Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

Border Patrol dog barks at woman.  Border Patrol does strip search and non-consensual cavity search.  Finds no drugs.  Takes her to hospital for non-consensual laxatives and examination of bowel movement.  Finds no drugs.  Administers CT scan without informed consent.  Finds no drugs.  Releases her and sends her the hospital bill.

Remember, though, if they didn’t do this, somebody might smuggle drugs to a willing drug user, and then something bad might happen.

By Thoreau

First, since most of the comments on my teaching-related posts are of the torch-and-pitchfork variety, it was nice to see this comment.

Second, somebody just learned from an Important National Committee that there are Serious And Important People working on documenting Best Practices for helping physics students prepare for careers outside academia.  Now, I’ve been taking students to meetings with people from industry for several years, and inviting speakers from the private sector and hosting alumni panels.  But I’m a curmudgeon, usually arguing against whatever the latest fad is, and usually reacting negatively to whatever the National Committees of Serious And Important People are going on about.  Now that they’ve suddenly started issuing documents on something that I’ve been doing for a while, it is New And Important And We Need To Get On This.  Previously, this person was solely focused on sending students to the PhD path, but the Serious And Important People have just told him to put some effort into other tracks.

I feel like I need a sock puppet with a name badge that says “Member of Serious Committee”, and then I could get this person to do whatever I want.

By Thoreau

I knew that linguists had reconstructed portions of the original Indo-European language.  I did not know that they had reconstructed the swear words.  I guess it makes sense, though.  Linguists are as human as anybody else.  Get a bunch of them to work on reconstructing an ancestral language, and eventually somebody will ask “What the fuck?”  And then they’ll have to answer the question.

It must make for interesting conversation at conferences.  ”So, how’s your research going?”  ”It’s all bullshit, man.”

Strangely, though, Rule 34 does not apply to Indo-European linguistics.

By Thoreau

I was talking to a person who advertises his enlightenment quite openly, and he was going on about how interviewing people via Skype (instead of phone) is so useful because you learn so much more from demeanor and body language.  I don’t deny that you can learn a lot from such things, but my non-expert impression of the literature on bias is that you also have the greatest opportunity for subconscious bias to creep in.  Granted, the goal is to select people for in-person interviews, and once that happens there will be unavoidable opportunities for bias to creep in, but I would think (perhaps naively) that doing the first pass via phone instead of Skype would at least be slightly less bad.

Does  anybody know if there’s research on this?  Are screening interviews via Skype more bias-prone than phone interviews?

By Thoreau

I generally dislike  invocations of “privilege” in internet debates.  It’s a useful concept for understanding many things, but it is not terribly enlightening when used as a rhetorical weapon.  However, I think this article shows a case where privilege is a remarkably useful lens for understanding the world: If you are a white guy in a suit, and you commit a crime on camera and in full view of the cops, it is remarkably difficult to get arrested.

I particularly like this part, where he speaks of his work as a former prosecutor:

But in between the important cases, I found myself spending most of my time prosecuting people of color for things we white kids did with impunity growing up in the suburbs. As our office handed down arrest records and probation terms for riding dirt bikes in the street, cutting through a neighbor’s yard, hosting loud parties, fighting, or smoking weed – shenanigans that had rarely earned my own classmates anything more than raised eyebrows and scoldings – I often wondered if there was a side of the justice system that we never saw in the suburbs.

Indeed.

Of course, once  they realized that he was on a mission to embarrass the system, they punished him as harshly as they could, because he committed the one unforgivable crime: He embarrassed the system.  Some might argue that there’s no particular need to feel outrage over his treatment, since he sought it out, and that’s a perfectly fine point.  Still, it’s a useful reminder of how things work.

By Thoreau

It is year seven, and it is time for sabbatical.  For the next six months, the answer to every cow-orker’s question is “Not my problem.”  In fact, the answer is “Not only is it not my problem, but I signed a contract promising to not work on anything except my own research.  You don’t want me to violate the rules, do you?”

Also, no veal!  For the next six months, I shall be surrounded by gradflakes, surly postdocs, and faculty who only teach grad students.

By Thoreau

The announcement at the airport  is “Due to increased security measures, passengers must maintain control of their belongings at all times.”

“Increased”?  I’ve been hearing these announcements in some form since 1995 or 1996, when they feared that the Unabomber might attack LAX.  I’ve spent half my life listening to that warning message.  I have college students who are as old as that warning message.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea to leave packages lying around at the airport, and this is one of the less bothersome security measures, but the “increased” part of the message bothers me.  Maybe I should be glad that they’re not playing the “We have always been at war with Eastasia” line, but it still bugs me.  I guess it’s that it treats the wound as fresh.

Also, I know that this is nothing new, but it’s still annoying to watch them lecture the person ahead of me in line about her can of soda.  I mean, they sell cans of Diet Coke in the terminal.  They also sell Mentos.  Think, people!

By Thoreau

It’s been said in many places that US politics are becoming more polarized.  Some of those lamentations have to be dismissed–there have always been divides and deep disputes; I am obviously comfortable asserting that we’re in a less polarized condition than the run-up to the Civil War. On the other hand, while partisan divides have always been with us, they can fluctuate up and down, and it’s not crazy to think that they might be fluctuating upward right now.  This graphic, concerning the declining prevalence of cross-over voting in the Senate, is one piece of evidence for that, and consistent with other observations.

While I continue to be uncomfortable about the way that the filibuster was modified, I will say that the patterns illustrated here is one reason why the change was understandable, even if not something that I desired.  Having a minority blocking mechanism in place is acceptable if (1) it won’t be used too frequently and (2) there will be opportunities to craft broad supermajority coalitions to overcome the minority veto.  If there are no crossover votes, there is no way to strike a compromise.

Another question that we could ask, given that polarization has increased, is whether the median has shifted. That’s a hard question, because how you define moderation or extremism is not entirely objective.  Do we distinguish extremism and moderation by the specific stance advocated, or by the direction that the person pushes in and the appeal that they use to push in that direction?  I’ve noted before that many of Nixon’s policies might be liberal by some absolute yardstick of today, but the directions that he pushed in and the ways that he pushed were clearly of the right, not the left.  Looking at some regulatory document issued by a Nixon-era Undersecretary tells you nothing about whether Nixon was a man of the left, right, or center (obviously he was of the right), and whether Nixon was moderate or extreme.  (In fact, he was neither moderate nor extreme.  He was calculating.)

So, the issues on the table today, and the directions that people are pushing in, are different enough from 1989 that I’m not sure if we can really say that the center has moved in either direction.  Certainly tax rates are lower and many civil liberties enjoy less protection.  On the other hand, we have Obamacare (which may not be a progressive wet dream but is certainly to the left of what was considered politically possible in 1989), and in many states some of the civil liberties of gays and lesbians enjoy a level of protection that was unthinkable in 1989.  The incarceration rate continues to climb, but we are seeing cracks in the drug war.  And so forth.

In other words, polarization is something that we can measure on a more-or-less objective scale, while shifts in the center are harder to quantify.

By Thoreau

I admittedly don’t follow business news as closely as I probably should, but what little dribs and drabs that I hear indicate (1) a renewed interest in tech start-ups and (2) a lot of hype over apps for “social media integration.”  I’m definitely primed to dislike hype, especially about social media, and I’m admittedly a grumpy old man (I just barely remember Usenet, kids!), but I don’t quite get why people are so sure that a big transformation is imminent this time around.  In the 1990’s, the internet was very, very different from what had been before. Not so much because a Geocities site in 1995 was fundamentally better than whatever AOL had been offering, but because use of the internet was spreading much more rapidly than it had previously, and it was going from being the sort of thing that geeks and gurus use to something that your uncle could use to forward email jokes to you.  Now I talk to a kid (God, I’m old) and he’s all “Yeah, I’m developing an app that will select news stories for you based on things you liked on Facebook” or “We’re working on an app that will look at your social media contacts and let you know which parties they’re at.”

To me, it sounds like an effort to solve the problems of bored twenty-somethings and TED talk enthusiasts, rather than an effort to make things that might get interest (and revenue) from across society.  I mean, Amazon sells lots of things that appeal to lots of people.  Google has lots of products.  Even Pets.com at least wanted to sell the sorts of things that lots of people have a use for.  A slightly different way to aggregate news stories?  Eh.  The leap from “no internet” to “Even your uncle has email” is much bigger than the leap from “Facebook” to “integrating Facebook with your news feed.”

I know, I know, I’m old, but with experience comes wisdom, and when the tech bubble of the 1990’s popped it was because a lot of companies were unable to figure out what they would do to get customers to spend money on their products.  If you tell me that some of these social media apps will be reasonably profitable little endeavors in specific, I believe you.  I have no doubt that some of them will find their niche and do well in there.  If you tell me that all of these apps and social media integration endeavors will transform the world in the same way that putting everybody online did, I’m far more skeptical.

By Thoreau

I vaguely remember that teachers used to consider over-use of commas a serious problem.  I have fuzzy recollections of being harangued by teachers who wanted to stamp out that practice.  I think they succeeded, and they probably succeeded a little too well.  Nowadays kids seem to under-use commas.

For once, I’m not pissed at anyone.  Teachers responded with remarkable effectiveness to a real problem, and now we just need to re-calibrate.  Whenever I hand back critiques of writing I put the title of this post on the chalkboard and ask if commas might save some lives.