Random Links Before Bedtime

Most of these I picked up from Chris Blattman's blog, but I'll just post it here anyway.

1. Chris reports on a "clever + useful" new paper that finds credible evidence for voting fraud in Nigeria based on psychological biases in reporting random numbers. People tend to make non-random mistakes when attempting to write down "random" numbers, and so they use some basic rules of thumb to look for statistical deviations in voting outcomes, using Swedish races as a control group, and sure enough, find evidence for it. I agree with Chris that this is a great useful+clever paper. We all wish our papers were useful, or maybe we wish they were clever, but to be really clever and useful? That's the bi-fecta. My personal favorite for "clever+useful" is Joe Doyle's papers on foster care and adult outcomes (papers 1 and 4 on this list). I swoon over his identification, and then when I stand up, get engaged by the value of what we learned about the potential pitfalls of placing kids in foster care who maybe didn't need it.

2. Over the last ten days, I was traveling a little bit. One night at my parents' house, I just couldn't fall asleep (likely b/c of the 5:00pm cup of coffee I'd had earlier), so I drifted downstairs to the old couch and watched CABLE TELEVISION (ahhhh... so nice). What was on but Scorsese's Taxi Driver, which I hadn't seen in years. I have a nice photo in my office of one scene from the movie, as it's one of my favorites, but it's a "favorite" that I can only see with significant time lapses, usually measured in years. Anyway, I started watching it about 20-30 minutes before this scene. One of the things that has always caught my eye in this scene is at the minute marker of around 2:40-2:43. It's where Travis Biddle looks at the crazy, now one-handed man, climbing the stairs after him. Biddle stares at the main in a kind of curious look as he holds his hands to the bullethole in his neck, which is gushing a lot of blood. Biddle then does a weird little dance - a kind of sidestep, side turn, backwards step - sort of like he was dodging the man, but only just barely. Because the scene has had the speed slowed down, it looks like a little dance to me, anyway, and evertime time I see it, I kind of laugh inside a little. It's an incredibly gruesome scene, so tell the kiddos to go to bed first. The ending is still very perplexing to me. All I can think is that Biddle's failure to assassinate the Presidential nominee leads him to go on a random killing spree, in which his small affections for Iris is enough to center his rage on her pimp employers. For those affections, he is able to achieve some catharsis with respect to the fury inside him. How differently it would've turned out for everyone in the story had that Secret Service agent now spotted Travis acting weird in the crowd. Probably the mohawk was a bad choice, since it only made Travis stand out more. I really love the ending with Cybil Shephard, because I cannot figure out if she is interested in striking up a relationship with him, or just wanting to reach out to help him, since she had run so fast from him once he took her to that porno.

Update. Since I'm awake at 4am, I thought I'd rewatch that scene again. Sheesh, how sad. Stupid sunburn. Anyway, I had a memory that George Lucas's wife, Marcia Lucas, was the editor on this movie, so maybe she is responsible for that little scene. IMDB reports she was the supervising editor, which may or may not mean that.



3. The story with Christina and David Romer's almost-leave for Harvard is getting a lot of online coverage. We are lucky that such prolific blogger as Brad DeLong is at UCB to give his occasional thoughts. I wonder what in the world happened with the Harvard President to withdraw the offer? I wish I knew someone at Harvard on faculty that could share the gossip. I live for this stuff!