Water Horse (3.25 out of 4 stars)

Tonight was "family movie night" at the Kinsey household, and we selected the wonderful family movie, Water Horse: Legend of the Deep. It's a fairy tale sort of film about the Loch Ness Monster, Nellie. It was a lot of fun, and worth watching with your whole family. Nothing too scary or anything like that, either.

As a kid, I was a fan of Nellie. I had many books on paranormal, weird things, like UFOs, Big Foot, and Loch Ness, but I kind of made Loch Ness my favorite at some point. Eventually, I stopped thinking about Loch Ness. Years passed, I thought of her again, and immediately realized I figured she wasn't real. Funny how that kind of change happens. I suppose it's less disappointing, though, than being confronted face-to-face with deeply held beliefs being falsified.

Youtube is of course a great resource for rediscovering all those old photographs and footage. This one, in particular, shows some of the shots I always found so compelling. ;)

Wolfers on Carrel and Hoestra

Justin Wolfers discusses the new Carrell and Hoestra paper on how domestic violence affects educational outcomes. I blogged about this cool paper, too, last month. It's very interesting - check it out, or at least Wolfers rundown of it.

Child Prostitution Up in Kenya

CNN reports on the rise in child prostitution following post-election violence in Kenya. This is particularly devastating to read:

"We use condoms most of the time," said Milka Muthoni, 17, who was nearly finished with secondary school when she dropped out this year. "I know it's a risky business. At times I have gone to the hospital with injuries and venereal diseases. But I have no other options."

Milka, who also lives in Eldoret, said her parents kicked her out when they learned she was a prostitute.

Increase in child prostitution, associated inconsistent use in condoms, and a reduction in female education rates. Civil wars and violence in developing countries set into motions devastation one may not immediately think of.

Tightrope Walker

A.O. Scott reviews Man on Wire, a new documentary about Philippe Petit who became famous for illegally walking a tightrope in 1974 between the Twin Towers in NYC. The documentary sounds interesting partly because it reveals the logistics of pulling off something as ambitious and as illegal (and as public) as this.

Accordingly, “Man on Wire” is constructed like a heist movie, in the manner of “Rififi” or the revived “Ocean’s Eleven” franchise. Though Mr. Petit was alone on the cable that August morning, his walk in the sky was the result of a conspiracy of true believers and casual adventurers. In his two previous acts of guerrilla funambulism — at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris and on the Harbor Bridge in Sydney — he relied on the logistical and moral support of several friends, including his lover, Annie Allix, and his faithful sidekick, Jean-Louis Blondeau.

In interviews, they and some of Mr. Petit’s other confederates — including two American goofballs and Barry Greenhouse, a flamboyant insurance executive who served as the all-important inside man — reconstruct their project, which they referred to at the time as “the coup,” in fascinating detail. There were engineering problems and also challenges that seem to belong to the world of espionage, as well as the inevitable tensions that arise when a group of people pursue a dangerous goal.

Amazing. Wikipedia has a really interesting description of how they managed to get the ropes across.

Petit and his crew were able to ride in a freight elevator to the 104th floor with their equipment the day before the walk, and were able to store this equipment just nineteen steps from the roof. In order to pass the cable across the void, Petit and his crew decided to use a bow and arrow. They first shot across a fishing line, and then passed larger and larger ropes across the space between the towers until they were able to pass the 450-pound steel cable across. Cavalettis (guy lines) were used to stabilize the cable and keep the swaying of the wire to a minimum. For the first time in the history of the Twin Towers, they were joined. The 'artistic crime of the century' took six years of planning, during which he learned everything he could about the buildings, taking into account such problems as the swaying of the towers because of wind and how to get the walking cable across the 140-foot gap between the towers.

Also, check out what the Sgt. Charles Daniels said about Petit's famous walk.

I observed the tightrope 'dancer'—because you couldn't call him a 'walker'—approximately halfway between the two towers. And upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire....And when he got to the building we asked him to get off the high wire but instead he turned around and ran back out into the middle....He was bouncing up and down. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again....Unbelievable really....[E]verybody was spellbound in the watching of it.

Man on Wire is rated PG-13, and so far has a 100 at Rottentomatoes. I doubt it'll be coming to my town, but one can hope. Either way, it'll be on video soon.

Random Links

1. The Twilight series looks kind of interesting. I hadn't heard of it til I saw the trailer for the upcoming movie, but it apparently is quite popular. Chicago Tribune reports on what a balancing act between sexual yearning and the absence of any sex, which describes some of this teen romance series about werewolves and vampires.

2. The surge continues to exert its positive effects on reduced violence in Iraq.

3. My wife and I watched episode 1 of Mad Men season 1 on iTunes last night. The story was about an advertising agency in 1959/1960 working the Lucky Strikes brand, at a time where the government was increasing its regulation of what tobacco companies could say about the health benefits of smoking. It's like a freaking time capsule, more generally, though. The sheer amount of sexism and racism was far more nauseating than the cigarette smoke in the air. I couldn't believe how the women and the African-Americans were portrayed in the show. Society doesn't even bare a resemblance to that period, and quite frankly, I can't really appreciate how anyone would think that that period was somehow morally superior to the one we live in now. We'll definitely be watching the rest of the season, and so should you.

Al Gore Places Infant Son in Rocket to Escape Dying Planet

Oh Onion, what you do to me.

EARTH—Former vice president Al Gore—who for the past three decades has unsuccessfully attempted to warn humanity of the coming destruction of our planet, only to be mocked and derided by the very people he has tried to save—launched his infant son into space Monday in the faint hope that his only child would reach the safety of another world.

"I tried to warn them, but the Elders of this planet would not listen," said Gore, who in 2000 was nearly banished to a featureless realm of nonexistence for promoting his unpopular message. "They called me foolish and laughed at my predictions. Yet even now, the Midwest is flooded, the ice caps are melting, and the cities are rocked with tremors, just as I foretold. Fools! Why didn't they heed me before it was too late?"

Al Gore—or, as he is known in his own language, Gore-Al—placed his son, Kal-Al, gently in the one-passenger rocket ship, his brow furrowed by the great weight he carried in preserving the sole survivor of humanity's hubristic folly.

There are geniuses at this newspaper.

Still No Recession

Uncle Tupelo would be happy - there's apparently still no recession in the United States. Carpe Diem links to the newest numbers. Q2 was 1.9%. The intrade contract on "are we in a recession - 2008" is down to 20%. The intrade contract on "recession in 2009" is at 52%, but it's a fairly low volume contract at this point. The Intrade contracts are interesting, but they are fulfilled if the economy experiences two quarters of negative economic growth. The NBER actually decides whether we are in a recession, though, and they don't use that metric. Still, it's interesting and encouraging to see so far that the economy is doing a good dodge and weave. Perhaps the Fed's interventions have been successful at limiting the damage from the subprime problems. What would GDP have been had nothing been done? That counterfactual is always the one to keep in mind when interpreting positive data like these.

Mr. T Pities America

Sadly, you won't be seeing this Mars Snickers ad featuring Mr. T and the awesome guy from Lazy Muncie, who plays a speedwalker. Mr. T's ad was seen as potentially homophobic, and so they pulled the ad globally. (BTW, I loved Lazy Muncie - it was my favorite of all the Lazy spinoffs).

New Punisher Movie Looks Violent

First, I want to kill someone just because I hated this music so bad. But secondly, the violence in this movie looks like stupid and gross - it's like Dick Tracey meets Taxi Driver or something. Anyway, I figure it's going to be horrible. There was a time, a billion year ago, when I think I actually collected Punisher. I just now realized he (along with Moon Knight) were really just Marvel's answer to Batman.

The Wolfman Trailer Looks Exciting

The Wolfman trailer was shown at ComicCon (see below) and it looks pretty riveting. I found this little discussion at wikipedia about the makeup for it funny.

Rick Baker created the make-up for The Wolf Man. When he heard Universal was remaking the film, he eagerly pursued it, as both The Wolf Man and Frankenstein inspired him to become a make-up artist as a child. He acknowledged transforming Del Toro was difficult because he is a hairy man: "Going from Benicio to Benicio as the Wolf Man isn't a really extreme difference. Like when I did An American Werewolf in London, we went from this naked man to a four-legged hound from hell, and we had a lot of room to go from the transformation and do a lot of really extreme things. Here we have Benicio Del Toro, who's practically the Wolf Man already, to Benicio Del Toro with more hair and bigger teeth."

Carter Shoos a Rabbit

Kind of sounds like a Dr. Seuss novel. Nope, just an old photo of President Carter fending off an attack from an enraged rabbit. You can read the story here.

I think this old story and link got some activity a few years ago, but I just found it again.

BTW, is it "shoo" or "shew"?

Hoop Dreams on Hulu

My Next TV Obsession

I'm going to get my hands on the first season of Mad Men just as soon as I can. Read about it here. It's an AMC drama now starting its second season. So many good shows coming from basic cable, as well as networks. I'm nowhere near tired of them all.

Update: Oh sweet. Looks like it's up on Hulu.

Update deux: Scratch that. It links to AMC, which only shows clips. But it's on iTunes.

Worst Husbands Ever?

Cracked has a nice new comic book list: the 6 worst comic book superheroes. Admittedly, I think this is basically just a list of Marvel superhero husbands, period. The only guy I can immediately think of who's missing is the Vision, who was/is married to Scarlet Witch. He's an android, so if they purposefully left him off the list, then you have to think these guys are pretty crappy. Spidey, Hulk, Cyclops, Antman, Hawkeye and Reed Richards make the cut. The list really starts getting funny once you get to page 2 and see #3, #2, and #1. These two pics of Reed Richards showing his soft side were really nice, I thought.

Obama is Paris Hilton

This is kind of funny. There's kind of similar celebrity fawning over Obama as there is over Paris and Brittney, but still, pretty funny to see it in an Obama attack ad. Kind of juvenile, but hey, I suspect this is mild compared to things coming soon.

Things I'll Never Do #1

1. I will never wear pantyhose - not even pantyhose designed specifically for men.

Quick Links

1. Section 46.101(b) says that my survey is IRB exempt, meaning we can proceed with the data collection. I suppose I'm about to learn a lot about collecting my own data. Undoubtedly, this is going to be an unmitigated disaster, but hopefully not.

2. Which leads nicely into #2. What'd the difference between political scientist and a psychologist? The former analyzes existing data, while the latter collects original data! Get it? No? I screwed up the delivery I think.

3. Gelman also explains how to do research. I'll probably crib this next year when I teach research methods. The simple answer is: 1. What's your evidence? 2. How does this fit in with what else you know? 3. What have you found beyond what people thought before? 4. How did all those smart people who came before get things wrong?

4. David Brooks explains the role of early education on economic growth, in the process discussing Heckman, Katz and Goldin's research.

5. First crack, then meth. What's next? Hopium. My wife is a hopium addict. I'm going to see if I can't find a good Hopium Anonymous group in town. Denial's not just a river in Egypt baby.

6. The surest way for me to get a swift quick to the face by my wife is if she caught me trying to defy death by eating one of these killer hot dogs. Wasn't it just a mere months ago that I was applauding the food industry for its efficiency in using the leftover parts to create the hotdog? For these, I may have to eat some of those words.

7. Watch the 5.8 earthquake in Los Angeles during the filming of Judge Judy. Thankfully, this quake for all its ferocity has not caused a lot of casualties - none that I have read of actually. I think this is testimony to the immense need for economic growth, to be serious. In another country, or in America in another time, a 5.8 quake would've been devestating, but continual economic growth affords us to create cities and structures that can withstand some of the mid-sized shocks. I wonder what the upper bound is, though, on withstandable quakes using today's technology and architectural skill.

8. This John Edwards story is not going anywhere anytime soon. Once the National Enquirer posts those pics, it'll really hit the fan. Methinks there will be no place for John Edwards in the Obama administration. You can see it take nosedive at InTrade for the VP candidacy (though admittedly, it looks like he was already a longshot by the time this story broke).



9. Afroninja the Movie. Or, one more reason why I love the Internet. This guy knows how to make lemonade out of life's lemons. (see embedded link below). Be sure to read the interview in that link. If it plays near me, I'm all over it.

Jobs' Health and Economics

Investors are worried about Steve Jobs' health. He's considered irreplaceable as a CEO (even if that isn't true exactly), and so the value of the company could be affected. So my question is: how long before we see a paper that uses Jobs' alleged cancer in an event study to estimate the effect of the value of a particular CEO to a company? It's either being written or will be written soon.

HIV Testing and Saving

How does learning your HIV status affect your saving behavior? Rebecca Thornton reports on an ingenius study that set out to answer the question. The abstract reads:

According to economic life-cycle models, if learning HIV results is informative about additional years of life, being diagnosed HIV positive or negative should predict changes in consumption and savings. This paper examines the impact of learning HIV status on the savings of rural Malawians two years after testing. Using a field experiment that randomly assigned incentives to learn HIV results, HIV positives who learned their status were 27 percentage points less likely to save than HIV positives who did not learn their status. HIV negatives who learned their status saved significantly more than HIV negatives who did not learn their status. There were some differences in learning HIV positive or negative results among different age groups, but no difference between those with and without children. These findings contribute theoretically to our understanding of life-cycle consumption providing strong evidence that life expectancy, disease, and diagnoses have important effects on savings behaviors.

I'm printing out the paper now.

When Movies Kill

MoLT points me to another "bad Ebert review." This one is Stepbrothers, which he gives 1.5 stars. Pretty bad. In this one, as with Caligula, Ebert is brought to the point of despair.

Sometimes I think I am living in a nightmare. All about me, standards are collapsing, manners are evaporating, people show no respect for themselves. I am not a moralistic nut. I'm proud of the X-rated movie I once wrote. I like vulgarity if it's funny or serves a purpose. But what is going on here?

Putting aside his first couple of sentences for a second, I wanted to say that I've been brought to the point of despair from watching a movie, too. It was Todd Solondz's Happiness. Ebert gave it 4 stars, and I'm not saying he's wrong. But the movie hurt me bad. My wife and I cried and cried as we left the theater, and I got so angry I punched the dashboard as we drove away. Maybe that was the point of the movie, though? I'm not really sure. Another movie that did almost the same thing to me was My Friends and Neighbors, which Ebert also gave 4 stars. Again, not even saying he's wrong. As with Happiness, I left that movie scarred, wanting to drown myself or do anything I could to unwatch the movie. It wasn't that the movie was bad, though. It was just crippling to see a movie that almost enjoyed human beings descending into savagery.

Ebert's talking about pointless things, though. Pointless vulgarity. Pointless sex. I think those things bother me, too, but I see them mostly as empty and stupid. I wonder why Happiness and Friends and Neighbors didn't skewer his soul, though. They really did mine. I can't give an objective review of either one, and I can't really understand how someone could become emotionally involved with each of those films and be able to say positive things of it.

Police Brutality?

Check out 00:25. Some of you have probably seen this before, but it's new to me. The Smoking Gun says that the matter is being investigated. According to the officer:

[the cyclist] drove his bicycle directly into him, knocking the cop to the ground and causing "lacerations on deponent's forearm." The video, of course, shows Pogan delivering a blow that would have made former Oakland Raider Jack Tatum proud. Pogan also claimed that Long resisted arrest and even exclaimed, "You are pawns in the game, I'm gonna have your job."

Too bad for the cop that someone in the crowd got the whole thing on film, showing the cop literally trying to tackle him, even while the cyclist is trying to evade. What in the world happened to set this cop off? There's literally hundreds of cyclists going past him, and he just snaps and randomly picks this guy?



Update. The NYT tells the interesting story about how the video was acquired. The Critical Mass bike ride is promoted by a group called Time's Up. And the person filming the attack contacted Time's Up and sold them the tape. He wanted to get $1,500 for it, but they agreed to $310. Kind of disappointing that he tried to make a buck off of delivering this media, given that the rider was actually arrested and put in jail for 26 hours for allegedly driving straight at the officer (the tape suggests that that is a fabrication, at best). But whatever, thankfully Time's Up sought to take care of this cyclist. This just shows one of the advantageous ways that technology can affect policy brutality. If this video didn't exist, the cyclist would be sitting in jail and probably have a criminal record, and no one would be the wiser. But the video exists and is viral now, and so the cop pays the price of his actions. The Internet affects prices in many different ways, but one way it does is that it has the potential to make law enforcement and politicians pay the full price of their actions by raising the probability of detection due to social networks and other viral agents linking to media and keeping stories alive. By raising the probability of detection, hopefully we not only incapacitate the bad cops, but we discourage cops from doing stupid and bad things like this, too.

Signalling, Falling Costs, or Both?

NPR has a story about how having sex without condoms is the new way that people show they are committed to one another. I wonder if this is a kind of signal. In signaling theory, there is a signaler and a recipient of the signal. The recipient sees a crowd of women of two types - one type who loves him, and another type who doesn't. Asking the crowd which one loves him isn't going to reveal anything because talk is cheap. So, the ones who love him decide to send a signal. The signal is costly, but can be observed by the recipient, and enables him to differentiate between the women who love him and the women who don't. The cost is borne by the girl sending the signal - in this context, it represents some expected cost of pregnancy or contracting an STD from him. I suppose it signals trust that he will not abuse the vulnerable position she has placed herself in. This is at least one way of maybe thinking about this. (I previously blogged about how this may be related to signaling here.)

Also related to this is a Page Six story about the rise unsafe sex practices in New York and its connection to romance and romantic feelings. From the link.

It was after 4 a.m. on a Sunday morning last month when Sophie and Jeff drunkenly stumbled upstairs to his East Village walk-up. They had met a week earlier at an art gallery opening, and now, after a few drinks at Gallery Bar, followed by a nightcap and a joint at Jeff’s apartment, they were having sex when the condom broke.

“We pinky-sweared we were both clean, and continued having sex,” recalls Sophie, 24, a painter who lives on Avenue A and who is not on birth- control pills. “In the morning, we got Plan B [an over-the-counter emergency contraception pill] and split the cost. It was kind of romantic. I’m sure he was sleeping with other people, but the condom had been his idea, so I wasn’t worried about STDs because I figured he was a regular condom user.”

This, too, seems to suggest that there is some kind of romance-unsafesex relationship. Maybe it's signaling; maybe not. Heck, signaling aside, maybe it's caused not just by information asymmetries, but rather because STDs really aren't dangerous in 2008, and pregnancy risk is so easily controlled by the new abortion technologies. I've written about this before, but the increased efficacy of the protease inhibitor and other antiretroviral treatments have reduced the expected costs of unsafe sex by increasing the life expectancy of HIV -positive patients. Increased legal and safe access to new abortion technologies, like the Morning After Pill, have also likely had substitution effects away from protected sex towards unprotected sex. In the event pregnancy occurs, or ejaculation during intercourse occurs, individuals can have a procedure done at relatively low cost (both reputationally and financially) the next day. The Page Six article has several relevant quotes along these lines.

Of her patients who get a check-up after having unprotected sex outside of a committed relationship, Dr. McDaniel says “most of them come in a month or so after the incident, and they aren’t scared. They’re resigned. A lot of them take Plan B so they’re not worried about pregnancy, and they’re not super-worried about sexually transmitted diseases. But they should be, because if someone has a one-night stand with you, they probably had a one-night stand with someone else.”

So why are young people having unprotected sex? “Part of it’s the invulnerability factor,” says New Yorker Yvonne Fulbright, author of The Hot Guide to Safer Sex. Dr. McDaniel says one 23-year-old patient recently tested positive for HIV and “she wasn’t even upset. This generation sees Magic Johnson, they see you can live for a long time with HIV—they don’t see walking skeletons like in the ’80s.”

“Once STDs and death seemed synonymous,” adds Moe. “Today, the accepted reality is that the STDs one is likely to contract through unprotected sex are more mundane, which is underscored by the fact that so many of them are cured using the same antibiotics you’d use for a sinus infection.”

I don't think it can just be explained by signaling, even when we do see it occurring in these kinds of weird romance environments because I get the sense the change is relatively new. More likely, it's the falling costs of STDs and pregnancy (through increased access to abortion technologies) that creates an environment where these types of relatively low cost signals can occur. In a high-AIDS time, for instance, the costs of the signal would've been prohibitive even for the women who did love the man. It's more likely that the costs have fallen enough but not too much. Regarding protease inhibitors, if HIV-positive patients expected to die in only a few years as was once the case, I expect we'd see more of this type of protective, cautious behavior. Ahituv, Hotz and Philipson found in their 1996 JHR study, "The Responsiveness of the Demand for Condoms to the Local Prevalence of AIDS" that a 1 percent increase in the local prevalence of AIDS increases the propensity of people to wear condoms by as much as 50%. Several papers have also found, similarly, that the increased availability of emergency contraception is related to sexual risk taking. One paper found that it was related to increases in chlamydia, for instance.

It may not be enough to convince Elisabeth that people are sometimes rational in their sex lives, but I think it does suggest that the demand for sex is not unitarily inelastic with respect to prices and life expectancy.

What's the Worst Movie Roger Ebert Ever Reviewed?

Probably Caligula. You can read about the movie's production at wikipedia. This movie has the honor of being one of the few movies, maybe the only movie, that Ebert ever walked out on. Here's his opening to the review.

"Caligula" is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length. That was on Saturday night, as a line of hundreds of people stretched down Lincoln Ave., waiting to pay $7.50 apiece to become eyewitnesses to shame.

Wow. The entire review reads like a piece of literature. His reviews of the worst movies are actually some of the best film criticism and writing I've ever read.

It sounds like this movie is not just bad - it's degradation. Sometimes Ebert reviews a movie, and the movie is just plain bad. But this movie sounds like it took a piece of Ebert's soul. Thankfully, in the closure, we learn that there is a cure when a movie takes a piece of your soul.

My friendly recommendation is that they see "The Great Santini," to freshen their minds and learn to laugh and care again in a movie. People learn fast. "This movie," said the lady in front of me at the drinking fountain, "is the worst piece of shit I have ever seen."

Wall-E

Now that that pesky IRB proposal is sitting on the desk of Mr. IRB himself, awaiting his prompt attention, I thought I'd wander over to box office mojo and see how our little robot is doing. At this point, after 5 weeks, it's at $195 million. At 5 weeks, Cars had $205 million, Finding Nemo had $254 million, The Incredibles had $225 million, and Ratatouille had $180 million. So, if we think it follows the trajectory of Ratatouille, I guess it could end up inching its way toward $210 million. Maybe that's a disappointment to some, but at the same time, it's kind of amazing that Pixar can make films like these that consistently crack $200 million. Even its more serious ones do really well. What studio has a more sterling track record than Pixar?

Spirit Trailer

Movieweb has The Spirit trailer.

Goodbye Scrabulous?

See here.

Lanterne Rouge Incentives

Kottke links to the lanterne rouge, which is the last place finish in the Tour de France. It is not easy to finish last in the Tour de France, because approximately 20% of the cyclists who start the race are disqualified or quit for various reasons along the race. Still, this indicates it is the case that there are significant incentives to finishing last.

In the Tour de France the rider who finishes last, rather than dropping out along the way, is accorded a distinction. Riders may compete to come last rather than just near the back. Often the rider who comes last is remembered, while those a few places ahead are forgotten. The revenue the last rider will generate from later appearance fees can be greater than had he finished second to last, although this was more true when riders still made much of their income from post-Tour criteriums.

Makes you wonder what is likely happening to the last few riders at the finish line. If you are in the bottom decile of the race, aren't you faced with incentives to try to then lose? So do we see those last riders pausing, stopping or doing anything that might suggest they're purposefully trying to come in last? Maybe some of the cyclists reading have an opinion?

MK vs DC

At first I thought this was some kind of typical Digg-fan mashup thing, but it's not. It's part of the new DC Universe coming out this November. Batman gets his ass handed to him by Sub-Zero, but Flash's fight with Sonya is much more of a give-and-take. You need a PC, xbox 360 or ps3 to play this game. I have none of these, and so will likely not be playing it. (Sad face).

Morning Reading

1. Jetpacks. Although, is it me, or is the embedded video horrible? Why couldn't the cameraman have gotten all of him hovering in frame?

2. The University of Chicago is known for being advocates for free markets and "conservative" (for lack of a better word) economic policy. So what do they think about Obama, who once taught con law in the law school? The New Republic has a kind of social/intellectual biographical piece about Obama, from the perspective the University of Chicago. Reading pieces like these always lightens my mood and even gives me hope, though don't tell my wife as then I may have to eat my words for making fun of how much hope with she is filled.

3. I know MoLT is going to love this one. Google maps meets wikipedia to map diseases internationally. The only question I have is why wasn't this done sooner? What a great idea. F.A. Hayek would also be pleased.

4. The Tax Foundation refutes an anti-Obama tax meme that is circulating.

5. Is it censorship when editors block inclusion of John Edwards' current "love child" scandal from his wikipedia page on the grounds that inclusion violates WIkipedia's "Do No Harm" principle? That's a serious question. We need a law review article written about it, methinks, to flesh out the issue better.

6. Kottke linked to the below youtube of Michael Chang's underhanded serve in 1989. Not being a tennis fan (but being from a family of tennis players), I thought I'd check out the wikipedia page (notwithstanding #5, I believe Wikipedia's incredibly useful as an encyclopedia. Just not so much for controversial topics). I was really inspired reading about how he fought his way back using some novel tactics, all the while fighting nearly debilitating leg cramps.

Tr2n Trailer Looks Great

Can't figure out how to embed this. But the light cycles look so great.

Batman Shaping Creative Patterns?

So says this article. It's sort of brief and vague as to what it means, but it points out that the sheer force of the movie, as it gobbles up dollars at lightning speed, has everyone paying attention. Maybe Zac Snyder will be making a Frank Miller The Dark Knight Returns. Sort of a throwup to V is for Vendetta. The article notes that Spiderman and before it, X-men, together breathed some serious life back into this genre, and for years, we've seen that the blockbuster of today is the superhero film. With this one being without doubt the best entry in the franchise so far, and with Spiderman 2 also being the best in that particular franchise and also the most profitable, can we hope that studios will see the dollars and make the connection that quality storytelling matters first in making profitable fantasy-based movies?

W. Trailer

I wonder what this movie is going to be like, really. The one thing I consistently about Bush, by the people who know him, is that he's a "good guy." I see some of that in the trailer - maybe too much of a good guy, actually. But I wonder if in making the movie, Stone felt that way towards his subject matter.

To be honest, can you tell anybody's story if you don't like them?

Serial Rapist's Spree Ends in Suicide

This grisly tale is about a serial rapist named Mark Humphries who raped 9 women he had contacted through Craigslist escort ads. I'm currently working on several projects involving Internet prostitution, otherwise I wouldn't even know that Craigslist ran these ads (I rarely use craigslist for anything, but when I do, it's very targeted searches). But it does, as do several other sites, and the Internet in general has led to what appears to be an increase in both the demand for these services and the supply as well. Mainly, probably, due to falling reputational costs associated with falling probabilities of detection. Men can solicit prostitutes, acquiring substantial information about them, through the Internet without fear of detection. But, while this change in venue likely does reduce the risks associated with escorting, it does not eliminate them entirely. Escorts will always have the challenge of screening clients beforehand, for instance. Some of the higher priced escorts use more elaborate methods to successfully screen their clients - requiring clients have letters of recommendation or references from other providers, for instance. Or if the call is an incall service, meaning the client comes to some agreed upon venue arranged by the provider, the provider will pick places where she watch him approach. These were all outcall attacks. Either he was picking these places, or they were picking the places but he was arriving there before them. Either way, they were outcall, which is lower cost in some ways, since rooms can be rented by the hour or the evening, but are higher cost in other ways, since they mean higher probabilities of attacks, less security, etc. Thankfully, his spree ended, although it ended with him killing himself after detectives tracked him down. He left very little clues and evidence behind, making him a hard predator to catch, but some cooperation by one victim and some other lucky breaks managed to break the case.

The Quest for the Perfect Burger

Eric Rifert decided to start an American bistro, which of course means he has to have a burger on the menu. Not just any burger, but the "perfect burger," which required some research on his part. So of course, not being American himself but being in America, he went to McDonalds and Burger King. His results were kind of counter-intuitive, seeing as how he's a gourmet chef and all.

Just looking at the basic burgers at each of these chains—particularly the Big Mac—showed me a couple of very key things: First of all, the burgers are a perfect size. You can grab them in both hands, and they’re never too tall or too wide to hold on to. And the toppings are the perfect size, too—all to scale, including the thickness of the tomatoes, the amount of lettuce, etc. In terms of the actual flavors, they taste okay, but you can count on them to be consistent; you always know what you’re going to get.

The other thing he pointed out was that almost always, without fail, the burgers you get at upscale restaurants are designed to be impossible to eat. That's one of those observations that I've noticed for years, but have never really realized it might be common to other people. I just thought that something was wrong with me. This really made me smile, because I've had this same question so many times.

Sometimes “upscale” burgers are so massive, and piled so high with toppings, that I have no idea how to eat them. And the chefs never put the pickle in the burger; when I get one on my plate I always wonder what I’m supposed to do with it.

So true! Don't get me wrong, I know exactly what to do with those pickles on the side of my burger at the nice places. I just eat them. But if I'm at a fast food place, I never do that - I put the pickle on the burger, and I love it as a result. So funny. Anyway, I love reading stuff like this. It makes me realize how careful and scientific good chefs are about their food, and it also makes me realize that a lot of foods I take for granted, like the American hamburger, have a certain ontological shape to them that have to be uncovered through reflection and empiricism, after which a practitioner can make something truly special and original. (hattip to kottke)

Dan Drezner Breaks it Down

Dan Drezner's mom calls and asks him if he's teaching this summer, which she asks every summer, requiring that he once again have the apparently impossible-to-understand conversation in which he says, "No, I'm not teaching. Yes, I am working." Being a tenure track professor myself, this really hit home. I feel like I'm constantly having to explain to people that I have a job and that I work, even though I'm not teaching. "Research" with the scare quotes is very difficult to understand as work unless you're in an environment requiring it, and being threatened to be fired if you don't do it.

Sexual Arousal's Effect on Judgment

Wow. I tried to click on this a few days ago, but Blattman's link was dead. I must have missed this on Wisdom of Whores, but it was a link to Elisabeth Pisani's blog. So hattip to Blattman, and to Pisani. Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein published this article in 2006 in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, and the abstract really blows your mind. As far as I can tell (I've not read it yet), Ariely and Loewenstein randomly put male college students into one of two groups where the two groups took an identical survey asking them about various hypothetical sexual scenarios, and whether they would do various things that were either high risk or sexually questionable (at least, I think that's the idea). The first group took the survey normally; the second group took the survey while masturbating. This group was paid $10 for participation. What they found was that being in a state of sexual arousal substantially changed their answers to the various questions. They were more likely to engage in unsafe sex, to have sex with women outside their "normal" preferences, and things of this nature. My first reaction to this is that this is incredible, in every sense of that word. My second reaction is that this is really kind of interesting. The fact of the matter is, when men are sexually aroused, their entire decision-making process becomes telescoped around the goal of sexual gratification. I look forward to reading this later.

Note to Self: Read this Later

Jesse Larner wonders if FA Hayek is relevant anymore. She notes, for instance, that his critique of socialism is really only relevant for full-blown state ownership, and not simply for government intervention (which seems to me correct). Ilma Solyin, though, says he's still relevant because of the persistence of central planning in leftist ideology. Larner points out that Hayek totally ignored voluntary collectivism, which may be more relevant today among liberals, and Solyin more or less agrees, but says Hayek actually didn't advocate against this because he didn't see it as problematic. It was the coercive collectivism that he felt was severely flawed.

Morning Coffee

1. Some nice rumors from Comic-Con are finding their way out. Zack Snyder said he wants to adapt The Dark Knight Returns, to which Frank Miller said, "Sure." I bet that got some studios excited. If The Watchmen does well, maybe that will happen. The Miller properties have made really good transitions to film. 300 did great, as did Sin City. And of course, everyone knows that the current Batman success is because it's a Frank Miller inspired Nolan invention.

2. Joss Whedon said he's doing a sequel to Dr. Horrible.

3. Randy Pausch has succumbed to pancreatic cancer. He lived 5 months loner than expected. Rest in peace, Randy.

4. Another possible treatment group for those studying the effect of transfats on health outcome - California joins New York City and bans the ingredient.

5. Alan Blinder explains cash for clunkers - an environmental proposal that will effectively reduce vehicle emissions by buying old cars from consumers. Old cars are one of the largest sources of vehicle emissions, and people tend to keep them longer before because of stricter standards on new automobiles (old cars effectively a substitute for newer cars, raising prices on new cars increases the demand for old cars, resulting in people less likely to get rid of them). I've always loved this idea. I taught environmental economics one summer, and when I covered this idea (in Tietenberg's book), I loved it.

Closing Thoughts

Battlestar Galactica continues to impress me. We're on season 3, episode 7. I'm a little disappointed that disk 2 only has 3 episodes, though. Actually, several times I felt jipped when learning that the disk had few episodes on it. So, that's a criticism of their publication of the DVDs. But as the show goes, season 3 has been interesting.

We drank Reilly's Barking Mad Shiraz 2006. The Wine Advocate gave it 90 points. I think it retails somewhere around $12-14, depending on your state. We got it for closer to $12 (we think), but I'd pay $14. I, personally, liked this wine the most of any of the wines we've had. It's a "big wine" - it had 15% alcohol, and you felt the fire when you drank it. But I actually felt like there was a lot more interesting things in this wine that you might not notice if your first reaction was that it was too strong. The finish was especially kind of cool - some weird tastes on the back of my throat, and even somewhere on the sides of my tongue. Kind of moderately to heavy tannins, but not overpowering. The fruit comes out on the finish, not on the front palate, which I thought was kind of weird and cool. And it wasn't really fruit, like big bowls of fruit that I've been tasting in some of the recent Pinots we've had. It was (how's this for a helpful description) something different. Anyway, my ability to describe my palate and taste sucks, but I nonetheless really loved it, and may buy a case, or at least advocate for having a couple more bottles of it the next time we go to the store (probably the latter will happen).

Bat Bucks

As of Saturday night, the new Batman film based on Friday estimates is rounding $261 million in domestic revenues. It's projected to break $300 million by day 10, since its release, which will mean more records set (the second Pirates of the Caribbean did it in 16 days). It'll easily round $400 million, apparently, which will make its total domestic box office revenues twice the first movie. Even some are speculating that it could beat Titanic. But I'll believe that when I see it. Titanic was an anomaly. It busted $600 million domestically, and no other movie has even broken $500 million. But TDK has strong repeat business and continues to consume the competition, so who knows. With so much Oscar buzz, it could stay alive into the fall perhaps. Maybe going deep into $500 million range isn't impossible.

Black, Female and Single

CNN briefly mentions the low marriage rates among Black women. For those who want to learn more about this, check out Charles and Luoh currently unpublished manuscript, Male Incarceration, the Marriage Market and Female Outcomes which links the low marriage rates to the shortage of men in the marriage market.

Morning Coffee and Paper

Whew. We both slept til 8am this morning. The 1-year-old actually slept til 8am. Was it a coincidence that we also drank too much last night, or some kind of divine intervention? Anyway, coffee never felt so good. Here's what I'm reading.

1. Inside Higher Ed debates and discusses the value of academic tenure. It also pointed to this interesting looking blog.

2. Apparently, The Dark Knight and Batman Begins are complements.

3. Anderson Cooper looks at the effect of recessions on Black Americans. There's an asymmetric effect. I wonder if a Black and White worker of the same age, same experience, same city, same employer, same education are equally likely to get fired during a recession. That is, holding their observable qualities constant, is the recession going to select the White or Black worker first? Because undoubtedly part of the story of the uneven effects of the recession on Blacks and Whites is the differences in education and the differences in occupations. Black Americans have, on average, lower educational attainment and tend to sort in the least recession-proof industries. But, I wouldn't be surprised if someone showed me that an employer was more likely to fire the Black worker over the White worker, even though both are comparable. Someone should do that study.

4. Ebert gives 3 1/2 stars to a new documentary about Roman Polanski.

AIDS In the South

J reported the other day on this, but here it is again in a different source. The article reads,

AIDS specialists are calling for a fundamental rethinking of HIV policy after a new report showed that infection with the virus was rising dramatically in the South even as it dropped everywhere else in the country.

One explanation is the high rate of Black male imprisonment. Raphael and Johnson have a forthcoming Journal of Law and Economics article showing that controlling for lagged incarceration eliminates the racial disparity entirely, for instance.

This statistic was startling.

“African-American women are 83 percent of all [new] cases that we can document,” said Bambi Gaddist, executive director of the South Carolina HIV/AIDS Council and a member of the AIDS Coalition board of directors. “And the new epidemic is young people. They’re between 22 and 24.”

Two Words: Stud

Notice that he is not sitting there by the bar initially. He's pushed to the bar by the freaking car that barreled through the diner's window. I didn't realize that on first glance - I thought he was actually just sitting at the bar, and the car just barely hit him. But no, he basically got hit by a car and somehow isn't hurt at all.

Beautiful Ghost Towns

Hattip to Kottke. This shows several gorgeous ghost towns. I'd seen the Chernobyl pictures, but not the others.

Another Batman Review

Baylor philosopher, Thomas Hibbs, reviews the new Batman in First Things. ht to j.

Haves and Have Nots

I was talking to a friend about trends in applied microeconomics the other day. Right now, the "identification fetish", to quote Chris Blattman, is kind of in a steep wane. I said I'm seeing various other things taking the obsessions with two-stage least squares. I'm seeing regression discontinuity (Journal of Econometrics devoted an entire issue to it in early 2008) and random peer group assignments. Both of them are cousins to instrumental variables, because both are focused on finding some artificial, hopefully random, treatment assignment, from which we can estimate some kind of localized treatment effect by comparing the treated and the non-treated. It helps us get around problems in observational data like unobserved selection or simply omitted variable bias.

But, if you think about that Angus Deaton piece I linked to the other day, as well as Heckman's many public poops on this stuff, does it not seem like top people in the profession have begun to seriously think all of this stuff is stupid? I mean, when you've got Levitt on his blog defending himself from criticisms that he's "ruined" economics, it means Levitt's hearing so much of this, so often, that he's a bit stressed about it.

I was refereeing a paper for a top field journal the other month. It had an instrumental variable section that was meant to really be the main point of the paper. The author found, what he argued was, a random increase in treatments, from which he could estimate the average effect at around the localized treatment, across the states that had this experience. The paper had problems, but I voted for publication. The other two referees voted against it. The paper was turned down. I came away from it feeling like the tide was turning. Ten years ago, that would've been published, and not just in a field journal either. In the JPE or the AER. Levitt got away with far less than what is routinely rejected by top journals all the time.

So where to go? I told my friend I am noting a lot of manually collected data. For instance, Manisha Shah and several others went and collected data from prostitutes in South America on individual transactions. This data has gone into a JPE publication, and more recently, in the AEA May Papers & Proceedings (not the typical AER, but I think most of us would take a May AEA any day). The Stinebrickner's have been using Berea College's rule of random roommate assignments, followed up with their own manual collection of survey data from the students, to roll out a buttload of papers in AER, Journal of Public Economics, and other places. So maybe we should already be thinking this, too. Unlike 2SLS or other approaches, you aren't passive to the data collection. You can even collect the data to coincide with a natural experiment if you still want to utilize such a thing - Levitt and his coauthor do this in their paper on prostitution, using July 4th as a date to collect data on prostitutes, which is believed to increase demand for prostitution services. You can also just get back to real scientific work when you're collecting data. I mean, if your junior and an applied microeconomist, you can't tell me you've never really been disappointed by the obsession with identification, can you? How many times have I felt like such a sham when I come home and tell my wife or a colleague I have this incredible research idea where I'll use some age cut-off to identify the effect of Medicare on health outcomes (Card already did this by the way), or use Katrina to estimate the effect of local schools on student outcomes. We've all heard this - we're starting to care more about instruments than questions. I understand the reason, too, and unlike most, I don't think it's even such a bad thing. There's value to finding causal relationships, particularly if you're wanting to think about policy. If you cannot deal with that, then you can't really hope to have some policy relevance. But in the end, if it's all we do, I think we'll be really disappointed by who we become as social scientists. Not as a group; I mean just individually. I don't want to look back and think that all I did with my career was come up with some clever instruments. Seriously.

So my friend found the trend towards manual data collection troubling, interestingly. He said that if this continues (which he also has seen), then it'll only further separate the haves from the have-nots. The costs for a Harvard researcher to going to Uganda by having an RA spend some indefinite period of time there is low compared to me or most economists. I'd love to do that, but I can't. He's right. If you're in development work, you're going to be at a disadvantage. I guess part of the appeal of instrumental variables was, in other words, the pure egalitarian nature of them. Everyone had the NLS dataset on mature male workers. But, Card noticed a "College in the county" variable in this publicly available dataset, and so used it to instrument for college attendance, in order to estimate the returns to schooling. Sure, Card was at Berkeley, but the point is, had you or me been smart enough, we could've found the same thing. And that generation build their entire career off of that stuff - Levitt, Angrist, Card, Krueger, Hoxby. A lot of their famous works were IV works - breakthrough papers that dealt with some lingering identification problem in the empirical literature. A decade later, nearly all of those breakthrough papers clearly have problems. Hoxby's paper on streams turns out is kind of sensitive to what you actually call a river or a stream. Levitt's had numerous coding problems that once you corrected, went away (both in his abortion-crime paper, and in his earlier gubernatorial cycle and police hirings paper). Card's Miami boatlift paper, and even that college in the county paper, both are disputed constantly. Borjas at one point calls Card crazy for what he wrote in that Miami boatlift paper! I think Angrist's work on the Vietnam draft is the lone one left standing, but even it gets regularly attacked. And of course, the Angrist one that looked at variation in birthdates to look at high school completion was what led to the whole "weak instruments" literature. And so on.

It also seems like editors have a much different incentive structure than I once believed. I used to think it just went like this. If the paper is good, it gets accepted, otherwise it's rejected. There's other things going on in their minds that I do not understand, to be honest. Some of it has to do with wanting to minimize a later paper that overturns that paper, which means this weak instrument stuff is really important. It's not just about trying to the test statistics on your instrument up to 12, either. That's not enough, either. So where do you turn? I really do not know. Like I said, I've been seeing manually collected data becoming really common, and right now, that's where I'm turning. I've had research assistants collect data for the last four months, and they're still not done. I bought proprietary data that cost my department $16,000. I'm right now putting a survey together to hit the field in a month. I'm moving away from things like NLS and CPS and towards things which are untouched, in other words. I'm still sticking to my research interests, but I'm moving away from snazzy approaches. I just think, based on listening to people at the top schools and widely esteemed, that this identification fad is done. And you either immediately start to transition, or you're going to get run over, and come up for tenure in six years with nothing but dozens of rejection slips from journals.

Wine again

Levitt blogs again about Robin Goldstein - this time about Goldstein's new book on blind taste testings. From what I understand, Goldstein held numerous blind taste testings with average, everyday Americans - about 6,000 people were subjected to the experiment in total. People were all self-selected, so keep that in mind. But anyway, they were given brown bags holding wines of different quality and price, from which they poured participants small glasses of wine. Participants were then asked to fill out a survey on the wine. The previous article linked to on this blog doesn't explain the methodology, but rather references the book, so to know more about the precise experiment, you have to pick up the book. This part from Levitt's post stuck out at me.

Not until I read Goldstein’s book did I realize just how weak the correlation was in blind tastings between expert evaluations and price in experimental settings. Yet, somehow Wine Spectator, which claims to do tastings blind (at least with respect to who the producer is), has an extremely strong positive correlation between prices and ratings. Hmmm … seems a bit suspicious.

I need to just read Goldstein's book, I guess. But in that previous article, presented at the Association of Wine Economists, Goldstein and the authors actually find a strong, positive correlation between price and what they called "experts." So I'm not sure what Levitt is talking about here. The negative correlation between price and preference exists only for the non-experts. But for people who have taken a class on wine, or who might otherwise be categorized as experts, even under blind taste tests, they prefer the more expensive wines (even though they don't know which those are).

To me, this is really, really simple. There's increasing returns to education and experience in the appreciation of wine. That is, there is a learning component - the more wine you drink, the more discerning your palate becomes. To take it even further, the more you drink of it, the more you prefer certain kinds of wine. That a non-random selection (or even a random selection) of Americans can't tell the difference between good wine and bad wine hardly proves the point that there is no such thing as good or bad wine. It's like asking me to rank my preference of techno music or classical music, even, when I've maybe listened to samples of each a handful of times in my entire life. Or to ask my kid to tell me if he likes kale, mashed potatos or pizza. Of course he's going to pick pizza. Does that mean pizza is "better" in some objective sense? Seems to me like Levitt's committing the ought/is fallacy. Just because something is the case doesn't mean it ought to be the case.

Update: One last thing. In that more recent paper by Goldstein and co-authors, they appear to use a robust standard error correction. But, now that I think about it - and mainly I'm thinking about something my friend, Matt, said to me once about his own experimental work - shouldn't they be clustering on the session? The errors are clearly correlated within session. The sessions were blind, yes, but they were also done in public view of one another. Surveys were also filled out at tables where people could see one another's answers. Shouldn't you cluster at the session? This would affect inference, and I'd be interested in how it changed the results. I also really wish that instead of price, he was controlling for quality rating based on Wine Spectator or Wine Advocate scorings. Price is interesting, but the real measure of a wine's quality is going to be the "expert" ratings. It'd like to see price and quality controlled for and see whether preferences follow or not.

Batman is a Neocon? Pulease

I think Doug Jones is reaching to make this case. The Batman in Nolan's portrayal is the classic dark knight. He goes back at least as far as the Reagan administration, to Frank Miller's book which was utterly critical of neo-conservative. Miller's Batman saw Reagan as dangerous and a fascist, and defeats the naive Superman in hand to hand combat because he'd become a puppet to that administration. If anything, Batman is an anarchist. He works with law enforcement when it suits his needs, which are usually specific to some specific crime he's investigating. Batman believes that government is corrupt, and that the rays of light coming out of it are so rare as to be trivial and ignored.

I think Jones really has in mind certain things in the new movie. Like the cell phone tapping thing, which some are saying is reminiscent of the wiretapping in the US. Notice the differences, though, which I suspect were purposefully inserted by Nolan so as to draw strong criticisms of the US wiretapping. First, Lucius Fox tells Batman it's unethical, which is decidedly a non-Batman take on these sorts of things. (In a recent storyline in DC comics, Batman's spy satellites were taken over and used against humanity, showing Batman that even his own efforts to be a watcher comes at high risks). Secondly, Wayne acknowledges this and says the cell phone system will only work if Fox orchestrates it. And then when he's done with it this one time, it'll be discontinued. In other words, Nolan tries to build checks and balances into the entire last act.

But, I also think Jones is missing some of the more interesting messianic parts of the movie, and is mistakenly seeing those messianic elements as statism or contemporary neo-conservatism. (Were we to interview Nolan, how much would you be willing to admit the man is as far from being an advocate of the Bush administration as we can find?). What of the final scenes of the movie where Batman willingly takes on the sins of Harvey Dent in order to save Gotham City from itself? Surely there's more going on here than simply a weak allegory of American politics. The movie is a story about Batman learning exactly the kind of hero he is going to have to be, and it is one that will require complete self-emptying for the sake of the people he loves and wants to save. Sounds an awful lot like a retelling of the gospel than a retelling of 9/11 to me.

Frightening

This is from a series called Pictures taken at just the right time. This one, though, made me crap my pants. Assuming it's real and not some attempt to copy Finding Nemo I mean.

Lunch Reading

Well, that was satisfying. I just took a break and ate a bag of doritos for "lunch", and while I did, I read Keith Phipps' review of Ian Fleming's Goldfinger. Phipps bought a box of 75 paperback science fiction and crime novels, and is reading them all, complete with wonderful reviews. His review of Goldfinger was interesting - apparently, it's an excellent read, dated and extremely racist/homophobic.

Now back to making tables. No, not that kind of table. More like these, sort of.

12-Part Levy Article Racism?

Hadn't thought of this before, but Robert Pierre did. The other day I linked to the 12-part story that the Wapo was running on the Chandra Levy story. Robert Pierre wrote an internal memo to management at the Washington Post calling it racism for devoting so much attention to one white female's murder, when hundreds of Blacks are murdered all the time and receive no attention. Of course there's a pattern to this that transcends the WAshington Post, though. The more beautiful the murdered or missing White woman, the more likely it is to get significant attention in the media.

Superhero Documentary

For the boy. In 10 parts.

Dear Kanye

Ben Sollee has a beef with Kanye West.

Fred Goes to CNN

Mass Imprisonment

Harvard sociologist, Bruce Western, has a lengthy piece on reversing mass incarceration in the Boston Review. Printing it now - 29 pages long. Will have to read on the john some other time. Let's hope it's got mix of idealistic things (like drug legalization) and realistic things (liked increased funding to minority education).

Actually, the entire issue is full of incarceration articles. Here's one on fathers and imprisonment, a neglected topic, but one that is getting a lot more attention over the last couple of years. Here's another on lessons we can learn from the history of prison boom.

Mike Tyson's Abandoned House

Hat tip to Kottke for this gem. I think this is part of a larger series of photographs taken of abandoned homes. Nonetheless, these photographs of Mike Tyson's abandoned mansion are really interesting. I think I probably would've been petrified, personally, walking through this ghost of a mansion. The cold winter outside, freezing over indoor pools, and the sadness everywhere - I would've felt like at any moment, the ghost of the zebras whose coats line the floors would've risen up and mauled me in the way only zebra ghosts can do. The mansion is of course very gaudy, as you probably heard. But I really liked the indoor pool, to be honest. How could you not? I don't eat sundaes, but I could probably learn if the sundae bar beside the waterfall could become operational again. I also thought the shape of the wooden ceilings in the pool room were strikingly beautiful. They reminded me of a small country church's ceiling. Other parts, particularly views from the outside, made it seem really livable - but the amount of money you'd spend in updating this place would be astronomical.

The Future of Wine Writing

Just saw this on Parker's wikipedia page. Entitled "Every One a Critic: The Future of Wine Writing" by Mike Steinberger. Looks like it's partly a critique Robert Parker's wine writings.

Here's an old Atlantic Monthly piece on Parker, for those interested.

Statement from Roger Ebert

After 33 years on the air, 23 of them with Disney, the studio has decided to take the program named "Siskel & Ebert" and then "Ebert & Roeper" in a new direction. I will no longer be associated with it.

The show was a wonderful experience. It was a great loss to me when surgery in July 2006 made it impossible for me to appear on the air any longer. Although I remained active behind the scenes, I feel that Richard Roeper and several co-hosts, notably Michael Phillips and A.O. Scott, have excelled at carrying on the tradition Gene Siskel and I began in 1975 with "Sneak Previews" on PBS.

Gene and I felt the formula was simplicity itself: Two film critics, sitting across the aisle from each other in a movie balcony, debating the new films of the week. We developed an entirely new concept for TV. Few shows have been on the air so long and remained so popular. We made television history, and established the trademarked catch-phrase "Two thumbs up."

The trademark still belongs to me and Marlene Iglitzen, Gene's widow, and the thumbs will return. We are discussing possibilities, and plan to continue the show's tradition.

Ben Linus for President

Dang I want one, but I'm pretty sure that this is too expensive. hattip to Slowing Going Bald.

Minimum Drinking Age and Birth Outcomes

From Tara Watson and Angela Fertig. Entitled, Minimum Drinking Age Laws and Infant Health Outcomes. The abstract reads

Alcohol policies have potentially far-reaching impacts on risky sexual behavior, prenatal health behaviors, and subsequent outcomes for infants. We examine whether changes in minimum drinking age (MLDA) laws affect the likelihood of poor birth outcomes. Using data from the National Vital Statistics (NVS) for the years 1978-88, we find that a drinking age of 18 is associated with adverse outcomes among births to young mothers -- including higher incidences of low birth weight and premature birth, but not congenital malformations. The effects are largest among black women. We find suggestive evidence from both the NVS and the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) that the MLDA laws alter the composition of births that occur. In states with lenient drinking laws, young black mothers are more likely to have used alcohol 12 months prior to the birth of their child and less likely to report paternal information on the birth certificate. We suspect that lenient drinking laws generate poor birth outcomes because they increase the number of unplanned pregnancies.

Haven't read it yet, but am looking forward to doing so soon.

Best Ever in the World

Take that Coppola!

Rural HIV in the US

J discusses the increasing incidence of HIV in rural portions of the Deep South. This is probably a good time to re-post Jon Cohen's 2004 Slate article, A Silent Epidemic, WHY IS THERE SUCH A HIGH PERCENTAGE OF HIV AND AIDS AMONG BLACK WOMEN?

Pajiba Reviews TDK

Good review from Pajiba. He writes:

If Frank Miller reinvigorated the seriousness of the comic book character with 1986’s The Dark Knight Returns, then Christopher Nolan gave him new life on screen by erasing the memory of Joel Schumacher’s abysmal films and rebooting the entire storyline from scratch three years ago with the bleak, daring, and completely engaging Batman Begins. Tim Burton’s Batman and follow-up Batman Returns were themselves overrated, overheated, and almost suffocatingly stylized, but their biggest sin was that they played up the absurdity of the character without making him believable. Burton once said, “Anyone who knows me knows I would never read a comic book,” and that air of mild condescension came across on screen. But Nolan clearly respects not only the possibilities in the source material but also the very real pain that would drive a man like Bruce Wayne to the edge.

We loved Burton's story because it was all we had, but in retrospect - having lived in such a wonderful period where superhero stories are told with such care and eagerness - that movie falls short. In fact, is it really such a jump that it went from Burton to Schumacher? Not that Burton's movies were bad at all - they were great fun, and had a touch of darkness to them. But they were always fantastical, and so of course it's not that far from fantastical to farce. I think the danger with the Batman franchise is that it'll jump the shark in the last episode the way that Spiderman did in Spiderman 3 - taking itself obnoxiously seriously, heavy on the action, and light on the story and characterization.

It's optimal, I think, to try and sabotage the film when you are doing sequels and on the last episode of that multi-episode franchise. You have a built-in audience, and you don't care if you piss them off, since there's no more future films to come out of the franchise. So skimp on costs and use the previous films' momentum to turn a quick buck. The only way to keep these things alive is if they can be sustained as multi-movie franchises, like James Bond or Star Trek. In those instances, care is taken to avoid damaging the property, assuming there is some future expected demand for those characters and stories. I think at roughly 70 years of age in popularity, a case can be made that the Batman story is mature and robust enough to go much further than a Nolan authored franchise, but that the Spidey 3 was so absolutely stinky compared to Spidey 2 does mean we can expect this one to eventually dive too. Thankfully, that has not been the case yet, as like Pajimba points out, TDK is the bomb.

Low-Carb Diet Wins

The Associated Press reports findings from a recent trial done with participants in Israel in a longitudinal study on weight loss and diet regimes.

"The research was done in a controlled environment - an isolated nuclear research facility in Israel. The 322 participants got their main meal of the day, lunch, at a central cafeteria.

The low-fat diet - no more than 30 percent of calories from fat - restricted calories and cholesterol and focused on low-fat grains, vegetables and fruits as options. The Mediterranean diet had similar calorie, fat and cholesterol restrictions, emphasizing poultry, fish, olive oil and nuts. The low-carb diet set limits for carbohydrates, but none for calories or fat. It urged dieters to choose vegetarian sources of fat and protein.

Average weight loss for those in the low-carb group was 10.3 pounds after two years. Those in the Mediterranean diet lost 10 pounds, and those on the low-fat regimen dropped 6.5. "

It's not so surprising to see that both the low-carb and the Mediterranean diet had greater weight loss than a traditional low diet. What is apparently surprising people was to learn that the Atkins diet outperformed the Med diet in terms of overall cholesterol performance. The Atkins diet appears to have had the most improvement, of the three dieting regimes utilized, in several cholesterol measurements.

How important is it to studies like this that we do not have a true control group? Is low-fat dieting the control group for Atkins dieting? Why not simply have a fourth group that is not dieting at all, and use it as the control group?

Batman Snaps Hollywood Slump

A lot of interesting analysis in today's WSJ. Even though it broke records, analysts say that the huge number of screens it went out on may actually mean that demand will dry up really quickly. Where Batman settles in revenues is unclear, despite its record breaking weekend.

Sex in Public

From Instapundit, an article about why people have sex in public. This little ditty really jumped out at me, though.

How prevalent is public sex? A 2006 online survey of nearly 80,000 men and women, most of whom were involved in monogamous relationships, found that 22 percent had had sex in some kind of public venue.

Hmmm. How much you want to be that that is a complete bullshit statistic?

An "online survey" of nearly 80,000 men and women, "most of whom were involved in monogamous relationships." Most likely, a magazine like Maxim or FHM did this survey (I'm just guessing because it's not listed in the article as far as I can tell). Readers were probably invited to answer a survey, and around 80,000 did so. I have no doubt that 22% said that they'd had sex in a public, but that is a far cry from saying that 22% of some population has had sex in public. If I'm right, and a somewhat trashy magazine did this survey, then it's rife with selection bias. Selection of people who read the magazine (already skewed towards more promiscuous, if I had to guess). Selection of people who then chose to answer the survey (even more skewed). You end up with basically a statistic that could've come straight out of the Kinsey Report.

Remember, large sample sizes mean absolutely nothing if the procedure to collect the data isn't random. We might say that 22% of the magazine's readers have had sex in public (even that is doubtful, but it's better than the way the writer presents it, which is open ended and invites the reader to think 22% of Americans have had sex in public). I looked in my copy of The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United State by Laumann, Gagnon, Michael and Michaels, which explores the famous 'sex survey' done by NORC in the early 1990s. I can't find anything yet about sex in public, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that when I do find a statistic on it, it'll be far, far lower than 22%.

Update: It was a survey conducted by MSNBC and Elle magazine. Exactly as I thought.

Wine, Wine Everywhere

From Wine and Spirits. The first is Gary interviewing Paul Greico. The second has Greico interviewing Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV. Some interesting biographical information in the Gary interview - I've only watched 5 minutes of it so far, but will watch the remainder tonight with my ladyfriend, the missus. Gary took his parents' liquor store, which had around $4-5 million annually in revenues, and increased it ten-fold. It was originally 50% beer, but now seems to be more wine intensive. I'm sure the remainder of the interview will be fascinating. Greico has just opened a new 24-seater wine bar called Terroir, which is at least his second venture. HT to J.

Big Batman Weekend

Well, Batman blew the doors off all the records this weekend. $155 million in the opening weekend put it atop of Spiderman 3, which previously held the spot for highest gross in an opening weekend, and already puts the Batman sequel at 75% of the predecessor, Batman Begins, entire reveues after only a few days. With very little else on the summer horizon, this is most likely to be a big movie. And for basic, popcorn intensive summer blockbuster material, the movie was complex, serious, and tragic. Doug Jones argues that it's basically propoganda for imperialism. Maybe, though he omits Batman's unwillingness to make wiretapping a permanent Batcave policy when he tells Lucius Fox to do it only once, and then destroy the equipment. Nevertheless, I'm in a heated fight within my soul whether or not to cut out from work today at see it once again.

If you really want to see a movie that feels like propaganda for the war on terror, then check out seasons 1-2 of Battlestar Galactica. Wow. It's not just some abstract allegory, either. I'm saying, it reads like a play-by-play rehashing of the Bush administration, with the first two seasons being almost explicitly pro-Bush. My wife thinks I'm crazy, but when Gaius Baltar attacked President Rosyln for using fear of the Cylons recurring attack in her re-election campaign, he says she is trying to use fear tactics for her own political campaign. It's a pro-military, pro-executive branch story so far, in which the human race is under constant attack from a race of monotheist radicals.

I think these stories, like Batman, 24, and BSG are good for the public square. I think, though, that they do for one side of the war that conservatives have always criticized extremely liberalized stories of doing for the other side of the war. By giving a nuanced perspective of a pro-war perspective, and therefore humanizing it deeply, we can't just use our ideology's jingo phrases to attack. And it's much easier to be radical when you can view your opponents as dangerously naive warmongers, or dangerously naive pacifists.