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.