Photography is amazing - the view from 1859

A writer for the Atlantic is rummaging through the magazine's archives of old articles about then-emerging technologies (via).

Here is Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.), writing in 1859 about photography (I've corrected a few errors in the Atlantic's text scans without indicating this):

This triumph of human ingenuity is the most audacious, remote, improbable, incredible,—the one that would seem least likely to be regained, if all traces of it were lost, of all the discoveries man has made. It has become such an everyday matter with us, that we forget its miraculous nature, as we forget that of the sun itself, to which we owe the creations of our new art. Yet in all the prophecies of dreaming enthusiasts, in all the random guesses of the future conquests over matter, we do not remember any prediction of such an inconceivable wonder, as our neighbor round the corner, or the proprietor of the small house on wheels, standing on the village common, will furnish any of us for the most painfully slender remuneration. No Century of Inventions includes this among its possibilities. Nothing but the vision of a Laputan, who passed his days in extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, could have reached such a height of delirium as to rave about the time when a man should paint his miniature by looking at a blank tablet, and a multitudinous wilderness of forest foliage or an endless Babel of roofs and spires stamp itself, in a moment, so faithfully and so minutely, that one may creep over the surface of the picture with his microscope and find every leaf perfect, or read the letters of distant signs, and see what was the play at the "Variétés" or the "Victoria," on the evening of the day when it was taken, just as he would sweep the real view with a spy-glass to explore all that it contains. . . .

We were just now stereographed, ourselves, at a moment's warning, as if we were fugitives from justice. A skeleton shape, of about a man's height, its head covered with a black veil, glided across the floor, faced us, lifted its veil, and took a preliminary look. When we had grown sufficiently rigid in our attitude of studied ease, and got our umbrella into a position of thoughtful carelessness, and put our features with much effort into an unconstrained aspect of cheerfulness tempered with dignity, of manly firmness blended with womanly sensibility, of courtesy, as much as to imply,—"You honor me, Sir," toned or sized, as one may say, with something of the self-assertion of a human soul which reflects proudly, "I am superior to all this,"—when, I say, we were all right, the spectral Mokanna dropped his long veil, and his waiting-slave put a sensitive tablet under its folds. The veil was then again lifted, and the two great glassy eyes stared at us once more for some thirty seconds. The veil then dropped again; but in the mean time, the shrouded sorcerer had stolen our double image; we were immortal.

He also goes into great detail about the physical process of photography. Here's an excerpt of his much longer description of the photographic negative:

[T]he picture is reversed, just as in every camera-obscura where the image is received on a screen direct from the lens. Thus the glass plate has the right part of the object on the left side of its picture, and the left part on its right side; its light is darkness, and its darkness is light. Everything is just as wrong as it can be, except that the relations of each wrong to the other wrongs are like the relations of the corresponding rights to each other in the original natural image. This is a negative picture.

Extremes meet. Every given point of the picture is as far from truth as a lie can be. But in travelling away from the pattern it has gone round a complete circle, and is at once as remote from Nature and as near it as possible. . . .

Out of the perverse and totally depraved negative,—where it might almost seem as if some magic and diabolic power had wrenched all things from their proprieties, where the light of the eye was darkness, and the deepest blackness was gilded with the brightest glare,—is to come the true end of all this series of operations, a copy of Nature in all her sweet gradations and harmonies and contrasts.

His next thought verges on science fiction:

[P]erhaps this world is only the negative of that better one in which lights will be turned to shadows and shadows into light, but all harmonized, so that we shall see why these ugly patches, these misplaced gleams and blots, were wrought into the temporary arrangements of our planetary life.

(Photo by soulrush.)

What blogs are worth the most money?

Here are the top 25.

The most valuable blog is worth almost a quarter billion dollars.

Notably, all of the top 25 blogs "are private companies, as has been true in all four of the earlier lists. None are owned by larger media companies, corporations, consulting firms, or other businesses which do not have the blog or blog network as their primary operation."

Young voters and political party

Ann Althouse (my mom) quotes this report on a CBSNews/New York Times poll:

[O]nly half the 18-29 year olds are registered to vote and just 55 percent of them say they will definitely vote in 2010. Moreover, a mere 15 percent of young people say they are paying “a lot of attention” to the election. By comparison, 84 percent of voters over 64 say they will definitely vote, and 50 percent say they are paying a lot of attention to the election.

She makes a good point:

One is tempted to think that if only more young people would vote, the Democrats would have it made. But the young people who say they favor Democrats also aren't paying attention. They have to get interested before they'll be motivated to vote, and we don't know what they'd think after they paid attention. . . .

When you're young, usually you want to get along. You want to be liked. But do you care about politics? Do you really know who to vote for? Apparently not, or you'd vote.

See also "the taste of political and economic ideas." People often seem to be expressing coherent political ideas, when they're really displaying their taste or personality. Very often, the subtext of political discussions is: "I belong in our group, and I want to get along." If you're in a liberal milieu,* and you're talking with someone who states a lot of liberal opinions, you can't assume this person has engaged in any serious thinking about "the issues." It could be that they're skilled at adopting other people's words as their own, and they place a high priority on fitting in and getting along. When I was a teenager, I used to draw anarchy symbols on notebooks — why? Because friends of mine did this, and it was a way to signal: "I'm the type of person we approve of in our group." To conclude that I would have voted for anarchist politicians (if I had been old enough to vote) would have been a big mistake.

* Of course, the same thing applies if you cross out "liberal" and replace it with a different ideology. I'm using liberal by default because I've spent my life in liberal milieus. Or should that be milieux?

What is the atheist / secular humanist / freethought community missing?

Over the weekend, I was reading the paper edition of this New York Times article about a schism in a secular humanist organization called the Center for Inquiry. It's written as a profile of the Center's "exiled founder," Paul Kurtz, who has a different vision of secular humanism or atheism than the new leader, Ronald Lindsay. Things have turned very sour between them:

The center’s donations have fallen since Mr. Kurtz’s departure, which prompted warring blog posts between his defenders and Mr. Lindsay’s. Matters have not improved: on Wednesday, when Mr. Kurtz stopped by the center, where he still keeps an office, he found the locks had been changed. Mr. Lindsay told me that Mr. Kurtz did not need the new key because he “has no connection with us.”

I was surprised that this fact was put in the very last paragraph of a 5-column article. Isn't that the big news? The new leader is so hostile to the founder that the former effectively kicked the latter out of his office (just a few days before the article went to press). Instead, the article leads with a description of Kurtz's dogs — who are all named after famous "free thinkers" (John Dewey, Bentham, Voltaire) — greeting the reporter in Kurtz's driveway.

Anyway, what's the substance of the schism?

In books like “What Is Secular Humanism?” Mr. Kurtz has argued for a universal but nonreligious ethics, one he now calls “planetary humanism.” Its first principle is that “every person on the planet should be considered equal in dignity and value.” In his books, he explains how this principle can be derived from nature and from what we know of the human species.

And he contrasted his affirmative vision with recent projects under Mr. Lindsay, like International Blasphemy Day. (The 2010 version, held Thursday, was renamed International Blasphemy Rights Day.) Mr. Kurtz was also a vocal critic of a contest for cartoons about religion that included some entries that could be considered deeply offensive.

“Angry atheism does not work,” Mr. Kurtz said. “It has to be friendly, cooperative relations with people of other points of view.”

Lindsay defended his blasphemy day in a blog post:

Two points. Although blasphemy may not, at present, be legally prohibited in the United States, many still hold the view that criticizing religion is socially unacceptable. Religion is considered a taboo subject.

I disagree. Placing religion off limits in social discourse is just another, gentler way of prohibiting examination and criticism of religion. In my view, all subjects of human interest should be open to examination and criticism by humans. . . .

Second, as many of you may know already, blasphemy remains very much a live legal issue in many countries --and therefore, remains a live issue for anyone concerned about human rights. Call a Teddy Bear "Muhammad" in some Islamic countries and your risk losing your head. Moreover, there have been repeated efforts --successful efforts I might add --to have various United Nations bodies condemn so-called "defamation of religion." This is a prohibition of blasphemy by another name.

I admire Lindsay's concern for free speech rights around the world. He makes a reasonable argument — when you look at it from a coldly rational standpoint. But there are always many different ways you could make a single point, and someone as smart as Lindsay surely realizes that people react not only to well-reasoned arguments but to the emotional impact of words. He could have still made his substantive point about blasphemy without putting the word "blasphemy" in the title of his event.

As I said, the NYT article is 5 columns long (which isn't very long — each column was a short fraction of the whole page). We see a photo of the 84-year-old Kurtz sitting in his armchair, holding his dog John Dewey, with an expanse of books behind him (books presumably written by the likes of his dogs' namesakes). These were the first 5 of 6 columns on the page, but the 6th column on the page got my attention. It was a few small text ads under the heading "Religious Services." One of the ads said this:

Love and Completeness are Your Spiritual Right:

Say Goodbye to Loneliness, Fear, & Lack! . . .

> Doors open 6:30

> Inspirational music at 7:00

> You are Welcome

> Child Care Provided

This is what "atheist," "secular humanist," or "freethought" organizations aren't offering people.

I don't think the main obstacle for secular humanists is that they're too "angry" (Kurtz's word) or too critical of religious people. Negativity can actually be quite effective. People of all religious stripes will vehemently criticize the societal elements they consider noxious; they'll criticize other religions and worldviews; they'll even criticize other people and strands of thought within their own religion. To criticize atheists or secular humanists for criticizing too much is missing their real shortcoming.

It's all too easy to dismiss the recent, popular "new atheist" books as if they're the real problem with secular humanism. This has become an obligatory flourish for secular humanists who are trying to position themselves as moderate and reasonable: "I'm not like those angry atheists, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris." (This is often said by those who haven't read Hitchens and Harris closely enough to know that they're not identical; for instance, they disagree profoundly about spirituality.)

The problem with secular humanists isn't their negativity, but their lack of a positive message that matters to most people. As brilliant and subtle and right as the books in Kurtz's library might be, most people aren't interested in reading philosophical treatises. Secular humanism might have no shortage of reason and insight for those who are interested, but how many people (other than academic elites) are actually interested?

Most people don't look to philosophically coherent doctrines for guidance in how to live; they care more about belonging to a community. And I don't mean "community" in the abstract sense in which we've become accustomed to using it ("the gay community," "the international community," etc.). I mean real community made up of your actual neighbors.

I have never seen a self-proclaimed atheist or secular humanist advertising an event with phrases like "You" — whoever you are! — "are Welcome," or "Child Care Provided." If secular humanist organizations want to become more of a force for good than religion is, they need to create communities that are meaningful enough that people will turn to them, by default, if they need someone to help take care of their children.

UPDATES: Lots of discussion in the comments. Also, someone on Twitter tells me that "child care is always provided at the @fofdallas" — referring to the Fellowship of Freethought in Dallas.


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The Simpson embiggens the English language.

Language Log calls out the Economist for using the Simpsons neologism "embiggened":

If a future turn of events in Africa was seen as requiring the island’s military role to be embiggened and its facilities rendered much more secure, it might be convenient if the islanders had no legal right to remain where they were.

The Economist writer seems to have had no inkling that there was anything humorous about the word. As Euguene Volokh points out, the rest of the sentence isn't especially funny. In fact, it's quite dour. So is the rest of the article (a series of dispatches from an isolated island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean called Ascension).

Language Log points us to the Wikipedia entry on the Simpsons episode that originally used "embiggen" (I've omitted the numerous footnotes and links here):

The show runners asked the writers if they could come up with two words which sounded like real words . . . . The Springfield town motto is "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man." Schoolteacher Edna Krabappel comments that she never heard the word embiggens until she moved to Springfield. Miss Hoover, another teacher, replies, "I don’t know why; it’s a perfectly cromulent word." Later in the episode, while talking about Homer’s audition for the role of town crier, Principal Skinner states, "He's embiggened that role with his cromulent performance."

Embiggen—in the context it is used in the episode—is a verb that was coined by Dan Greaney in 1996. [That is, a Simpsons writer coined it for the episode.] The verb previously occurred in an 1884 edition of the British journal Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc. by C. A. Ward, in the sentence "but the people magnified them, to make great or embiggen, if we may invent an English parallel as ugly. After all, use is nearly everything." The literal meaning of embiggen is to make something larger. . . . [E]mbiggen can be found in string theory. The first occurrence of the word was in the journal High Energy Physics in the article "Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking", which was published on January 23, 2007. For example, the article says: "For large P, the three-form fluxes are dilute, and the gradient of the Myers potential encouraging an anti-D3 to embiggen is very mild." Later this usage was noted in the journal Nature, which explained that in this context, it means to grow or expand.

Cromulent is an adjective that was coined by David S. Cohen. [Actually, he was forced to change his name and is now David X. Cohen.] Since it was coined it has appeared in the Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English. The meaning of cromulent is inferred only from its usage, which indicates that it is a positive attribute. Webster's Dictionary defines it as meaning fine or acceptable.

Language Log says Dan Greaney might join "the very select club of people who invented words that make it into major dictionaries."

In a blog post entitled "Beyond embiggens and cromulent," a linguist named Heidi Harley gave an amusingly analytical list of Simpsons jokes that play with language.

She followed this up every year for the next few years: 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009.

Caution: Reading these posts can use up hours of your time. I just read the first 5 in the first list, and I'm delighted by all of them. I like this one so much I have Moe's remark in my list of "favorite quotes" on Facebook:

The Simpsons' house has been broken into on Christmas eve, and all their Christmas presents and decorations stolen. Homer is telling his woes to Moe. Moe says, "You know what I blame this on the breakdown of? Society!"

Lorrie Moore on language for sale

There's a whole body of First Amendment law on "commercial speech." This is a weird grey area: the First Amendment isn't irrelevant, but it doesn't confer the full protections you think of when you hear the phrase "freedom of speech." That's why the law can prohibit false advertising and require companies to say certain things, e.g. to put nutrition labels on food.

But isn't "commercial speech" vs. "noncommercial speech" a false dichotomy? Isn't most speech commercial?

My mom, Ann Althouse, embeds a short video clip of Lorrie Moore (who, as another full disclosure, is a family friend) saying:

It's important to get language that isn't commercially mediated, and increasingly, we don't have that. . . .

I sometimes think: is reading a book itself a value? . . . It doesn't matter what book, as long as you're reading a book? And I go either way on that. . . . It's not valuable because it's a book. It would be better to spend time watching a good movie. . . .

Most language that we encounter is trying to sell us something. And that's really unfortunate, and it degrades the language, and it degrades encounters with language.

I agree with all that.

At one point, she starts to say that fiction writers are "presumably" an exception — but she immediately catches herself and points out that they're also working for money.




Once the 2-minute segment is over, the embedded video switches to a black background with the word "PREMIUM" in a gold rectangle. The screen urges us:

Get full access to this premium program: http://FORA.tv/premium

If you click on that link, you'll see a list of "PREMIUM EVENTS." To the right, there's an explanation in fine print:

FORA.tv Premium Events offer pay-per-view programming from the world's top conferences, universities, and public forums. Now, you can enjoy many of the benefits of these exclusive gatherings without the costs and hassles of travel, and at a fraction of the ticket price. We offer flexible access plans to suit your interests including annual and monthly subscriptions, and full event and single program passes. . . . We invite you to watch Previews of our premium programming to take in a big idea and sample the panel, presentation, or debate.

So, when Lorrie Moore said, "Most language we encounter is trying to sell us something," those words were part of a teaser for a website that's trying to sell us more words (including more of her own words). On that same webpage is a list of titles in gold type (with the color gold signaling, "This is worth spending money on").

One of the more attention-getting titles is "Hollywood, War Crimes and the Search for Love," which is accompanied by a photo of a blond-haired woman wearing sunglasses, a revealing shirt, a jeans skirt, hot-pink stockings, and high heels that are mostly blue but have pink heels to match the stockings. She's writing on a pad of paper while lying on her stomach, legs crossed, in classic lying-on-the-bed-writing-in-a-diary pose. It isn't immediately apparent what any of that has to do with war crimes, but that doesn't matter because the image got us to stop and look.

Each of these visual elements was meticulously selected in order to persuade people (male and female) to spend money in exchange for language.

Speech is always going to be commodified — we're never going to solve that problem. As consumers/readers, the best we can do is to keep this in mind: when you're reading a text that seems strikingly authoritative or persuasive, remember that the words are so powerful because the person who wrote them was trying to make a living. If we're skeptical of the statements we see on food packages in the supermarket, we should be just as skeptical of statements we read in a book. It's all "commercial."

Font

How do you like the new font? Should I stay with it or go back to the old one? Are the sizes good?

UPDATE: The new font didn't go over well, so I changed it back.

Do laws against texting while driving reduce or increase car crashes?

You might think: of course those laws make the roads safer. But that's far from obvious (via):

Researchers at the Highway Loss Data Institute compared rates of collision insurance claims in four states — California, Louisiana, Minnesota and Washington — before and after they enacted texting bans. Crash rates rose in three of the states after bans were enacted.

The Highway Loss group theorizes that drivers try to evade police by lowering their phones when texting, increasing the risk by taking their eyes even further from the road and for a longer time.

The findings "call into question the way policymakers are trying to address the problem of distracted-driving crashes," Lund says, calling for a strategy that goes beyond cellphones to hit other behaviors such as eating and putting on makeup. "They're focusing on a single manifestation of distracted driving and banning it," he says.

But I'm skeptical of these conclusions as the article presents them. Look again at that sentence: "Crash rates rose in three of the states after bans were enacted." It doesn't tell us how much the rates rose. When journalists report on research that shows an increase or decrease in anything, I wish they'd tell us how big the increase or decrease was.

I've been noticing this a lot lately. For instance, this article tells us that religious people give "more" donations to charity and do "more" volunteer work; this one says religious people have "higher levels of 'life satisfaction.'" But they don't tell us how much more (or higher). If anything, I'd guess that the difference was fairly small; otherwise, the reporter probably would have wanted to quantify it in order to impress us with the finding.


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Does a thief's race influence how bystanders react to his crime in progress?

Here's a completely unscientific and sensationalistic but still thought-provoking hidden-camera experiment on that question:




"I know this is weird, but . . . you wouldn't happen to know whose bike this is?"

"No."

"Good."


ADDED: If your bike ever gets stolen, read this story, and remember to check CraigsList!


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Suicide and gay shaming through online privacy invasion at Rutgers University

A search for [Rutgers suicide] — not on the whole web, but restricted to blog posts only in the past 24 hours — returns over 8,500 results right now. The same story is also on the front page of Memeorandum, a website that automatically generates a list of the top news stories being covered by both traditional journalists and bloggers.

This is the story that's getting so much attention:

The death of a Rutgers University freshman stirred outrage and remorse on campus from classmates who wished they could have stopped the teen from jumping off a bridge last week after a recording of him having a sexual encounter with a man was broadcast online. . . .

A lawyer for [Tyler] Clementi's family confirmed Wednesday that he had jumped off the George Washington Bridge last week. Police recovered a man's body Wednesday afternoon in the Hudson River just north of the bridge, and authorities were trying to determine if it was Clementi's.

Clementi's roommate, Dhraun Ravi, and fellow Rutgers freshman Molly Wei, both 18, have been charged with invading Clementi's privacy. Middlesex County prosecutors say the pair used a webcam to surreptitiously transmit a live image of Clementi having sex on Sept. 19 and that Ravi tried to webcast a second encounter on Sept. 21, the day before Clementi's suicide. . . .

Collecting or viewing sexual images without consent is a fourth-degree crime. Transmitting them is a third-degree crime with a maximum prison term of five years.

Whether or not Ravi and Wei end up receiving any criminal punishment, they've already been punished in the media: the New York Times is prominently displaying yearbook-style headshots of them.

The Times reports:

Rutgers officials would not say whether the two suspects had been suspended. But in a statement late Wednesday, the university’s president, Richard L. McCormick, said, “If the charges are true, these actions gravely violate the university’s standards of decency and humanity.”

More details of what happened:

Ravi's Twitter feed on [September 19] referred to seeing his roommate have sex with another man in their room on the Piscataway campus, classmates said.

"Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay," Ravi said on his Twitter page in a Sept. 19 entry posted at 6:17 p.m.

Two days later, Ravi posted another entry directing his nearly 150 Twitter followers to iChat, an internet messaging service with a live video feed.

"Anyone with iChat, I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes it's happening again," Ravi wrote in the Sept. 21 post.

Ravi's Twitter feed has since been taken down. But the entries survived in a cached version of the page still available through Google's search engine this afternoon. . . .

Prosecutors said Ravi and Wei set up a camera on Sept. 19 and broadcast live images of Clementi having a "sexual encounter." Ravi is also accused of trying unsuccessfully to broadcast a second sex scene Sept. 21.

Clementi wrote this on September 22 as a status update on Facebook:

"Jumping off the gw bridge sorry."

I'm interested in how an incident like this becomes a major story in both the mainstream media and blogosphere, even though it might seem to be a strictly local story that's affected a relatively tiny number of people. What is it about this story? Suicide? Homophobia? Using internet technology to bully and invade someone's privacy? Don't all those things happen all the time?

Well, none of the elements are new, but they intersected dramatically enough to grab our attention. So it's understandable that the news and blogs are covering this so widely.

But I wish the shaming of gays weren't something we passively accepted as just-the-way-young-people-are, until something like this happens. It shouldn't take a death to make homophobia temporarily worth expressing concern over. Virulent homophobia — especially among youths, who tend to have low inhibitions about broadcasting their bigotry and a strong interest in building up their reputations by tearing down their peers' — is a huge, national problem whether or not it ever kills anyone.

Tony Curtis dies at 85

Here's the New York Times obituary.

I had no idea he had such a rough childhood:

Tony Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz on June 3, 1925, to Helen and Emanuel Schwartz, Jewish immigrants from Hungary. Emanuel operated a tailor shop in a poor neighborhood [in the Bronx], and the family occupied cramped quarters behind the store, the parents in one room and little Bernard sharing another with his two brothers, Julius and Robert. Helen Schwartz suffered from schizophrenia and frequently beat the three boys. (Robert was later found to have the same disease.)

In 1933, at the height of the Depression, his parents found they could not properly provide for their children, and Bernard and Julius were placed in a state institution. Returning to his old neighborhood, Bernard frequently found himself caught up in gang warfare and the target of anti-Semitic hostility; as he recalled in many interviews, he learned to dodge the stones and fists to protect his face, which he realized even then would be his ticket to greater things.

Skipping ahead to the end of his life:

His final screen appearance was in 2008, when he played a small role in “David & Fatima,” an independent budget film about a romance between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim. His character’s name was Mr. Schwartz.

I admit I've seen only one Tony Curtis movie, but it's one of my favorites:

Under Billy Wilder’s direction in “Some Like It Hot,” another 1959 release, Mr. Curtis employed a spot-on imitation of [Cary] Grant’s mid-Atlantic accent when his character, posing as an oil heir, attempts to seduce a voluptuous singer (Marilyn Monroe). His role in that film — as a Chicago musician who, with his best friend (Jack Lemmon), witnesses the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and flees to Florida in women’s clothing as a member of an all-girl dance band — remains Mr. Curtis’s best-known performance.

Everyone should watch this movie!

Women make less money than men on average, but how much (if any) of this is due to sexism/discrimination?

Last week Christina Hoff Sommers had a New York Times op-ed about the gap in men's and women's pay. The headline: "Women Don't Need the Paycheck Fairness Act." Sommers writes:

AMONG the top items left on the Senate’s to-do list before the November elections is a “paycheck fairness” bill, which would make it easier for women to file class-action, punitive-damages suits against employers they accuse of sex-based pay discrimination.

The bill’s passage is hardly certain, but it has received strong support from women’s rights groups, professional organizations and even President Obama, who has called it “a common-sense bill.”

But the bill isn’t as commonsensical as it might seem. It overlooks mountains of research showing that discrimination plays little role in pay disparities between men and women, and it threatens to impose onerous requirements on employers to correct gaps over which they have little control. . . .

[F]or proof, proponents point out that for every dollar men earn, women earn just 77 cents.

But that wage gap isn’t necessarily the result of discrimination. On the contrary, there are lots of other reasons men might earn more than women, including differences in education, experience and job tenure.

When these factors are taken into account the gap narrows considerably — in some studies, to the point of vanishing. A recent survey found that young, childless, single urban women earn 8 percent more than their male counterparts, mostly because more of them earn college degrees.

Moreover, a 2009 analysis of wage-gap studies commissioned by the Labor Department evaluated more than 50 peer-reviewed papers and concluded that the aggregate wage gap “may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.”

I agree with all of that. I don't have much of an opinion on the bill, since I haven't studied the provisions. I just want to focus on the underlying premise: that there's a significant discrimination-based gap in how much men and women are paid.

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran several letters rebutting the op-ed. If you know how these discussions tend to go, and if you're familiar with the NYT's letters section, you might be able to guess what the top letter says. Linda D. Hallman of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) writes:

The wage gap is real. Our 2007 report, “Behind the Pay Gap,” which controlled for factors flagged by Ms. Sommers, like education and experience, found that college-educated women earn less than men with comparable backgrounds.

The latest analysis Ms. Sommers cites, which shows young women outearning young men, needs to be viewed with a skeptical eye. The average American woman still earns 23 percent less than her male counterpart earns, a gap that is widest among older women and smallest among younger women.

Now, let's break down the main talking points from that letter:

1. The AAUW did a study that took into account Sommers's points, and they found that the gender gap is still "real" — women earn "less" than men.

2. "The average American woman still earns 23 percent less than her male counterpart earns."

3. The gap is "widest among older women and smallest among younger women."

Point 3 indicates that the gap is shrinking over time. It's easy to imagine that this trend would continue and eventually there'd be little or no gap, even without controlling for other factors.

How about points 1 and 2? If you read those in quick succession, you might go away with the impression that there's been a rigorous study that controlled for all the variables and still found a 23% pay gap between American male and female workers.

But that's not what Hallman says in her letter. She says the AAUW controlled for variables and found a gap . . . of unmentioned size. She says these are the same "factors flagged by Ms. Sommers" — implying that their report should allay the concerns Sommers expressed in her op-ed. Shortly after making these statements, she says there's a 23% gap.

But that 23% gap is before controlling for any variables. So that statistic is simply repeating the shortcoming that Sommers called out in her op-ed.

I wanted to see if that study Hallman links to did a better job of clarifying how much of the gap is actually due to gender itself, rather than other factors that happen to be correlated with gender. The link goes to an "Executive Summary" and a "Full Report" (which are both PDFs).

I don't see anything in the summary about controlling for variables. It simply reports the uncontrolled figures as if they're the definitive word on the "real" gap. We're supposed to see these statistics and immediately perceive sexism in how much employers pay their employees. But the gap alone doesn't demonstrate there's any sexism at play — it could result (in whole or in part) from benign factors that are correlated with gender.

So, how about the full report? I haven't read the whole thing — it's 45 pages, not counting the end materials. But they clearly found a lot of explanations for why there is such a gap, many of which they attribute to men's and women's different choices.

Here's one example of a factor, which I've taken almost at random: the report tells us that among full-time workers, men work longer hours than women (45 and 42 hours a week, respectively). This is also true among part-time workers (22 and 20 hours a week worked by men and women, respectively). Only 9% of female full-time workers work over 50 hours a week, compared with 15% of male full-time workers who work such long hours. (This is from page 15, and there's a relevant graph — only about full-time workers — on page 17.)

A little later, the AAUW gives us this conclusion, in a green, bold-faced heading:

A large portion of the gender pay gap is not explain by women's choices of characteristics.

Under that heading, the AAUW claims to support the conclusion:

If a woman and a man make the same choices, will they receive the same pay? The answer is no. The evidence shows that even when the "explanations" for the pay gap are included in a regression, they cannot fully explain the pay disparity. The regressions for earnings one year after college indicate that when all variables are included, about one-quarter of the pay gap is attributable to gender. That is, after controlling for all the factors known to affect earnings, college-educated women earn about 5 percent less than college-educated men earn. Thus, while discrimination cannot be measured directly, it is reasonable to assume that this pay gap is the product of gender discrimination.

Well, 5% is much smaller than the gap invoked in the NYT letter: 23%.

Now, you could sensibly respond: "But even a 5% difference in pay based on gender is unacceptable." Of course it would be unacceptable is women were paid 5% less than men due to their gender.

However,  even this controlling-for-variables statistic does not give us grounds to conclude that if you're a woman, you get paid 5% less than you would have if only you had been born male.

After all, how could the report have reached such a definitive conclusion? It firmly says "The answer [to whether a man and women who make the same choices will make the same money] is no," and this is proven by "the evidence." That presupposes that the AAUW in fact looked at all the relevant evidence. But the best anyone can do when they're studying such an immensely complex societal question is to control for some variables. It's an open question whether there are other relevant factors out there that the study ignored.

For instance, I said that the report looks at hours worked by full-time workers and hours worked by part-time workers. OK, that's nice. But there's some more information I'd like to know, which I don't see in the report's discussion of hours: how much more likely are men to work full-time rather than part-time? This question isn't answered by telling us how many more hours the full-time male workers work than their female counterparts. (As I said, I haven't read the whole report, so perhaps I'm wrong that the report fails to consider this factor. But you would think they'd mention it in the section about how many hours full-time and part-time workers work.) [UPDATE: Detailed discussion of this point in the comments. It's a little more complex than I thought when I was writing this post, but I still believe the report hasn't fully considered the distinction between full- and part-time workers.]

Now, what are all the variables the study failed to take into account? I don't know! And we're probably not going to find the answer to that question in the report; naturally, the report is going to talk about the things the researchers did study rather than talk about the factors they failed to study.

Thomas Sowell explains in his book Economic Facts and Fallacies (page 61):

Ideally, we would like to be able to compare those women and men who are truly comparable in education, skills, experience, continuity of employment, and full-time or part-time work, among other variables, and then determine whether employes hire, pay, and promote women the same as they do comparable men. At the very least, we might then see in whatever differences in hiring, pay and promotions might exist a measure of how much employer discrimination exists. Given the absence or imperfections of data on some of these variables, the most we can reasonably expect is some measure of whatever residual economic differences between women and men remain after taking into account those variables which can be measured with some degree of accuracy and reliability. That residual would then give us the upper limit of the combined effect of employer discrimination plus whatever unspecified or unmeasured variables might also exist.

In other words, the size of the gap attributable to gender discrimination might be 5%. Or it might be less than that. It might be 2% or 1%. It might be zero. It might even favor women. We don't know the answer.

If you're interested enough in this question to have read this far, I highly recommend buying Economic Facts and Fallacies and reading the chapter called "Male-Female Facts and Fallacies," where Sowell brilliantly explains many of the factors that account for the gender gap.

IN THE COMMENTS: LemmusLemmus draws an insightful analogy:

Sowell is right, of course. Just ascribing residual variance to your favourite factor, such as sexism, is the statistical equivalent of the God of the Gaps argument. [link added]

Fake outrage over the deficit from the Pledge to America (and everyone else)

Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle notice that the Republican Party's Pledge to America repeats the same incoherent set of positions we've been getting from the Democratic and Republican sides for decades:

1. We can't raise taxes.

2. We can't cut military or entitlement spending.

3. We have to reduce the deficit.

As Drezner says: "Good luck with that."



McArdle has a good rebuke to Tea Partiers who claim to be passionately opposed to the high deficit:

That's sort of like saying, "I want to be a size 6 and run marathons. I just don't want to do the part where I stop eating and go running."

ADDED: This is the Paul Krugman column that Drezner mentions (and agrees with. Krugman says:

In essence, what [the House Republicans] say [in the Pledge to America] is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.

True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there’s only one specific cut proposed — canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That’s less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified — “except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

So what’s left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid . . . No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”

"What will future generations condemn us for?"

That's the excellent question asked and answered by a piece in today's Washington Post by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

In my post on the death of Senator Robert Byrd, I quoted this Metafilter comment that tried to draw a lesson from Byrd's membership in, and subsequent renunciation of, the Ku Klux Klan:

I imagine that you (and the rest of us), should we have the opportunity to examine our actions today in 70 years, would be taken aback at some of the things we did and believed, things that appeared to us at the time to be obviously, manifestly right. And here's the kicker: we don't know what those things will be.

We may not want to admit it, but on some issue we are all Robert Byrd. Let's just hope we have the grace, as did Byrd, to realize what that issue is when the time comes.

That comment is phrased as if it's a foregone conclusion that it's going to be a long, long time before we can even perceive what these issues are.

Well, Appiah's article gives some basis to be a little more optimistic. Specifically, he gives "three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation":

First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.

Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, "We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?")

And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they're complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn't think about what made those goods possible. That's why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.

Appiah gives 4 current practices that he imagines that we'll look at in the future and ask: "What were people thinking?"

Can you guess what Appiah thinks these practices are? Remember, the Metafilter commenter didn't just say it'll be a long time before we succeed in putting an end to the practices, but that it would be a long time before we were even capable of reasoning our way to a conclusion about what the practices are. If you can come up with even one of the same answers as Appiah before clicking the link in the next paragraph, that would suggest that the Metafilter commenter was too pessimistic; we actually can answer these questions today.

After you've thought about it, read Appiah's answers.

ADDED: Feel free to put your own answer in the comments, either before or after reading the article.

Unfree speech in Pakistan and the bravery of Umar Cheema

A 34-year-old journalist named Umar Cheema (who writes for a Pakistani newspaper but has also worked for the New York Times) was kidnapped from his home in Islamabad, Pakistan and taken to a remote area where he was beaten, stripped naked, and otherwise humiliated. They then dumped him by the side of a road 100 miles from Islamabad.

That New York Times article reports:

At one point, while he lay face down on the floor with his hands cuffed behind him, his captors made clear why he had been singled out for punishment: for writing against the government. “If you can’t avoid rape,” one taunted him, “enjoy it.” . . .

His ordeal was not uncommon for a journalist or politician who crossed the interests of the military and intelligence agencies, the centers of power even in the current era of civilian government, reporters and politicians said.

What makes his case different is that Mr. Cheema has spoken out about it, describing in graphic detail what happened in the early hours of Sept. 4, something rare in a country where victims who suspect that their brutal treatment was at the hands of government agents often choose, out of fear, to keep quiet.

“I have suspicions and every journalist has suspicions that all fingers point to the ISI,” Mr. Cheema said, using the acronym for the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the institution that the C.I.A. works with closely in Pakistan to hunt militants. The ISI is an integral part of the Pakistani Army . . . .

NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof says on his Facebook page:

Sometimes I'm just embarrassed by the contrast between American "journalists" like Glenn Beck or our gossipy reporting on celebrity shoplifters -- and the real, courageous journalism done by some foreign journalists. Reporters abroad have to far gutsier than us. Take my brave friend Umar Cheema of Pakistan: [link to the article] And a word to readers from Pakistan's military and ISI: don't mess with Umar.

Of course it's terrible what happened to Umar, but his heroism is an odd basis to put down American journalism. He only had the opportunity to be so brave because the Pakistani press is muzzled by the government, and intransigent reporters face brutal, covert punishment.

By all means let's celebrate Umar. But let's also denounce the Pakistani system and celebrate the freedom of speech we usually take for granted.

Kristof has a complaint but no real alternative. Since people aren't perfect, you can count on the results of freedom being messy and annoying and less-than-ideal. If some of the consequences of free speech are that the most popular talk-show hosts aren't as reasoned and nuanced as you or I would like, and that reporters cover the trivial hijinks of celebrities . . . so be it.

Music Friday: Fort Wilson Riot plays "Love Song for Mabee Burlingham (Pieces of the War Part 1)"

I blogged a couple months ago about Fort Wilson Riot's new album and current tour. (Full disclosure: Jacob Mullis, who's half of FWR, is also my former bandmate.)

I love their new video -- a stripped-down, black-and-white, live-in-the-studio performance of the second-to-last song on their new album, "Love Song for Mabee Burlingham (Pieces of the War Part 1)":



(Thanks to "jamie" for posting it in the comments of the previous post.)

Rats and opossums in Brooklyn, and central planning

I love the over-the-top writing style of this news article:

In a bizarre attempt to outwit Mother Nature, city officials introduced beady-eyed opossums in Brooklyn years ago to scarf down rats running amok in the borough, according to local officials. . . .

Not only do wily rats continue to thrive, but the opossums have become their own epidemic, with bands of the conniving creatures sauntering through yards, plundering garbage cans and noshing on fruit trees.

They've even taken up golf . . .

Sometimes the government just hands out ammunition to libertarians.

I mentioned before that I've been reading Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies. In the book's introduction, he lays out a few of the overarching fallacies that explain why many government policies go wrong; he calls one of them "the chess-pieces fallacy." He got this name from Adam Smith's description of a theorist who "'seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.'" Sowell elaborates:

Unlike chess pieces, human beings have their own individual preferences, values, plans and wills, all of which can conflict with and even thwart the goals of social experiments. Moreover, whatever the merits of particular social experiments, experimentation as such can have huge economic and social costs. (8)

Apparently, this fallacy doesn't just apply to human beings.

(Photo of opossum by David Hoffman.)

Kausfiles has found a new home.

Mickey Kaus is now blogging on Newsweek.

And he finally has comments! And he says he'll actually respond to them:

kausfiles on Newsweek won't be quite the same as kausfiles on Slate. My early New Year's resolution is to be a lot more interactive (e.g. responding to comments), a bit less insidery, and a lot more Instapundit-y--emulating the wildly popular Tennessee blogger who posts lots of short links to worthy articles by others. Please let me know how I'm doing.

Here's a news article about it (via),* which includes some background on the odd trajectory of Kaus's career.

This is good news for the blogosphere.

* In the spirit of blog evolution heralded by Kaus's post, I'm going to start using this more minimal "via."

Mexico's drug violence and journalistic self-censorship

A typically appalling account of Mexico's drug wars by the New York Times quotes a chilling front-page editorial in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, which has been so ravaged by the violence that there's been an exodus from the city. It's a common gimmick for an editorial to pretend to address someone ("An Open Letter to ____"), but this is the first time I've seen one that literally addresses a group of people — the drug lords — as a genuine form of communication:

“We want you to explain to us what you want from us . . . . What are we supposed to publish or not publish, so we know what to abide by. You are at this time the de facto authorities in this city because the legal authorities have not been able to stop our colleagues from falling.”

I noticed the article because one of my friends recommended it on Facebook, which showed up in my feed as: "[Friend's Name] likes 'Mexico Paper, a Drug War Victim, Calls for a Voice.'" My friend remarked on the vacuous cheeriness with which Facebook's jargon has pervaded our content sharing:

When you "recommend" a NYTimes article, Facebook treats it as a "like." "Like" is not the right term for my regard for this article.

How the iPhone helps a blind person...

. . . see?

From that blog post (via):

I have seen a lot of technology for the blind, and I can safely say that the iPhone represents the most revolutionary thing to happen to the blind for at least the last ten years. Fifteen or twenty years brings us back to the Braille ‘n Speak, which I loved in the same way, so have a hard time choosing the greater. In my more excitable moments, I consider the iPhone as the greatest thing to have ever happened to the blind, and it may prove so. . . . The touchpad offers the familiar next/previous motion which the blind need, since speech offers one-dimensional output. Adding the ability to touch anywhere on the screen and hear it adds a whole other dimension, literally. For the first time, the blind can actually get spacial information about something. In the store, Mom could say “Try that button” and I could. Blind people know what I mean. How many times has a sighted person said “I see an icon at the top of the screen?” Now, that actually Means something. . . .

The other night, . . . a very amazing thing happened. I downloaded an app called Color ID. It uses the iPhone’s camera, and speaks names of colors. It must use a table, because each color has an identifier made up of 6 hexadecimal digits. This puts the total at 16777216 colors, and I believe it. Some of them have very surreal names, such as Atomic Orange, Cosmic, Hippie Green, Opium, and Black-White. These names in combination with what feels like a rise in serotonin levels makes for a very psychedelic experience.

I have never experienced this before in my life. I can see some light and color, but just in blurs, and objects don’t really have a color, just light sources. When I first tried it at three o’clock in the morning, I couldn’t figure out why it just reported black. After realizing that the screen curtain also disables the camera, I turned it off, but it still have very dark colors. Then I remembered that you actually need light to see, and it probably couldn’t see much at night. I thought about light sources . . . . First, I saw one of my beautiful salt lamps in its various shades of orange, another with its pink and rose colors, and the third kind in glowing pink and red.. I felt stunned.

The next day, I went outside. I looked at the sky. I heard colors such as “Horizon,” “Outer Space,” and many shades of blue and gray. I used color [cues] to find my pumpkin plants, by looking for the green among the brown and stone. I spent ten minutes looking at my pumpkin plants, with their leaves of green and lemon-ginger. I then roamed my yard, and saw a blue flower. I then found the brown shed, and returned to the gray house. My mind felt blown. I watched the sun set, listening to the colors change as the sky darkened. The next night, I had a conversation with Mom about how the sky looked bluer tonight. Since I can see some light and color, I think hearing the color names can help nudge my perception, and enhance my visual experience. Amazing!