the confines of West Virginia. But after many frustrating phonecalls with customer service reps of varying competence (there were some customer service reps who clearly went the extra mile, while there are some others, like the jackass I talked to this past Friday night, that deserve to be relegated to a special corner of hell).

Now fast forward to last Friday night. An envelope from my insurance company came in the mail. Puzzled (I haven't been to the doctor in months and my wife and daughter are now covered by wife's insurance plan... which, ironically enough, is different than mine, even though she is also an employee of WVU... except she works for the hospital which is run as a private corporation, partially I believe, so they can provide more competitive salaries and benefits... not that I can confirm any of that) I opened it. I find an explanation of benefits from my insurance company, rejecting a nearly $1,000 charge from the Anesthesiologist from my wife's procedure. Of course, because explanations of benefits don't explain anything, I had to call PEIA to find out, if you will, WTF?

The unempethetic voice at the other end of the line, gruffly said that this service was out-of-network and the claim came in after the allowed deadline for out-of-network coverage... "the patient is responsible." "But it was in network" I protested....I called everyone and confirmed this before the procedure. The operator, nearing the end of his shift, replied, "no, we called Beechstreet and confirmed this provider (the Anesthesiologist) is not in their network. He then condescendingly told me, "you should read your statement of coverage; this is clearly spelled out on page 57." Sensing an urge to tell him what he could do with his statement of coverage, I hung up.

Next, I called the Beechstreet customer service number. A helpful young lady searched for the Anesthesiologist's name, but could not find it. She did confirm that the surgeon and hospital were network providers. I asked, how can it be that a doctor providing an essential service for a surgery in a network facility for a network surgeon, is not also in the network. She said, "unfortunately, that's the way some hospitals do things."

So, I stew on this all weekend. My daughter asked me why I was so grumpy. (I didn't want to tell her that I was trying to decide if I should buy her Christmas presents, or make sure that I have money in the bank to pay for a year old medical bill that should have been covered). This morning when I got to the office, I called the hospital. I asked the billing office, to explain what happened. I was informed that:

* this hospital is indeed a network provider

* but, the hospital contracts with it's physicians.

Meaning that it has no say in what networks its practicing physicians are in, or are not in. While we had done the legwork on the surgeon, we didn't know that we also needed to inquire about the anesthesiologist, radiologist, pathologist, or any other potential expensive billing MD as to their participation.

I protested that we were not given a choice of anesthesiologists... we showed up at the surgery center and some dude in a funny hat came in and asked about loose teeth. That was it. Had I known that 20% of the billable services for the surgery were out of network, we would have found a different doctor in Kalamazoo, Lansing, or Ann Arbor. The hospital person was understanding, but told me that ultimately, this is not her problem. [As an aside, it's un-bothering-believable how often I've heard those three words in the past two years when sorting out medical billing. There are an awful lot of problems which don't belong to anyone but the patient/consumer].

The silver-lining in the story came when this woman at Foote hospital asked me why the claim came in so many months after the procedure. "How am I supposed to know?" I replied. "That's what has me ready to scream right now, we've done nothing wrong here and we seem to be the ones getting punished."

She told me, "well, we expect our contracting Physicans to bill in a timely and responsible manner. This looks like a billing problem, which was not your fault. If your insurer is refusing any payment for failure to file claim in a timely fashion, the billing folks usually write off the charge (e.g., PEIA could process the claim as out-of-network, force me to pay my $500 deductible, and then cover 60% of the remaining balance... but they're not even doing that because the claim was not filed within 6 months of the service.) Since this is the billing office's mistake, they will eat the claim. But they apparently, need to the insurance company to reject the claim first before they can adjust it. That's why I got the EOB, (because whenever the company takes an action on my behalf, they must explain it).

So, if at the end of the day, I owe nothing, why am I upset?

In what universe does any of this make sense? I spent too much time today on the internet googling "specialist out-of-network". This is a surprisingly common problem. Many medical specialists do not join managed care networks because they don't have to. Insurance companies take a hardline in establishing fee schedules that providers feel are too low. If all the specialists in the area decide to remain independent from networks, there is little the hospital can do to force them to participate. The hospitals compound this problem by not being transparent about the extent of network coverage. I'd argue that a reasonable person, upon hearing that a hospital is in-network, would assume that all services rendered in said hospital are likewise, in-network. (My google search confirms that this is a shared sentiment). This is especially true for services essential to the procedure being performed... it's kind of hard to have someone cut you open without an anesthesiologist on hand to keep you both asleep and alive.

In this bureaucratic journey, I've yet to find anyone who disagrees with me on the central point that I had done nothing wrong. Yet, the insurance companies calously point to their contract of service agreements generally, and the specific language such as the following:

Why is my anesthesiologist not in network when my hospital and surgeon are?

Your anesthesiologist is a separate entity from the hospital. Anesthesiologists’ contracts with hospitals do not require that they contract with the same insurance companies as the hospital. It is the patient’s responsibility to verify that all providers are in network.

Some lessons we learn the hard way. (I'm crossing my fingers that the biller actually does write this charge off. But I wouldn't be surprised to get a bill in the mail next month). God save us from the evil single-payer heath care system!

Words of wisdom from Timmothy Burke

I don't know the guy but I've been reading his blog for some time now. This is advice I need to take to heart.

If you insist on being actively involved every single time someone else in your institution is doing something objectionable, you will almost certainly devolve into being a crank and an asshole.

Then again, I may be doomed.

Too much snark

I don't have time to be doing this, but I don't want to do what I need to be doing at the moment, so I will write a short post.

One of my on going writing projects has a working title, Criminology and the Culture War. Labeling conduct as criminal (or not criminal as the case may be) is inherently both value-laden & political. The politics often seem to trump any reasonable discussion about the values driving the politics. Consider, for a moment, the ongoing clamor about hate crimes. We have pretty good evidence to suggest that some victims of violent crime or threats are selected because of their affiliation with particular groups. The contemporary news (sorry, I'm too lazy to look up links right now) serve up example, after example, white on black, or black on white violence that is driven by racial tension. Homosexuals have long experienced beatings, threats, and intimidation directed at their identity. Insofar as Criminology is a science (and MY GOD there are days when I wonder about this) it should be deriving theories based on the empirical evidence at hand.

Yet, there are those that would seek to have such contextual data about crime stricken from the record. My friends on the Christian Right assert that the State has no business validating sexual orientation as a status of record. They are seeking to stamp out hate crime measurement laws where we might actually, I don't know, measure the extent to which people are targeted for violence because of their perceived sexuality. This leads GLBT groups to gather their own figures (cynically manipulated to maximize the impression of incidence; such is a standard social movement strategy covered in detail by Joel Best in several books). Thus, we have Christian-based no-nothing types covering their eyes and shouting that this problem doesn't exist, and GLBT true-believer activists jumping in our faces with contrived and poorly measured data yelling that is, and pundits partial to one side or the other, echoing party-lines. All, with snark. I'm sick of snark; it gets us nowhere. Yet, snark seems to have replaced reasoned criticism as the methodology of public philosophy.

I discovered this little bundle of joy this afternoon and became very depressed (and I hate using the word "very"). Why must social movement partisans attack their positions with disingenuous characitures? (blogger doesn't recognize that spelling, but it looks right to me). To my Christian friends, if all truth is God's truth? Why not confront the evidence that people are beaten and threatened and treated poorly because of their sexual orientation? Furthermore, why not recognize that your behavior on this issue as at odds with Christ's teachings from the Sermon on the Mount (see Matthew 5-7). (I'm not saying you have to condone the lifestyle, behavior, worldview, etc. I am saying, remove the plank from you own eye, and while doing so, allow the rest of us to consider the evidence).

To my activist friends on the left; please stop ridiculing and mocking people who act from principle. Sure, the principle might be corrupted beyond recognition by the most evil of evil people (I'm pretty sure that if there is a heaven and hell, Jerry Fallwell went to the warm place; Jim Dobson, my guess is that you're next). But, the corruption is not the fault of our neighbors who are just trying to live their lives according to how they believe they've been instructed to. The best way to convince them that their principles have been corrupted, is to model grace back to them.

2 Clarifications on Laud Humphreys

As I posted a few days back, the stories about Larry Craig have revived interest in Laud Humphreys' controversial book, The Tea Room Trade.

Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Education (and Crooked Timber) offered a detailed book review of a recent Humphreys biography. Based on this review, I grabbed our library's copy of the book and read it Friday morning (minus the appendices, the book is about 100 pages). Two things presented in the biography struck me was being worth comment:

1. Alvin Gouldner assaulted Humphreys in retaliation for posting an unflattering posters portraying the professor as a bird that "feeds on underdogs." Humphreys told a New York Times reporter that he thought Gouldner's 1968 article in the American Sociologist, "was an unfair personal attack on leading exponents of what some term 'underdog sociology,' and an oblique attack on certain members of the sociology department at Washington University." Later in the Times piece we read, "Professor Gouldner, who called Mr. Humphreys a 'peeping parson,' contends that the altercation had been precipitated by the former clergyman's anger at his article."
   
   Ah, Sociology... You can't make this stuff up. But this confirms that I was wrong before; the stories of Gouldner beating up Humprheys for his "unethical research practices" do not hold water.
   
   
2. More interestingly, the biographers went to Humphreys's tearoom and examined the physical space. They conclude there is no way that he could have ascertained the detail of these encounters reported in his book as a non-participant observer. That is, he could not have observed the nuanced details of this ritual as a watch queen. This leads the biographers to conclude that he was engaged in as a participating observer.
   
   The biographers address the ethical implications of this, specifically that when Humphreys appeared to do his "survey", it's entirely possible that the subjects recognized him and felt compelled to answer his questions in fear of being outed. But there are some substantive implications as well. If he was an active participant in the tea-room trades, his work could be understood as normalizing advocacy. That is, an effort to communicate to heterosexuals that they should not fear this activity; that *we* have come up with ways to protect your innocence. Perhaps this is more wishful rhetoric than scientific reporting?

I haven't thought this through all the way yet, but it's an interesting question to follow. I know that advocacy research or participatory action research is popular within some areas of the field, but I have my reservations about it. I'll leave it at that for now. The only other impression I took away from the book was that Humphreys did not seem to be a terribly pleasant human being, at least to those he disagreed with.

Althouse on Craig-gate

Ann Althouse offers her two pence on the Craig affair. She criticizes a post by Arianna Huffington which stakes out a position somewhat similar to mine (Huffington, overplays the rhetorical terrorism card, in my humble opinion). Althouse makes several fair points in her criticism (though also uses a strawperson argument) and ends her post with an interesting rational-choice economic argument supporting the enforcement of so called "quality-of-life" crime investigations:

I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that the sting is cost effective. One police officer, carrying out very few arrests, ruins the reputation of this bathroom as a place for sex encounters. That bathroom is in the state's most important airport, a hub of commercial activity. Minnesotans have a huge interest in maintaining the quality of their international airport, and travelers have endless opportunities to choose other routes when they dislike an airport. I would speculate that Karsnia's work probably produced a large net benefit to taxpayers.

Having said that, someone in the comments thread referring to him/herself as EngimatiCore countered with an equally reasonable counter-argument.

...unless Sen. Craig was one of the first arrests by any officer in that bathroom. I think it is clear that the reputation of that bathroom had been unscathed at the time of the incident, and probably would still be had this not broken nationally.

I would bet that a cop stationed, in uniform, outside of the bathroom would work just as well. People would not have to 'go looking' for him, we would be further from the line of entrapment, and the cop would not be forced to spend his time on a commode.

Of course this reasoned discourse can't stand for long among the commenters of the Althouse blog. First troll A makes some silly sweeping generalization of the right, "The GOP Mantra...", followed by an equally sweeping generalization of the left, "You just repeat the same questions over and over again, while ignoring the debate that has previously occurred in response to such questions." And the troll baiting continues.

But to Ann and EnigmatiCore, I salute you.

More on Craig-gate

Well Senator Larry Craig has resigned from the Senate. An opinion column in yesterday's New York Times by Laura MacDonald argues that Senator Craig was entrapped.

MacDonald's interesting piece draws attention to a Sociological classic written by Laud Humphreys in the late 1960s. Every undergraduate sociology student who takes a research methods course will be exposed to Humphrey's book, The Tearoom Trade, which Earl Babbie and other text book authors point to as an exemplar in unethical research practice. Briefly, Humphreys was aware of a practice whereby men utilized highway rest-stops to engage in trysts with other male strangers. In his study, he observed these encounters (usually through the pretext of being a "lookout" and documented the ritual by which men identified potential partners and safely confirmed mutual interest). MacDonald does a better job describing this part of Humphrey's work than I can offer. While he was observing the "trade", Humphreys took down the men's license plate information, then used surreptitious methods to get names and addresses from the DMV. He appeared at the participant's door weeks later, in a disguise, to administer a survey. Data from this part of the study showed that a substantial number of these men lived their public lives in heterosexual marriages. Many were prominent men in the community. [Note: this is the unethical part. Humphreys collected his observational data under false pretenses, thereby not allowing the subjects truly informed consent. When he showed up at their door weeks later and asked them rather embarrassing questions in front of their families, he risked outing them. There is sociological lore that Alvin Gouldner punched Humphreys in the face and broke his nose, over the incident. Note that there are many variations of this story published in peer reviewed articles about the history of Sociology. All that we know for certain is that Gouldner hit Humphreys and was publicly critical of his work. I've yet to track down an authoritative accounting of the details. While Humphreys did put his subjects at risk, one could plausibly argue that these methods were necessary for us to really understand what's happening here; both to counter fear mongering and get a handle on the actual risks involved. I suppose that's not for me to judge at this time.]

Part of Humphrey's argument 37 years ago was that heterosexual worries about sexual advances from strange men in the rest-room are unwarranted. The participants had a vested interest in only approaching those that would reciprocate. Soliciting the wrong person could reasonably do violence to one's person or reputation. Therefore, they worked out an elaborate signaling system using subtle cues. One would have to be "in the know" to realize that he was being propositioned. Without a return cue, the seeker moves on.

Suggesting that the Minneapolis men's room activity is similar to Humphrey's tea-room, MacDonald argues that the police investigation amounts to entrapment. I disagree. While I share her assessment of the negligible public safety risk constituted by tearoom activities (the signaling mechanism maximizes safety) and I agree that this sort of a sting operation is not an effective use of public resources, it is not entrapment.

As I posted back in June, entrapment occurs when the State induces a subject to a commit a crime that he or she would not carry out on his or her own. Jacobson v. United States illustrates this where law enforcement sent catalog materials to the subject baiting him to order child pornography. Following Robinson v. California, an underlying condition or predilection (no matter how distasteful to prevailing public opinion) can not be criminalized. Only conduct may be criminalized. Thus, when To Catch a Predator's, the vigilante group (Perverted Justice,) baits a predator out to make a rendezvous, it's tough to prosecute because this is entrapment. But when an undercover police officer poses as a streetwalker, and a would-be john asks, "how much?", it's not entrapment. In the latter case, the suspect initiates the transaction; it's reasonable to presume that he or she would have done so without the aide of the State.¹

Craig's case falls into this latter category. Based on the documents released to date, I'm satisfied with the state's argument that Craig was signaling and there is a public ordinance that makes this conduct illegal in that jurisdiction (though I still question the legality of that ordinance). Therefore, this is not entrapment. Indeed, it is the model of good police work. It's a stupid use of good police work, but good work none-the-less.

====
1. I am not a Lawyer, nor do I have any formal training in the law from a law school. But, since I started teaching courses about and doing research on criminal justice processes 10 years ago, I've been reading a lot of case law. Should someone with a legal background stumble upon my analysis and wish to comment on my interepretation, I welcome it. Actually, I welcome anyone's comments generally.

Radley Balko makes a good point...

One of the things I appreciate most about Radley Balko's writing is his libertarian consistency. Principles rather than political positioning guide his analysis. In a recent post Balko asks what conduct is Senator Craig actually guilty of committing? This is a great question.

For those not following the news, Senator Craig was arrested in a mens room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport back in June of this year. He was charged with (and plead guilty to) disorderly conduct. But he was arrested for lewd conduct (specifically, trying to pick-up an undercover deputy). The arresting officer wrote wrote in his report that Craig peered into his stall, then occupied the next stall and...

Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct.... I saw Craig swipe his hand under the stall divider for a few seconds....Craig swiped his hand again for a few seconds in the same motion...

. The report goes on to document that Craig did this for a while, leading the officer to believe that he was trying to solicit a sexual encounter. He arrested the man, only later to learn that Craig is a United States senator. Later in the report, the officer indicates what Craig said in a post Miranda interview (meaning, after the Senator had been reminded of his 5th and 6th amendment rights.

Craig stated the following

• He is a commuter
• He went into the bathroom
• He was standing outside of the stalls for 1-2 minutes waiting for the stall
• He has a wide stance when going to the bathroom and that his foot may have touched mine
• He reached down with his right hand to pick up a piece of paper that was on the floor

.
These are all plausible (if creepy) bathroom behaviors. However, that's not Balko's point. While not condoning the actual engagement of sexual activity in a public bathroom, he asks:

Is it really illegal to try to find a sexual partner in a public bathroom using code? How would that be any different than looking for a sexual partner at a dance club, be it using code, pick-up lines, or any thing else in your singles arsenal?

.
I'm inclined to agree. While I agree with public decency laws prohibiting of sexual behavior in public places, Craig wasn't arrested for that. He was arrested for trying to pick someone up. And, he didn't try to pick someone up in an overt, offensive way. Had he walked up to someone with a wink and a nod and explicitly said... "hey, how about it?" I would support a charge of Harassment. But he was using an obscure code that effectively keeps those of us who are blissfully ignorant in that state.

Yeah, it's creepy. (Of course, I find many of the heterosexual mating rituals in the bar scene to be equally creepy). And, there's a perverse pleasure in seeing a hypocrite called to task. But at the end of the day, one has to wonder if we should be allowing the state to criminalize mate selection.

Like OMG? Overheard at the coffee shop

Young lady standing in line behind me yapping conversing on her cell phone:

Like... it was ridiculous. I mean, like, I couldn't even take notes, y'know. My teacher said um, like 364 times during her lecture. No... like, I counted them because she's like soooo obnoxious. I mean, like oh my gawd, how are you even a teacher? Sheesh, you should, like, think about what you're going to say and then say it.

My thought: Like, I wish I could get some of my students to pay such close attention to what I say in class. I'm going to try saying um more often.

Well at least we're #1.

Dead Sociologist Quote for August 27, 2007

A commitment made on the basis of an unexamined ideology may allow us to feel a manly righteousness, but it leaves us blind.
- Alvin W. Gouldner (1968) "The Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State." The American Sociologist. 3:103-116. Pg 105.

This essay also has one of the strongest lead-in sentences that I've encountered in a sociologist's writing:

Sociology begins by disenchanting the world and it proceeds by disenchanting itself (pg 103).

.

Alvin Gouldner (1920 - 1980)was one of Sociology's brightest lights. A clear writer with acerbic wit, Gouldner challenged the orthodoxy of grand theory building sociology in the 1950s and 60s. But, while he critiqued the mainstream fairytale of scientistic sociology, Gouldner also recoiled against the self-congratulatory liberal activism which claimed the title of scholarship in the 60s. As he wrote in the quote above, we may vociferously proclaim our convictions, but that doesn't automatically make them thoughtful. In "Sociologist as Partisan" Gouldner put Howard S. Becker firmly in his sights.¹.

Becker was the president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and delivered a presidential address asking, "Whose Side Are we On?" Becker goes on to develop what Gouldner calls, the metaphysics of the underdog and the underworld. While this seems reasonable, even admirable, on its surface. Gouldner (who shares the sympathy) begins to pick apart the logical conundrums of such a metaphysics. I won't go into this in any detail here (though I am working on my own essay applying Gouldner's criticism of Becker to the principles of public sociology as outlined by Michael Burawoy in his 2004 Presidential address to the American Sociological Association.

I don't quite know where I'm going with this yet; my friends in sociology know that I harbor deep reservations about the public sociology project. Part of me worries that public sociology is nothing more than a new lingo thrown over the partisan sociologies of old. But there seems to be something worth considering in Burawoy's project. So, I slog along on an essay that will be difficult to publish and probably won't be read if it finds its way into print. Yet, it's been fun to re-read this essay that I first encountered in Gerry Markle's Advanced General Sociology seminar a decade ago.


=====
1. As any of my graduate students will attest, I am a Howard Becker fan boy. That is a testament to the power of Gouldner's position. I didn't want to like Gouldner's essay, but was persuaded by the power of the writing.

why I still dislike elementary school

I spent the better part of this evening filling out forms for my daughter as she begins a new school year in a new State. Having been an absentee father for the past two years, I missed out on the administrative joys of getting a child off to school in our modern world. There are the multiple forms requiring duplicate entry of information; sternly worded dress code notices; explanations on the importance of homework; release forms and permission slips (no, we will not let the school give my daughter fluoride treatments), and a byzantine bus schedule that took me the better part of the evening to decipher. [I'm pretty sure we've got her on the right buses, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if I get a call tomorrow from Cheat Lake or Scott's Run, telling me that I misunderstood the schedule and I need to drive out 40 miles to get her].

I never liked elementary school. I wasn't good at the cutting, pasting, coloring, or following directions. I was a lousy reader (particularly given the boring drek that they put into the phonics readers) and was worse at math flashcards. I spent the better part of 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade in the hall (where the bad kids go). I started making smart-ass comments in the second grade to make other kids laugh. But this also gave me some sense of power or control in that situation. Of course, that didn't fly with Mrs. Berry. She warned the other teachers about me... and they remembered. I didn't know it at the time, but I was a poster child for labeling theory. In second grade, my teacher dumped my desk all over the floor and told the girl sitting next to me to organize my stuff at a big table at the side of the room. I actually kind of liked that arrangement and proudly told the Principal about my cool big desk. He came to visit that afternoon and on the next day they moved me back to a regular desk. Then there was the hubaloo that I caused by coloring in more than one bubble on the Stanford Achievement Test. I thought our teacher said that we should color in more than one right answer. Apparently, the canned instructions that she read out loud were, "there is only one right answer." When the test scores came back, the teacher announced to the class (with a measurable tone of disgust) "since Corey didn't follow directions, our class will retake the test." Yeah, I got sucker punched in the gut over that one. I was eight freaking years old; couldn't they cut me some slack? In a word, no. That screw-up was enough to get me labeled as "slow" Severn Elementary School. I suppose my current position in life is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that this test's predictive validity for measuring achievement is about as useful as the pieces of corn in a pile of decomposing poo. To this day, I'd still like to take my 2nd grade teacher (who I believe died several years ago) and kick her in the ass.

Anyway, filling out these forms dredged out the memories. My daughter (who generally adjusts better than I do) appears to not have inherited my dread for elementary school; I hope that this can be sustained. Perhaps educators have learned a thing or two since 1980.

Gmaps Pedometer

Via Chris Uggen (via Eszter) gmaps pedometer allows you to get precise distance measurements for your walks and runs. I used the tool to map my old football training route. What I had believed was a six mile run was actually closer to 8.

Then I mapped my daily walking commute. 1 mile, door-to-door almost exactly (and and elevation change of about 250 feet. That may not sound like a lot, but I can assure you the walk home is quite a bit harder than the walk to work which is all downhill. This has almost inspired me to start running again.

Lexis Nexis and bad design

Well it's the beginning of a new semester and I'm frantically trying to get my syllabi done before the start of classes next week. This semester I'd like to have my Criminal Justice classes read some West Virginia Caselaw. It used to be easy to search for cases restricted to a particular state. However, it looks like Lexis Nexis decided to streamline their searching tools, thereby breaking my routine. Whoever designed this interface ought to be shot at sunrise.

Font Frustration

The new version of Microsoft Office ships with goofy default fonts and line spacing in the normal.dot template. After using the default out of the box for the better part of a month, I've decided they must be changed.

First, I changed the default font back to 12-point Times New Roman. But then I came across this font advisory for NSF applicants. It specifies four appropriate fonts of size 10 or larger. None of these are Times New Roman. The figure below shows the default Word 2007 font, the old Times New Roman, and the 4 NSF approved Fonts.

I then searched NIH's criteria (only Arial and Helvetica permitted... yuck). I couldn't find a font specification for NIJ. (These being the three agencies I'm mostly likely to apply to, I didn't search further).

Then I looked at some of the journals I write for. Many request Times New Roman. Ugh.

I've decided to set my default as Georgia (see the figure above). It seems to be the most visually striking, while not being distracting. We'll see how long that lasts.

My next time-frittering project will be to set up a word document template for my students to ensure that their papers are formatted correctly.

I am thanking the supreme beings for small blessings

As I've cryptically mentioned on this blog from time to time, I interviewed for a job at Gallaudet University. At the time, I really wanted that job. (Of course, as a freshly minted PhD, stuck in a joyless (some would say "soulless") work environment, really I wanted any job). But, I really felt like I hammered the interview at Gallaudet and that I would fit there.

I learned several weeks later that I did not get the job. [Not from any sort of formal notification from the school mind you, but rather from a friend... I still haven't gotten that rejection letter.]

Anyway, I learned today that Gallaudet has been placed on probation by its accrediting body. While this is sad news to hear, it makes me all the more thankful for the opportunities that I was given after I failed to get that job. To my WVU colleagues; despite my propensity to complain, I'm really quite happy here.

82 of 99 problems...

Though I don't pretend to understand social networking and I'm certainly not proficient at it, I've been goofing around with facebook today.

One of the WVU groups is called:

I've got 99 problems and 82 of them are the stairs by the Life Science Building.

I might have to join that group; those stairs are in fact... a bitch.

I have engaged in the war against paper

Thanks to my miserly ways and a reverting pool of startup funds, I splurged on a new document scanner. This thing is amazing. I had a meeting with a graduate student this afternoon, where I took notes on a legal pad. When the meeting was over it took all of 3 seconds to scan my notes to a pdf file and store it in my student's directory.

Thanks to Jeremy for his inspiration to start my own war against paper.

The humbling reminder that we get things wrong

I'm deep in the historical databases, looking for material about W.I. and Dorothy Swaine Thomas. One of W.I.'s early arguments concerned the social and biological bases for the inferiority of women. As I understand the story, he changed his tune in the early 1920s. [Though I could be wrong, I haven't done a lot of biographical research yet]. In anycase, I came across the attached headline while working through Proquest's historical New York Times file. I like reviewing these bold proclaimations which turn out to be far from accurate. It humbles me and reminds me that regardless of how sure I may be about something, I too could be very wrong.

Source: The New York Times February 11, 1910, page 7

Bumper stickers that make me chuckle

After class this morning, I walked by the library on my way to buy a cup of coffee. A car parked in the library lot has the following slogan affixed to its rear bumper:

Yes I'm a librarian and I will shush your ass.

Travesties of pseudo science, part 831

My institution puts out a daily email news brief listing developments of note around the campus. This came through today:

RESEARCH:

WVU economic study: Expenses for women can be higher in Morgantown According to the latest edition of the Morgantown MSA Economic Monitor, published by WVU's College of Business and Economics, the purchasing decisions that women make may lead to more expense than for their male counterparts in Morgantown. For example, the cost for a trip to the hair salon, pair of khakis, bottle of wine and dinner at home for one woman was $10.71 more than what the cost was for a barbershop haircut, dress shirt, six-pack of beer and medium pizza that a Morgantown man might choose.

Sigh...

I'm not sure which is worse:
(1) The stereotypical assumptions about "typical" men and women and their choices of consumption, or
(2) using stereotypical assumptions about "typical" men and women to make apples and oranges comparisons and then conclude that these assumed differences reflect reality.

I went to the actual press release that describes this "study" in more detail. It begins as a comparison study for cost-of-living index items. The economist gathered price data on 61 items items; the Morgantown prices can be compared to San Fransisco, New York, Pittsburgh, etc. That's valuable and important work.

But then....

Then, she took the comparison a step further by looking at the prices of items and services men might purchase compared to those women might buy.

Yeah, it costs more to go to Vavoosh's Salon than Jake's barbershop. I'll concede that. But on what basis do we assume that women are more likely to purchase a bottle of wine than beer, expensive khaki's over a dress shirt? And dinner at home over pizza? Moreover, what the hell went into that dinner at home? I've had dinner at a couple of female friend's houses here in Morgantown; I would bet that the total cost of the ingredients for the meal was approximate to the cost of a large pizza with toppings. Behavior can be observed and verified empirically. To project one economist's assumptions about how women and men might possibly differ in the consumptive behavior is flat out bad science.

Though they do have numbers.... so it must be truth.

Chris Hanson's "To Induce a Suicide"

Radley Balko provides a link to a Texas newscast covering a "to catch a predator" sting that went horribly wrong. I make a point of ridiculing To Catch a Predator in my Criminal Justice course. Programs like this paint an inaccurate picture picture of sex offenders. If you consume a steady diet of television programming like this, you might be inclined to believe that there are perverts everywhere ready to snatch your children. While there are some people in the world who will engage in sexual activity with minors, they are not nearly as prevalent as Chris Hansen would have us believe.

No matter, I always assumed that the television program followed general legal principles in their stings. The video linked above suggests two questionable practices:

(1) By definition, if the government engages in entrapment when its agents persuades someone to commit a crime that he or she would otherwise have not committed. The classic case on this is Jacobson v. United States, (503 U.S. 540).¹ Briefly, in this case, Mr. Jacobson had purchased child pornography through the mail when it was legal to do so. After the law had changed, postal inspectors began sending Jacobson catalogs and other materials. Eventually, he ordered more stuff. They then arrested him and raided his home, turning up no child pornography beyond what he had previously ordered. The Supreme Court ruled that this is a clear case of entrapment. Jacobson was baited into breaking the law.

I always assumed that the Dateline show followed this convention in not baiting the predators. That is, while the activist group perverted justice, does impersonate juveniles on online discussion boards, I figured they always let the target initiate face-to-face contact. [It's a legal question as to whether typing something sexualized onto an internet chat service is illegal or free speech... but that's not really what this program targets for their stings. They want to capture the attempt to make face-to-face contact, presumably for the purpose of sexual activity. The video shows a member of perverted justice explicitly asking the target, "so when are we going to meet?" To me, that's baiting & constitutes entrapment. Online activity is not the same thing as action in the real world. Maybe this guy was just living out his fantasies on chatrooms. [Not that I'm condoning that. I'm arguing that to flirt online is a different magnitude from meeting someone face to face with an intent to engage in sexual behavior; since the target is actually e-chatting with another adult, one could argue this is simply a mutually consensual activity between predators of a different stripe. I'm not sure a police department will allocate lots of resources to roundup inappropriate e-chatters. Then again, maybe they will; not a wise use of our public resources in my opinion]. The point is, if this target did not initiate the face-to-face meeting, it's hard to argue that he wasn't entraped. The sting operation baited him out by making the first move.

(2) Relatedly, I thought that they always set up their cameras at a phony house and had the target come to them. That at least covers intentionality. If the target comes to the house for a purportedly agreed upon tryst, there's little question that the person intended to commit a felonious act. (Well, there might be a question, but it seems to me to be disingenuous.) But in this case, they went to the target's house. He did not respond to efforts to get him to come out. That again reflects entrapment. He is not participating in the exercise; he has not committed a guilty act (or at least, the guilty act that they want to capture on film for NBC's ratings).

Then they forced entry to serve a search warrant. As the video shows, they used a SWAT team to serve this warrant. WHY? Balko has done extensive writing on inappropriate use of SWAT and aggressive house entries. Now, we might be missing some information, but there does not seem to me to be any legitimate reason for forcing entry into that house to serve the warrant. They had probable cause for the search, otherwise they wouldn't have a warrant. But, as I understand the law, home entry is only to be used if they believe that evidence is being destroyed or that someone is in danger. When they entered the house, the target (a local assistant district attorney) killed himself.

I'm reading Philip Jenkins's Moral Panic right now. Jenkins is a historian with a social constructionist bent. In this book, he shows how moral panics about perverts and sex predators cycle over time. But a common denominator of this concern is it is out of whack with the actual dangers. This leads to strange public policy that at the end of the day is counter-productive and wasteful.

Why do I care about this? Well, it seems to me that paranoia of about these sorts of crimes creates misery and fear. As someone with the luxury of a job that encourages and rewards me investigating these sorts of things, I feel a responsibility to try to clarify where there is confusion and perhaps reduce unnecessary fear. I note that on their website, the editors of To Catch a Predator insist they are doing a public service. On the contrary, I think they are doing a public disservice by skewing perceptions about a real problem. I'm going to do some more writing about this television show and crime in the future.

------
1. Note, for the record, I am not a lawyer; just a layman who has read quite a bit of case law. Should a lawyer stumble across my blog and wish to correct me on interpretation of law, I am happy to be so guided.

Ward Churchill and the fraying of academic discourse

So the Prez at U of Colorado Boulder is initiating the process to terminate poor Ward Churchill. Some of my friends on the right who are outside of academe asked me my opinion about old Ward. Then, as now, I had no opinion. If calling the victims of the World Trade Center destruction little Eichmann's is the worst thing he's done, I wouldn't get too excited. Though that certainly wasn't a nice thing to say, or even terribly accurate (despite what his point may have been); I've heard far worse things said by professors and graduate students in a host of different venues.

No, where I begin to care is when I see evidence of fraudulent academic misconduct. It's one thing to make an honest scholarly mistake and fail to attribute sources due to confusion, or perhaps the misguided assumption that a claim is common knowledge. It's a far different concern to build one's career swiping the ideas of others. That's my understanding of the claims leveled against Mr. Churchill and apparently a faculty review panel substantiated this at some level. [And no, I don't know what that means. Frankly, I don't care enough about this to go find out either].

Over at Inside Higher Ed, there is a raging discussion with all the usual trolls getting in their licks. {I know I should spend my time reading other things, but I get sucked into these things like a soap opera. I just have to see the next outlandish claim made by someone associated with (or antagonistic to) Higher Education}. Within the cacophony of claims, I read this incisive lament by someone calling him/her-self "unapologetically tenured". I quote the comment in full because I don't see any way of linking directly to that comment. If the author of this comment wishes for me to remove this, contact me privately and I will do so.

Quoting...

Political Hacks and Higher Education

The frustrating thing about the Ward Churchill case is that it seems to bring out the worst in everyone. From the political hacks in Denver, to the mouth breathers on cable television, to the professor-hating basement-dwellers who oddly find themselves flocking to higher education websites, everyone plays her part as scripted. It’s all a big game to them, your guys against my guys.

Well, to me this is not a game. This is my career and I take it seriously. I couldn’t care less about Ward Chuchill. In fact, he seems like a bit of an idiot, but that’s not my call to make. I care about this case because I care about academic freedom, not as some abstract slogan to be batted around in pointless debates on Fox News or CNN, but as a fundamental condition of my workplace.

When I hear Chuchill’s defenders adopt a knee-jerk stance of support, I am disappointed. Professor Yellow Bird and Professor Craven should know that Churchill’s violations are not trivial, and are not excused by the good work he may have done on behalf of their cause. Chuchill is discredited, and rightly so, regardless of where this case ends up.

But I am far more concerned about the effectiveness of the right-wing noise machine and its political co-conspirators. Their disingenuousness is obvious, and well represented by Hank Brown’s ludicrous invocation of Paris Hilton. For the record, Paris Hilton was never the target of a full-scale investigation by an institution of the government as a result of her notoriety. Either Mr. Brown knows this, and is insulting our intelligence, or he does not, in which case his political baggage evidently prevents his from even producing a coherent argument on his own behalf.

What Chuchill did is not all right. But what the State of Colorado is doing is worse. It is a cornerstone of the notion of due process that nobody should be subject to unusual government scrutiny or selective prosecution as a result of her constitutionally protected speech. When anyone, including Hank Brown, chips away at that cornserstone, we all become more vulnerable.

I regret that Ward Churchill has become the vehicle for this fight. He is unworthy. But anyone who knows the history of people like Ernesto Miranda knows that we cannot choose our champions. Just our principles.

Unapologetically Tenured, at 9:10 am EDT on May 30, 2007

The analogy to Miranda is one of the better references made on this site. A serial rapist, his conviction was overturned because police interrogators failed to respect his privilege against self-incrimination and his right to counsel. He was later killed in a knife fight at a bar. Not exactly the spokesperson we want for due process rights; yet they are all the more important for it.

Two things about some new software.

I got some new software this week. The new version of Microsoft Office has a redesigned user interface which I'm having to adjust to. But, my version includes Microsoft Onenote, which is a phenomenal tool. It's designed to operate like a virtual notebook, by intuitively creating moveable boxes for content insertion. I've only used it a couple of days, but I think it may be time to retire zoot!

The other program? Well, I can confirm... it is silicone crack. It's unbelievable how completely a game like Civilization can suck you into a fantasy world.

Another mystery of modern airtravel

What exactly is the point to "checking in"? One would think that by having passengers "check in", the airline will know how many people are going to be on the plane. Fine. But now, airlines let you "check in" from your home or office computer. A lot can happen between the time I click "check in" and the time I arrive at the airport.

I just bought a ticket on Southwest to fly from Pittsburgh to Chicago (which is the first leg in a 12 hour Planes, Trains and Automobiles odyssey that I'll write about some other time). Southwest has an annoying (imho) practice of not assigning seats. Instead passengers are classified into boarding categories. Theoretically, the first people to sign in get the first priority to board. This leads people to go online upto 24 hours before the flight to "check in".

I'm weird about seats. On planes & trains, movie theaters and stadiums, etc & so on, I want to know where my seat is and that nobody will take it from me (note, I already stipulated that this is weird). But I also don't want to commit until the last minute. Once I'm at an airport, I have no trouble checking in; but it seems wrong to notify the airline of my arrival 24 hours prior to my arrival. Anyway... it's almost time to teach the first class of the day.

Me in 20 years

Country Roads... hip hop style?

I love West Virginia. I am happy to call the State home, despite some odd idiosyncrasies. But this... well this is just weird. (Warning, there is some profanity in the lyrics).

I can't believe I'm still thinking about metadata

This post is for my friends at ICPSR (i think there's one or two of you there who will still admit to knowing me).

I came across some notes that I had made in the twilight of my career as a data processor. For those of you who do not know what ICPSR does, it is (or claims to be, anyway) the world's largest archive of quantitative social science data. Investigators send their materials to Ann Arbor for preservation and distribution. The staff at ICPSR are charged with preserving the original materials (data collection instruments, interviewing guides, methodological memorandums, electronic datasets, etc) as well as packaging this material so someone else can profitably use it to pursue a research question. This involves converting the data into a format that can be used by any statistics package; preparing documentation so the analyst will understand how to use the data; and catalog the materials so would-be analysts can find it. For example, Brad Wright is doing some interesting stuff concerning the effects of religion on social behavior. He is able to do this because the investigators of the original studies made their data available through archives. Brad was able to find these datasets through various channels and now he is putting them to good use. Felicia LeClere explains the virtue of sharing data more eloquently than I ever could.

Data processing at ICPSR is an incredibly tedious yet important job. Each and every measurement is checked to ensure that the ranges are correct and that labels are applied. When I started there, the only way to do this was to generate a frequency distribution for each measure and check it. Data sets were corrected on an item-by-item basis. This is an incredibly inefficient and error prone way to work. It occurred to me after a while, that the appropriate use of metadata would both make this task more efficient and enhance the value of the data. In my time there, I'm not sure I convinced anyone that I was right. So, I'm taking another stab now.

What's Metadata?

Briefly, metadata captures information about the information. Lets say that I'm conducting a survey of child welfare professions (because I am). My survey will have 40 measurements (not really, but this is for the sake of simplicity). 10 of these measurements will be nominal questions that capture basic identifying information (male/female, job title, church affiliation, institution that granted one's degree, etc). 20 of these measurements will be ordinal, capturing information that has a discernible hierarchy (high to low) but the increments within this hierarchy are not mathematically precise. For instance, lets say that my sample includes divisional managers, team managers, lineworkers, and support staff. We know that a divisional manager has more authority than the team manager, but we can't say in any precise numerical way how much more. The remaining 10 measurements will be on an interval/ratio scale. These are measures like age, or number of years on the job where a value of 20 is equal to twenty units, and 20 units is twice 10.

These three categories of variables are appropriate for different types of analysis. Interval/ratio measures are numerical variables. I can use these to calculate means, analyze variance, and estimate regression equations. As an analyst, when I examine an interval-ratio variable in a codebook, I want to know 5 things: mean, standard deviation, median, and interquartile range. Rarely do I want to see a frequency distribution on these measures, because that information is more efficiently communicated in these other descriptive statistics. In contrast, ordinal and nominal variables are qualitative. They either arbitrarily label a condition with no implicit quantitative value (Catholic = 1, Protestant = 2, Jewish = 3, etc) or they communicate imprecise variation (low, medium, high). In either case means, standard deviations, medians, and interquartile ranges have limited value here. A frequency table is much more useful. As an analyst, I want to know the meaning of each value for these measures. I may decide to collapse these items into binary variables for some form of regression analysis. Or I may want to use categorical variables in a contingency table.

So What?

Now that I'm using this stuff, I'm finding that social science codebooks could be far more useful than they are. If data processors were to classify the level of measurement on each variable (e.g., nominal, ordinal, interval, & ratio), I could use that information when searching for data. For instance, if I'm teaching data analysis and am introducing my class to regression, I might want to use real data from on an interesting topic. But for the sake of conceptual clarity, I only want to use interval-ratio measures in my example (to minimize the straining of assumptions).

Tagging data in this manner would also make life easier for the data processor. [Well, on one level it creates work... the cognitive work of deciding what level of measure to classify a variable; but this is useful work. Scrolling through hundreds of pages of frequency output for cardinal measures is the opposite of useful.] Once the data are processed in this way, the processor can spend his or her time examining the frequency tables of categorical variables, to ensure the data are accurately labeled. They can glance at the 5 figure summary on interval-ratio measures to make sure they are within range. Once the variables are tagged, generating this output is relatively easy to script.

Why did I write this? Well, I came across these notes and had spent some time on this 2 years ago. I figured they might benefit someone. Or not.

Mary Douglas (1921 - 2007)

From Rex at Savage Minds I learned that Mary Douglas passed away. Every sociologist who wishes to study the dynamics of institutions should read How Institutions Think.

Professor Douglas will be missed.

How do you know you are loved?

Your buddies drunk dial you at midnight from Montreal.

An amazing reflection on mother

I cried while reading this. The Phil Nugent Experience is now daily reading.

Thanks to Scott McLemee at Crooked Timber for linking to this wonderful writer.

The Congressional Idiot of the week

Is John Campbell, Republican from California. The millionaire automobile salesman from Orange County California started reading titles of recent NSF (National Science Foundation) grants to social scientsts and questioned the wisdom spending taxpayer funds on these projects. He singled out Accuracy in the cross-cultural understanding of others' emotions by U.C. Berkeley psychologist Hillary Anger Elfenbein as particularly worthy of his esteemed ridicule.

Elfenbein's work empirically measures the ways in which people communicate emotional cues. She is compiling mounting evidence that these cues are culturally influenced. I.e., what represents anger in one culture may look like fear to another. If human beings misinterpret the cues of others in social interaction, bad things can happen. This research is relevant given the mess of things the United States government has made of things in Iraq, Afghanistan, and our other recent military travels.

The good congressmen however suggests...

“I am sure that some believe that these are very fine academic studies. That’s excellent. Within the realms of academic halls, they may think a number of things are fine academic studies. That’s not the question,” Campbell said on the House floor. “The question before us is, do these things rise to the standard of requiring expenditures of taxpayer funds in a time of deficits, proposed tax increases and raiding Social Security funds?”

Actually as a fiscal conservative, I share his enthusiasm for carefully considering how the government should spend citizens money. Yet, it strikes me as disingenuous to go after a $200,000 research grant supporting work that has great potential to improve foreign policy, while this idiot says nothing about the billions of dollars that we've squandered through mismanagement and hubris in Iraq. [And to my friends and family who are soldiers serving in Iraq, this is not meant as a criticism of you. You follow the orders that you're given. If only our political leaders shared your respect for our country.]

SeeInside Higher Ed's coverage for more details on this particular item. Certainly, there is no small degree of self-interest on my part in criticizing this no-nothing boob. But, to be clear, I've never received funding from the NSF. My work is not yet good enough to be funded by NSF. The federal funding of research is important. Without this kind of support ideas without an immediate financial payoff are unlikely to blossom.

Hypothesis: Paula Zahn makes us dumber

So I, along with nearly everyone else I know, flipped through smorgasboard of cable news pontification last night concerning yesterday's mass shooting at Virginia Tech University. I stopped at CNN which was broadcasting a press conference with Tech's Chief of Police and President. The Chief (admirably in my humble opinion) tried to retain his composure as he answered a barrage of vague and inappropriate questions. He was trying to counter the rumor mongering encouraged by the 24 hour cable news The subtext through this press conference is a media constructed image of the Tech administration as a bunch of bumbling backwoods Gomer Pyle's. Several reporters framed questions to suggest that perhaps a dangerous gunman is still on the loose. Each time a question of that sort came up, the Chief unambigiously replied, "no, we don't believe there is a shooter on the loose."

10 minutes after the press conference, CNN's latest dimwit anchor came on proclaiming, "the latest press conference leaves us with more questions than answers." Yet the only questions to be raised are those that the media figures are manufacturing themselves. Ms. Zahn proceeded to ask the twenty-something twinkie reporter dispatched to Blacksburg to file reports on location (though there is little to be gleaned from the location) if "the administration faces greater liability now?" How would Ms. Twinkie know this? Of course Twinkie doesn't let lack of substantive fact to temper her conjecture... "Well as you saw Paula, there are many questions now..." Ugh... Yeah, questions that are being raised unencumbered by the thought process. Why can't they let the investigators do their job, get the facts, and then ask intelligent questions based on those facts?

Has television news always been this bad?

Kurt, you will be missed.

Kurt Vonnegut, may you and Billy Pilgrim rest in peace.

A terrible, horrible, awful, very bad fortnight

In a 13 day span the following things happened:

• My car broke down on my way to an important meeting concerning a grant proposal to my State.
  
• My grant proposal to the State was well off the mark of what the funders were/are looking for, so I need to redo it.
  
• It cost me $500 to get my car repaired (an electronic control module) [the car was worth about $1500.]
  
• After paying $500 to get my car repaired, I drove to Michigan to spend some time with the family. I brought my daughter back with me. All was well on the trip; my daughter watched movies on a portable dvd player while I listened to the Mountaineers win the NIT. Then around 10:00 p.m., I noticed that dashboard lights seemed dim. A bit later, my radio shorted out. I figured that I blew a fuse... A bit later, I noticed that my headlights were getting dim. I was about 25 miles outside of Morgantown in the Boondocks of Southwestern Pennsylvania. I had two choices: (a) pull over and call AAA. I looked at my cell phone and noticed that the signal was going in and out; I put by hazards on and noticed that I could barely see a blinking shadow. So I opted for (b) put the pedal to the metal and try to get back to Morgantown before the car dies. I got behind a car with good headlights and I followed it all the way to Morgantown. Miraculously, the car made it all the way to my office building on campus. [I was going to try and make it all the way to my apt, but I hit a red light infront of my office and the car shut down]. So, I called a friend to come get us, then called AAA and had the car towed to the Kia dealer.
  
• The KIA dealer held the car for 3 days before calling me and telling me that it would cost $900 to fix all the damage (alternator, steering pump, various belts, and a partridge in a pear tree).
  
• So, I went out Monday night and bought a new car. I hate buying cars. I got a 2004 Certified Honda Civic. The negotiations were a pain in the neck; the salesman had the nerve to tell me that Honda never negotiates on certified used cars. I called shenanigans on that and told him what my price would be. I thought I was going to have to walk, when he finally said, "ok, we'll let you have it for that; but you're getting a hell of a deal." Note to car salesmen everywhere... never say that to someone who knows what I car is worth. I bought the damn car for what it was worth according to Edmunds.com. The dealership did let me take the car that night while the paperwork, titling, etc was taken care of. So that was nice. But, then they skimped on detailing and cleaning it the next day. Everyone I met at this place just seemed slimy. I'm not sure I'd buy another car from them. I miss Howard Cooper in Ann Arbor. Note, I do love the car.. so I suppose the irritation was worth it in the long run. I'm taking it back to Michigan this weekend to put it through its paces.
  
• Today, I discovered a charge to my checking account from an internet website design company. I don't buy web services; if I did, I wouldn't use my debit card to do it. I had to go to the bank, fill out an affidavit, get my debit card canceled, argue with the bank about their replacement card fee. I told them that if they are going to charge me for replacing their card that had been compromised, I'd take my business to another bank. They waived the fee.

So there it is... I'm ready for some good stuff to happen now.

The stupidity of marketing surveys

The New Yorker sent me a link to an important survey being conducted by some market research firm. Since I'm generally interested in how different outfits word survey questions, I figured I'd give them 10 minutes of my time and respond. I quit by the 10th item.

The survey asked me how familiar I am with a range of department stores, collecting an ordinal measurement

1. never heard of
2. heard of, but have not shopped there
3. have shopped there, but not in the last 6 months
4. shopped there in the last six months.

Among the stores on the list, other than Target(tm), I've not shopped at any of the department stores. [I'm probably not exactly the demographic that they think I am... I'm pathologically averse to spending money.] Yet, the survey gave me a screen with a bunch of check boxes asking me to check off all that apply: "When I think of Dillards, I think of..." None of the responses were appropriate; I don't even know what Dillards is, other than a store. In so far as I have a thought about the place, it's probably over-priced crap that no one needs. That, of course, is not an option. So I skipped the item. The survey responds with bold red letters... you must respond to this item. WTH?

I'd like to formally notify all those retail magnets that read this blog, don't believe anything you get from your market research surveys. If they're deployed as this survey was, the error term around any estimate they derive will be large. A much better way to measure this stuff, is give the respondent an out where they truly have no opinion. A null response is better than an invented response.

A Moment of Irony on a cold winter day

I sat at a table in the corner of the Philadelphia Center City Sheraton on Saturday working on my presentation for the Eastern Sociological Society. While working there Mitch Duneier sat down at the table next to me. He played with his blackberry for a few minutes, got up and left. Five minutes later, Eric Klinenberg sat down at the same table to eat a sandwich. What's ironic about this?

Well, in 2004 Duneier published a rather abrasive critique of Klinenberg's book Heat Wave. The substance of Duneier's critique is that Klinenberg over interprets his data and had he obtained more data (following a Symbolic Interactionst approach to theoretical sampling) he would avoid perpetuating an ethnic myth. Klinenberg responded by suggesting that Duneier's hatchet job was retaliation for a critical assessment of his own work by Loic Wacquant.

Anyway, these sorts of squabbles rise now and again with little fanfare. However, Duneier didn't let it drop. He went to Chicago (the site of Klinenberg's fieldwork) and retraced his steps. He then published a research note in the American Sociological Review summarizing his findings, that contradict Klinenberg's core argument. [We shall leave aside for the moment how Duneier was able to get a piece of work this weak published in the ASR]. Klinenberg respsonded again with a rejoinder that quite thoroughly dismantle's Duneier's argument and makes his use of data and informants look quite naive.

The tone of this latest exchange communicates pure hostility. I've read the corpus of exchanges in this squabble and though I share Duneier's commitment to Symbolic Interactionism and what Wacquant dismisses as "the modern fairytale of Grounded Theory." I think Klinenberg is in the right here.

But for all that hostility, the two can still share the same seat in the corner of the Philadelphia Sheraton... even if they do so a few minutes apart.

Just me and my flip chart

Jim Nolan's mad photography strikes again. He snuck into my Qualitative Methods Seminar this morning to see my maniacal pedagogy in action. I love flip charts.

WVU in Winter

Morgantown is pretty in the snow. My colleague Jim Nolan snapped the above photo from his office window yesterday afternoon. My view is similar. The little yellow buggy-car on the raised track is the PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) which, somewhat ironically, is neither personal, nor rapid.

Ding Dong - The Beast is Dead

It's over. This morning we finally closed on the Money Pitt that has been our house for the past 4 years. I had to bring money to the table, but somehow I was able to pull everything together. They say that we learn from our mistakes. If that's true, I'm well on my way to be a real estate genius.

Media Monkey and Me

I downloaded a new music jukebox and mp3 tagging program called Media Monkey the other day. Though I don't consider myself to be an audiophile or a music junkie, I have an impressive collection of mp3, wma, and aac files on my various computers. I downloaded Media Monkey as a tool for cleaning up the id3 tags (artist, album title, track #, etc) and organizing the physical files on my hard disk.

An added bonus is that Media Monkey spins together some interesting playlists. Right now I'm listening to all the tracks where the title begins with a "G". Currently playing... "Garden" by Pearl Jam from the album Ten.

Operationalizing evangelicals

I offered most of the following as a comment to Brad Wright's thoughts on the negative stereotypes of evangelicals. I'm posting it here too expand a bit and solicit opinions. I still toy with the idea of resurrecting my research program on understanding the evangelical identity movement.

Brad came across a video titled "why evangelicals are scary," that portrays all evangelicals as narrow dogmatic creationists. He wonders why it is acceptable to paint evangelicals with a broad brush when it is obviously not socially acceptable to do the same to other identity groups:

Imagine the response if other groups were similarly denounced. How about:
"Why Muslims are Scary"
"Why Jews are Scary"
"Why African-Americans are Scary"
"Why Asians are Scary"
"Why Disabled People are Scary"
"Why Gays are Scary"
"Why (fill in the blank) are Scary"

I offered the following in the comments:

The scariness of evangelicals is rooted in a complex social alchemy.

(1) No one really knows what evangelical means. Sure, there are theologians like Carl F. Henry who define evangelical as a theological orientation that is distinct from fundamentalism. There are others who frame evangelical more as a social identity only loosely based on theology. This later group participates in identity politics... one is an evangelical if...

• he or she attends a certain kind of church (the people they hang out with)
  
• engages in certain kinds of behavior (voting, small group, whatever)
  
• refrains from certain behaviors (drinking, smoking)
  
• and the the list could go on.

In this case evangelicals span all kinds of finer distinctions. Political leaders like Falwell, Dobson, and the icon formerly known as Ted Haggard cynically exploit this identity movement for political power. And lets not kid ourselves about those leaders and their role. No matter what they call themselves, they are not ministers. They are political hacks. They have done a great disservice to people of faith and drive a wedge between the community of believers and those of us looking in from the outside.

(2) The entire debate in what James Davidson Hunter once called Culture Wars pits true believers of mutually antagonistic worldviews in a debate that is doomed to escalate. What is ironic is that both of these sides gain strength through their perception of persecution. That the implications of this battle are for the meaning of life, the universe, and everything (hat tip to Douglas Adams) only intensifies their resolve. Just to take one example, evangelicals (as an identity movement) are threatened by same-sex unions. This undermines a core principle of their identity construct. At the same time, gays and lesbians see this reaction as a threat to their existence. Both sides feed on the persecution of the other as well as feel persecuted by their opposite. And the cycle continues on and on. Hunter was examining these dynamics two decades ago, Christian Smith studied this in the mid 90s, and little if anything has changed today.

So to come back to Brad's original point. The left's (for lack of a better term... Hunter used the term progressive to describe this constellation) singling out of evangelicals (defined loosely) is anchored to an institutionalized squabble that appears not to be leaving anytime soon. The other groups you mention are not as tightly connected to this construct. Now, if and when any of those groups gain marketshare in the identity politics arena, I suppose they will join the fray.

Backhanded compliments?

I just got my transcription of the open-ended student evaluations. Generally they are flattering. But I'm not sure what to make of the following:

Can’t say anything bad about Colyer. Anyone who fails this class is ignorant.

Hmmmm. Given that one of my anonymous raters on ratemyprofessor.com opined "His objective is not to fail anyone..." I wonder if its time to ratchet up the intensity

Of course that was followed by

I think he should make it slightly easier to get an A.

*shrug*.

Through a scanner darkly.. .WVU style.

Jim Nolan continues to play with his camera... To the left, Brian Gerber. In the middle, Melissa Latimer. And our hero, yours truly is on the right.

How we spend our Saturdays in West Virginia

My division had an all day retreat last Saturday to work through the undergraduate curriculum in Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology. My colleague Jim got a new digital camera for Christmas, so we have photos. In all, I work with a good bunch of folks.

The day begins with a greasy breakfast at the Pokydot followed by several snack breaks. You will note from the photos that playdough and silly putty are an important part of our pedagogical practice.

When in Capernaum

So as not to be shown up by other (higher profile and arguably smarter sociological bloggers), I took the online Ultimate Bible Quiz.

You know the Bible 95%!

 

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

I feel quite pleased myself to have scored higher than Kieran Healy and Jeremy Freese. I suppose those 4 years at a Christian Liberal Arts College weren't a total loss.

Brad... I expect to see your score soon. The gauntlet doth been thrown... or something.

Real Estate sucks

Well, I still have not sold my house in Michigan. It has been on the market for 1.5 years now and the price has been dropped several times. It's currently priced at a point that gives me next to no wiggle room.

Since dropping to the current price X (which is about 5,000 below what we paid for the house a few years ago) we have received two offers. Both offers were substantially below the asking price (which is to be expected in a down market). We countered on the first offer to to a figure that I could almost afford. The buyer gave a verbal agreement, but then disappeared without returning the written agreement.

This past week I called my agent to discuss the problem in selling my house. She suggested that we drop the price another 5k to put it into a different price point. I told her doing so would give almost no negotiating room on any offer that comes in. Then I told her I was not planning on renewing my contract with her on February 1st.

Now, with 3 days to go on the contract, I suddenly have another offer. It's a terrible offer... Much below the list price (and on top of it, the buyer is asking for cash at close). Obviously, I can't afford afford it, so I countered. I don't know if the buyer will come back.

I've been cynically wondering about the timing of all this. In my brief adult life, I've not had much experience with real estate. We bought this house and now are trying to sell it, but have encountered less than scrupulous people in the process.

I hope beyond all hope that this buyer is serious and responds to our counter realistically.. [Well, since I countered with my final offer, the buyer will need to accept it or find a different house]. If not, I suppose I continue to feed the money pit that is my empty house.

Tagged: Five things about me

Brad Wright tagged me to give five odd facts about myself that most people would not know.

5) I got into my college by virtue of an athletic admission slot. My high school grades were not particularly good and my SAT scores were pathetic. But I was pretty good at running into other human beings as hard as I could (who said football has no academic value?).

4) I was once an elementary education major. I dropped out of the program because: a) my grades weren't good enough to be certified by the school, and b) I couldn't figure out how to do a bulletin board.

3) Despite my training as an ethnographer, my first real job was as a Research Associate at ICPSR where I played with statistical software all day long (all hail Stata). [For the record, as some of my old co-workers will tell you, I wasn't terribly good at that job.]

2) In college, I spent 3 summers working at camps for people with physical and mental disabilities. Two summers in Ohio and another in California.

1) I failed my first Sociology class.

Janet, you're next.

Interactive Fiction Lives

In the summer of 1983 I discovered the ibm personal computer. I had (well still have, actually) a friend whose father worked as an inventor for Corning Glass and was an early adopter of technology. The computer, with its dual disk drive and monochrome monitor sat on a large worktable in the den, a space that easily accommodated Brian (it was his house), Dave (another friend) and me. Brian worked the keyboard while Dave and I watched and made suggestions. (It really was much more fun than it sounds).

At the time, Dungeons and Dragons was all the rage. We used to play D&D on Dave's back porch for hours on end. As 12-year olds, we didn't really understand all of the nuances in the game, but it really sparked our imaginations. The action in D&D takes place in your head. A Dungeon Master spins a story (in our case, he read from a guide-book that we couldn't see) and the players envision it unfolding in their mind's eye. The problem with D&D was that we needed other people to play. When Brian's dad got that computer, we discovered a whole new way of playing imagination games which did not require a human dungeon master.

The game was called Zork. One day after school we sat in Brian's den drinking strawberry kool-aide and he pulled out a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk labeled "Zork: An Infocom Adventure". Brian inserted this disk to the left disk-drive of his dad's computer and typed:

>a:Zork.exe

The screen printed the following:

You are in an open field west of a big
white house with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

We typed:

open mailbox

The game replied:

Opening the mailbox reveals:
A leaflet.

We typed:

get leaflet

The computer replied:

Taken.

We typed:

read leaflet

The Computer replied:

Welcome to Zork (originally Dungeon)!

Dungeon is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning.
In it you will explore some of the most amazing territory
ever seen by mortal man. Hardened adventurers have run
screaming from the terrors contained within.

In Dungeon, the intrepid explorer delves into the
forgotten secrets of a lost labyrinth deep in the
bowels of the earth, searching for vast treasures
long hidden from prying eyes, treasures guarded by
fearsome monsters and diabolical traps!

No DECsystem should be without one!

Dungeon was created at the Programming Technology
Division of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
by Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels,
and Dave Lebling. It was inspired by the Adventure
game of Crowther and Woods, and the Dungeons and
Dragons game of Gygax and Arneson. The original
version was written in MDL (alias MUDDLE). The
current version was translated from MDL into
FORTRAN IV by a somewhat paranoid DEC engineer
who prefers to remain anonymous,and was later
translated to C.

On-line information may be obtained with
the commands HELP and INFO.

Have fun.
>

We were hooked!

Over the next several years, we played many different infocom text adventure games. When I was in graduate school, I worked with a guy who purchased The Lost Treasures of Infocom which included all the titles. I spent several Saturday's in front of my computer, avoiding my thesis and exploring these textual worlds.

Lately, I've been feeling nostalgic for those halcyon days of yesteryear. Googling infocom led me to discover the Interactive Fiction Archive with literally thousands of free text-based games to download and enjoy. All you need is a Z-machine interpreter¹ and game files. The Archive divides games into genres, you can play science fiction titles, mysteries, historical thrillers, and more.

I downloaded the WinFrotz Z-machine interpreter along with 20 or so games this past weekend and plan to reward myself for finishing a manuscript this week with several hours of sedentary adventuring. Life is truly good.

===
1. Actually, the Z-machine is only one of several interactive-adventure game engines. The z-machine is a reverse engineered open-source implementation of Infocom's original game engine. It looks like there are more games for the Z-machine than other interpreters. I've tried using TADS and ADRIFT which are similar to Z-machine, but I prefer the former.