Calling bullshit on (some) quantitative political analysis

I have to look up "stochastic" in the dictionary and don't understand the difference between Bayesian and frequentist statistics, except in the most superficial way, so I'm hardly the target audience for "The Seven Deadly Sins of Contemporary Quantitative Political Analysis."

Still, I enjoyed reading it, not least because it uses the word "bullshit." It's a cri de coeur by a Pennsylvania State University professor against the misuse of statistics by many data-oriented political scientists:

A combination of technological change, methodological drift and a certain degree of intellectual sloth and sloppiness, particularly with respect to philosophy of science, has allowed contemporary quantitative political analysis to accumulate a series of dysfunctional habits that have rendered a great deal of contemporary research more or less scientifically useless.

The author, Philip A. Schrodt, is a member of the tribe and doesn't renounce the field itself:

The cure for this is not to reject quantitative methods - and the cure is most certainly not a postmodernist nihilistic rejection of all systematic method - but rather to return to some fundamentals, and take on some hard problems rather than expecting to advance knowledge solely through the ever-increasing application of fast-twitch muscle fibers to computer mice.

How to detect an election shocker in advance

Reporters are often caught by surprise when an unknown candidate comes from seemingly nowhere to oust an incumbent. In the wake of a Tea Party candidate's strong showing in the Alaska primary, Nate Silver at the rebranded FiveThirtyEight blog proposes an algorithm for detecting shockers in advance:

If a candidate has low name recognition, but is running relatively well among voters who have become familiar with him, and has a strategy – like the ability to spend lots of money — for increasing his name recognition, then we should not be so surprised if he performs much better than expected on Election Day.

Google realtime search as a tool for reporters

Google has improved its realtime search, first released last year, including giving it its own URL. Realtime search gives you up-to-the-minute updates from such sites as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Buzz. The search results page continuously refreshes as new results come in.

Google is annoyingly vague about what websites are crawled. That may be because for now at least almost everything seems to come from Twitter. Some who have written about the recent improvements have mentioned that blogs and news sites are included, but I haven't seen any evidence of it. Nevertheless, four features could prove particularly useful for reporters. With realtime search you can:

• Search for updates from any city, state or country. That means, for example, you can look for what's being said about Wikileaks in Sweden.
• Go back in time and find updates for a particular day or hour. The data is thin to nonexistent if you go back just a little while, but in theory its usefulness should grow over time.
• Limit your search to just photographs. So if you're looking for pictures of an event happening nearby right now, you can find them more easily.
• Sign up for Google alerts that will deliver new results to your email or RSS reader.

Realtime search also threads conversations (as does Twitter's search, but not Twitter itself) making it easier to reconstruct what was said by whom in response to what.

My favorite tweak is the timeline, which lets you slide forward and backward in time. Here's the timeline for a search on University of Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino. The sudden spike of updates in late July and early August is from the federal trial of a woman who tried to blackmail Pitino after they had sex in a Louisville restaurant:

PhD ("Piled Higher and Deeper") Comics

PhD ("Piled Higher and Deeper") Comics is a consistently high quality, if mild and mainstream, online comic that gently mocks "life (or the lack thereof) in grad school." There's a new reader guide to orient yourself.

The Jury Expert

The Jury Expert is the sort of publication that induces despair in right-thinking citizens, not because it isn't worth reading, because it is, but because it's a window onto how much justice depends not on the cold, hard facts but on the style of the presentation of those facts to 12 human beings in a box. It's by the American Society of Trial Consultants, "the only professional organization specifically created for trial consultants, jury consultants and litigation consultants."

Some articles in the latest issue:

• "What We Do (and Don't) Know about Race and Jurors"
• Persuading with Probability: The Prosecution of O.J. Simpson
• Tattoos, Tolerance, Technology, and TMI: Welcome to the land of the Millennials (aka Generation Y)
• The Convoluted Spectrum of White Guilt Reactions: A Review of Emerging Literature
• Presumed Prejudice, Actual Prejudice, No Prejudice: Skilling v. U.S.
• Emotions in the courtroom: "Need for affect" in juror decision-making

PoynterOnline: 'How Technology is Renewing Attention to Long-form Journalism'

 

I'm a fan of the Instapaper-Kindle combo: I save long articles from the Web to Instapaper, which at regular intervals automatically feeds them to my Kindle, where they're more pleasant to read. Mallary Jean Tenore at PoynterOnline discusses Instapaper and three other tools that make this sort of thing possible in "How Technology is Renewing Attention to Long-form Journalism".

Journalism warning labels

From Tom Scott, a British "geek comedian," warning labels for journalism:

It seems a bit strange to me that the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there's no similar labelling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content.

Examples:

WARNING

Statistics, survey results and/or equations in this article were sponsored by a PR company.

WARNING

This article is basically just a press release, copied and pasted.

WARNING

Medical claims in this article have not been confirmed by peer-reviewed research.

There are even PDF templates so you can print out your own UK or US versions.

This comes via Language Log, where dissatisfied news consumers had many more suggestions.

I need some of these for this blog. Just because I mention a story, a blog post or a study here doesn't mean I believe its claims. It's merely because I find it interesting or amusing in some way. Caveat emptor.

Your polling place can change your vote

Tom Jacobs at Miller-McCune reviews research showing how the location of your polling place influences how you'll vote:

Political pundits seldom pause to ponder polling places. Unless the lines in a given location are so long they discourage voting, the question of where ballots are cast is usually ignored as irrelevant. But wonks — especially those who straddle political science and social psychology — know better. They argue the physical location of the polls not only affects how many people vote; it may also influence last-minute decisions regarding which box to mark or lever to pull.

'Databases of ruin'

A new article in the UCLA Law Review argues says we need to rethink our laws because it's impossible to share databases without compromising privacy. "Data can be either useful or perfectly anonymous but never both," writes Paul Ohm, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School.

It's a fine article, summarizing examples and recent research showing how difficult it is to make data truly anonymous even when you scrub personally identifiable information. For example, he cites research by Carnegie Mellon professor Latanya Sweeney that used 1990 Census data to show that 87 percent of people in the U.S. can be uniquely identified using just their ZIP code, birthdate and sex. Ohm writes:

Just as human fingerprints left at a crime scene can uniquely identify a single person and link that person with “anonymous” information, so too do data subjects generate “data fingerprints”

The article's biggest weakness is that it fails to lay out the evidence proving that the public release of private facts is as harmful as his sometimes overwrought language suggests:

Our enemies will find it easier to connect us to facts that they can use to blackmail, harass, defame, frame, or discriminate against us. Powerful reidentification will draw every one of us closer to what I call our personal “databases of ruin.”

He asserts that regulators may have to "prevent privacy harm by squeezing and reducing the flow of information in society, even though in doing so they may need to sacrifice, at least a little, important counter values like innovation, free speech, and security."

That's a lot to claim for a value that has yet to find an explicit place in the U.S. Constitution.

The joys of freelancing -- or, Why you should be a staff writer

Richard Morgan, who has just taken a job as a reporter for the The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, peels the skin off his seven years as a freelancer for such publications as The New York Times, Discover, Details, Wired and The Economist:

Freelancing is an adventure the way "Locked Up Abroad" is an adventure. Journalism even at its best is already a fairly caustic and draining experience. All the qualities that make you a great journalist make you a terrible person: gossip, urgency, obsession, noisiness, theatrics and hysterics. I help anyone who asks for it. Just this past Friday, I got an email at 3:38 a.m. from a Pulitzer-winning friend who wanted my help with a New Yorker assignment; I called their cell at 3:39. I never wanted to be one of those broken, bitter people. Why would anyone want to lose friends and alienate people? I was particularly struck—and maybe scared—by a story a friend told me after he snagged a great job at Condé Nast. He talked about how he shared his apartment with a married couple and their cat, and that the couple was on vacation and there he was, in his bathroom, trying to take a dump, and this cat was lonely and pawing at the gap under the door, and all he could think is that he had this glamorous job at this stylish magazine and he couldn’t even manage a life where he could take a dump in peace.

Nieman Storyboard interviewed him about his "funny/terrifying piece."

If you want your work to be cited, cite others

It's been said ad nauseam that the way to win more attention for your writing online is to link to other's work online. Here's tangential support for that from the world of academia: a University of Florida psychology professor says that the key to having your research cited by others is the frequency with which you cite others:

A long reference list at the end of a research paper may be the key to ensuring that it is well cited, according to an analysis of 100 years' worth of papers published in the journal Science.

The research suggests that scientists who reference the work of their peers are more likely to find their own work referenced in turn, and the effect is on the rise, with a single extra reference in an article now producing, on average, a whole additional citation for the referencing paper.

"There is a ridiculously strong relationship between the number of citations a paper receives and its number of references," Gregory Webster, the psychologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who conducted the research, told Nature. "If you want to get more cited, the answer could be to cite more people."

Political redistricting can be harmful to 'carved-out' voters

Kentucky's 3rd congressional district is essentially the boundaries of Jefferson County. I say essentially because a small portion of Jefferson County was carved out of the 3rd and put in Kentucky's 2nd congressional district in political redistricting. You might think that's harmless — after all, the voters in the carved-out portion still vote and are still represented in Congress. However, two political scientists say in the most recent Political Research Quarterly that it could be harmful. They say carved-out voters such as these are less informed about their House candidates than other voters.

Michael Wagner, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said in a press release that these voters are at an "informational disadvantage" that "results in a vote about as random as buying a sealed 'mystery' bag of groceries — sure, they picked something, but they don't know quite what it is until they get home."

"Media markets do not split up counties, which means that local media tend to focus on the lawmakers that make up the bulk of the market and ignore those who represent only a fraction of their readers or viewers," Wagner said. "This makes it harder for people living in districts outside of their community of interest to know who their congressperson is, let alone hold them accountable for their actions in Washington.

"We think that the political mapmakers should work harder to keep these natural communities intact."

I should say that it's absolutely true that The Courier-Journal, where I work and which is in Jefferson County, devotes most of its coverage to 3rd district congressman John Yarmuth and his political opponents and writes much less frequently about the congressman from the 2nd district. The same is true of other Jefferson County media.

A poker face isn't so useful in poker

A study published by PLoS ONE, an open access scientific journal, says that a poker face isn't necessarily the best face to put forward in a poker game. Participants in the study were shown "untrustworthy," "neutral" and "trustworthy" faces while playing a modified version of Texas Hold'em.

"Interestingly, contrary to the popular belief that the optimal poker face is neutral in appearance, the face that invokes the most betting mistakes by our subjects is has attributes that are correlated with trustworthiness. This suggests that poker players who bluff frequently may actually benefit from appearing trustworthy, since the natural tendency seems to be inferring that a trustworthy-looking player bluffs less."

The study found that "people took significantly longer and made more mistakes against emotionally positive opponents" and "suggests that rapid impressions of an opponent play an important role in competitive games, especially when people have little or no experience with an opponent."

The game conditions were highly artificial, so it would be unwise to assume the study generalizes to most real-world situations

[via BPS Research Digest]

Campaign finance data shows 'the myth of a conservative corporate America'

Campaign finance stories are often boring and obvious. They sum up the contributions and tell us who gave a candidate the most money, like a recent post from The Center for Public Integrity that told us Sen. MItch McConnell's contributions came from tobacco and whiskey interests. That's hardly surprising for a senator from a tobacco-whiskey state.

Last month, though, there was an interesting take from the Ideological Cartography blog. The blog's author, Adam Bonica, a Ph.D. candidate in politics at New York University, used campaign contribution data to study the political leanings of board members from 20 major U.S. corporations. What he found cuts against the conventional wisdom that corporate board members are typically politically conservative:

Republicans have long been seen as the party of big business. To whatever extent this label should apply, it probably owes more to the party’s policies than the composition of its support base. Although board members from some sectors exhibit conservative allegiances—notably the oil, gas, and coal industries—most corporate boards are either dispersed across the ideological spectrum, or seem to have aligned with the left, as is the case of many of the growth stories of the new economy.

Bonica's NYU homepage includes a working paper he wrote on using campaign finance data to measure the ideology of candidates and contributors, as well as two conference posters summarizing this work, all as PDFs.

I learned about this via the Monkey Cage, where Andrew Gelman points out that survey research "suggests" business executives are in fact more Republican-leaning than the national average.

Shirt boards are Gay Talese's secret to great writing

I just came across this 2009 Paris Review interview with Gay Talese on the art of nonfiction. In it Talese reveals his secret for success:

INTERVIEWER
Do you use notebooks when you are reporting?

TALESE
I don’t use notebooks. I use shirt boards.

INTERVIEWER
You mean the cardboard from dry-cleaned shirts?

TALESE
Exactly. I cut the shirt board into four parts and I cut the corners into round edges, so that they can fit in my pocket. I also use full shirt boards when I’m writing my outlines. I’ve been doing this since the fifties.

You can read a significant portion of the interview online, with some choice comments on journalism and writing, but not all of it. To do that you'll have to buy the issue, for $12 plus shipping.

Click here to see the shirt-board outline for Talese's 1966 classic, "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold."

[via OutlinerSoftware.com]

Online Detainee Locator System

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has an Online Detainee Locator System you can use to locate detainees 18 and older in custody or who have been released in the last 60 days. Search by country of birth and A-Number -- alien registration number -- or by first and last name and country of birth.

[Via PIbuzz]

'What Social Science Does – and Doesn't – Know'

The chairman of a business analytics company, Jim Manzi, discusses our "continuing inability to transform social sciences into actual sciences" in the latest issue of City Journal, a magazine published by the Manhattan Institute.

Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, nonobvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study—that is, human social behavior, including the impact of proposed government programs.

Manzi writes about the weak underpinnings of studies that are staples of news reporting, including studies of economics, medicine and crime. The most interesting part for me, however, was when he discussed how some businesses — such as Capital One — have embraced experimentation and compensated for some of the weaknesses of social science "by scaling up the testing process":

A key event occurred in 1988, when Rich Fairbank and Nigel Morris left a small strategy-consulting firm where the three of us worked to found credit-card company Capital One. The company was designed precisely as an application of the experimental method to business, and that method quickly permeated Capital One, to an extent never before seen. Suppose marketers wanted to know whether a credit-card solicitation would meet with greater success if it was mailed in a blue envelope or in a white one. Rather than debate the question, the company would simply mail, say, 50,000 randomly selected households the solicitation in a blue envelope and 50,000 randomly selected households the same solicitation in a white envelope, and then measure the relative profitability of the resulting customer relationships from each group. The success of Capital One, Fairbank told Fast Company, was predicated on its “ability to turn a business into a scientific laboratory where every decision about product design, marketing, channels of communication, credit lines, customer selection, collection policies and cross-selling decisions could be subjected to systematic testing using thousands of experiments.” By 2000, Capital One was reportedly running more than 60,000 tests per year. And by 2009, it had gone from an idea in a conference room to a public corporation worth $35 billion.

The influence of foreign accents on credibility

A study published this year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (PDF) says "non-native speakers who have an accent are seen as less credible." The study says this isn't necessarily the result of prejudice, but could be because of the way the listener mentally processes speech:

These results have important implications for how people perceive non-native speakers of a language, particularly as mobility increases in the modern world, leading millions of people to be non-native speakers of the language they use daily. Accent might reduce the credibility of non-native job seekers, eyewitnesses, reporters or news anchors. As we showed, such insidious impact of accent is even apparent when the non-native speaker is merely a messenger. Most likely, neither the native nor the non-native speakers are aware of this, making the difficulty of understanding accented speech an ever present reason for perceiving non-native speakers as less credible.

ScienceDaily writes about the study here.

[Via the Deception Blog]

Every editor is Thomas Jefferson

This Fourth of July the Writing for Digital blog offered a lesson in the value of editors:

"Those who devalue the work of editors ought to consider history. Perhaps the greatest single contribution of an editor to a written work can be found in The Declaration of Independence. Early drafts of the most important document of the United States of America show a lot of changes in word choice in the process of writing. Thomas Jefferson had a venerable editorial committee: John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, who wrote extensive comments in the margins.

In a crucial draft of the Declaration, Jefferson smudged out the word subjects in favor of the word citizens. Archivists have the technology to see the change for the first time, using special spectral technology to decipher the intent of manuscript authors.

Imagine if Jefferson had used the word subjects rather than citizens. For many, it would seem that the United States was merely replacing one tyranny with another, rather than crafting a system of government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” It seems plausible that this one edit changed the course of history."

I like to think that every edit I make changes the course of history.

Stock market ignores most blockbuster jury awards

A study of 17 blockbuster jury awards -- judgments of $100 million or more -- found the awards had only "trivial stock market effects" on the companies ordered to pay. The study was published recently in the Review of Law & Economics, and the abstract of it says:

"Apparently the awards, which on their face value seem large, are not always that important when one considers the much larger market capitalization and the fact that these very large, prominent defendant firms are under almost constant litigation, with the blockbuster being only one of many cases facing the firm."

Something to consider the next time someone argues such awards are too punitive and need to be curtailed. If they have no impact on the firm's value, are they punitive at all?

Steven Berlin Johnson on 'The Glass Box and The Commonplace Book'

In April the author and neighborhood-news entrepreneur Steven Berlin Johnson gave a lecture where he talked about the now forgotten practice of keeping a "commonplace book":

Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book.

That was his opening for an argument about why we should oppose letting our words be put in "glass boxes" and instead should embrace the power of the open, connected web.

TimeFlow: 'an open-source analytical timeline for reporters'

The creators of Many Eyes have teamed up with Duke professor and former Washington Post reporter Sarah Cohen to create TimeFlow, "an open-source analytical timeline for reporters":

The motivation behind TimeFlow comes from Sarah’s realization that visual analytical tools for reporters are rare. There are good visual presentation tools out there, but those that allow journalists to mull over hundreds and thousands of data points, slicing and dicing the information as they go along are harder to come by. Given this mandate, we set out to rethink timelines, striving to always show as much textual detail about the data as possible (a goal dear to reporters that, interestingly, goes against the visualization impulse to always aggregate).

TimeFlow offers five different viewing options: timeline, calendar, bar chart, table and list. There is also considerable flexibility in filtering values, combining filters, and re-arranging points on the screen.

Economics professor: 'there is no such thing as economic theory'

So says U.C. Berkeley's J. Bradford DeLong:

One of the embarrassing dirty little secrets of economics is that there is no such thing as economic theory properly so-called. There is simply no set of foundational bedrock principles on which one can base calculations that illuminate situations in the real world. Biologists know that every cell runs off instructions for protein synthesis encoded in its DNA. Chemists start with what the Heisenberg and Pauli principles plus the three-dimensionality of space tell us about stable electron configurations. Physicists start with the four fundamental forces of nature. Economists have none of that. The "economic principles" underpinning their theories are a fraud--not bedrock truths but mere knobs twiddled and tunes so that th right conclusions come out of the analysis.

What are the "right" conclusions? It depends on what type of economist you are, for three are two types. One type chooses, for non-economic and non-scientific reasons, a political stance and a political set of allies, and twiddles and tunes their assumptions until they come out with conclusions that please their allies and their stance. The other type takes the carcass of history, throws it into the pot, turns up the heat, and boils it down, hoping that the bones and the skeleton that emerge will teach lessons and suggest principles that will be useful to voters, bureaucrats, and politicians as they try to guide our civilization as it slouches toward utopia. (You will not be surprised to learn that I think that only this second kind of economist has any use at all.)

[via Free Advice]

An experiment so simple even a journalist could do it

I love an experiment so simple even a journalist could do it. In this one, a physicist answers a fundamental question: Is it it better to crack your windows open when parking your car on a hot day, or is it better to keep them shut?

For a long term-- say, leaving your car parked outside all day-- I hope everyone will agree that leaving the windows slightly open is the better call, but the answer isn't as clear for a short stop. There might well be some time during which the open-window car heats up faster as warm air from outside gets in, while the closed-window car holds in the air-conditioned goodness longer.

His approach was flawed, as he admits and as some of the comments point out, but still … evidence-based thinking is always a good thing.

Researchers study real-life addictions in virtual spaces

The Mind Hacks blog notes a study that used the online virtual world Second Life to examine methamphetamine use:

A 'meth house' is where methamphetamine users go to buy, take or make speed and regular users may spend long periods of time there. Being able to reliably induce drug cravings in the research lab is useful as it allows controlled studies to be more easily conducted.

The researchers in this study, led by psychiatrist Christopher Culbertson, compared the reactions of 17 speed users to four situations: a video of a meth house, a neutral video, a Second Life simulation of a meth house and an average looking flat recreated in the online world.

Turns out there's a significant academic subculture that uses virtual reality, if not Second Life, to study addictive behaviors. Some more examples:

• "Reactivity to cannabis cues in virtual reality environments"
• "Using virtual reality to assess young adult smokers' attention to cues"
• "Utilizing virtual reality to standardize nicotine craving research: A pilot study"
• "Nicotine Craving and Cue Exposure Therapy by Using Virtual Environments"
• "Immersive Virtual Environments in Cue Exposure"
• "Assessing reactivity to virtual reality alcohol based cues"
• "Location and longing: the nicotine craving experience in virtual reality"
• "Virtual Reality Cues for Binge Drinking in College Students"

There's more on the meth study here.