reg rats

2004-03-17T17:39:00.000-06:00

SURGERY AS PLACEBO

Salon has an article on gastric bypass surgery in adolescents. I admit my background on gastric surgery is pretty limited, but all accounts seem to emphasize, over and over, the incredibly restrictive diet patients must follow for the rest of their lives.

Now, granted, the surgery ensures that if post-ops deviate from that diet they will become violently ill. But it seems likely to me that following the same diet in the absence of surgery would also result in dramatic weight loss. Is it simply that the nausea and misery that result from post-operative indulgence are sufficient deterrant to enable patients to restrict their eating? Or that the expense, risk, and pain of surgery are inspirational--essentially, patients have invested so much that they can't let it be a failure?

I don't know how you could ethically do a controlled trial of this--randomly assigning gastric bypass patients to be operated on, or just to be cut open, resealed, and told they've undergone the surgery, is obviously not an option. But I would like to see more attention paid to the possibility that the surgery is not the direct cause of the weight loss.

2004-03-15T15:01:00.000-06:00

15-MARCH

Today is a very special day--not only is it the Ides of March, but it's the second anniversary of my college graduation.

I'm trying to come up with some deep insights I've gained in my post-collegiate life, but there ain't much. The year and a half interval between college and grad school was quite eventful, but not necessarily productive of enlightenment. So, in lieu of providing my own thoughts, I'll quote Bertrand Russell, whose autobiography I read recently. Russell spent one year at the University of Chicago, teaching an invited seminar. He mentions that President Hutchins didn't like him, and that he was impressed with the students, but sums up the experience thus:

"The town is beastly, and the weather was vile."

Ah, Chicago.

2004-02-27T14:40:00.000-06:00

The New York Times reports that, just like "door close" buttons in elevators, "walk signal" buttons at intersections are nonfunctional. I find this story incredibly funny for some reason. Maybe it's the lesson in futility and impatience and the failed promise of urban humanity and the great lies of technological innovation, and maybe it's the fact that the URL says BUTT in capital letters. My philosophizing, and my sophomoric sense of humor, both satisfied.

2004-02-22T15:51:00.000-06:00

FUN WITH TECUMSEH

I was discussing Tecumseh's Curse with a few people the other night, and none of us knew the actual numbers, so here they are, for the edification of all.

Probability that a U.S. president elected since 1840 would die in office, if he was not elected in a year ending in a zero: 0.05
Probability that a U.S. president from the same period, elected in a year ending in a zero, would die in office: 0.875

This calculation is made excluing all presidents who were never elected to the post (eg Ford, Fillmore), but not controlling for number of terms elected or number of years in office. Still, it is at least mildly interesting that in the past 160 years, out of 28 elected presidents, eight of whom were elected in years ending in zero, only one president (Zachary Taylor) elected in a non-zero year has died in office, while only one president (Ronald Reagan) elected in a zero year has survived his term. Prior to 1840, no president had died in office.

2004-02-21T16:32:00.000-06:00

H. G. and G. W.

In a recent exercise in denial of the freedom of information, the Bush administration’s Department of Education has removed funding support for the closed-captioning of almost 200 television programs, thereby preventing the deaf and hard-of-hearing from enjoying the same drivel as the rest of us. In general the results are about what one might expect, but a few things seem to have slipped through the cracks.

“Robin Hood” was denied funding; “The Time Machine” was approved. The decision regarding “Robin Hood” is fairly obvious—robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, otherwise known as progressive taxation, is hardly the sort of ideal the Bush administration hopes to encourage. “The Time Machine,” however, is a more subtle point. I suspect that our worthy government may be made up of folks who have only seen the movie, or at best read the abridged children’s versions.

As we all know, in H. G. Wells’ inexplicably famous book, a time traveler ends up in a horrific future where beautiful idiots live on the surface and brutish, deformed creatures live belowground and eat the “Upper-worlders.” The children’s versions, and TV-movie versions, tend to treat this as a simple horror story. But the original is a cautionary tale—the Upper-worlders are the descendants of capitalists; the Under-worlders are the descendants of the proletariat. The workers, having been pushed to the margins of both society and the earth, have become inhuman and, eventually, cannibalistic, while the bourgeois have become complacent to the point of being no more than livestock.

It may not be worth bringing this up—after all, what appears on TV will not be the original story. Or is the message in the emasculated version so far distorted that it appears to be the reverse—a warning of the terrors the working classes might inflict upon the elite if the elite relax their vigilance?

What all of this has to do with hearing impairment, I’m not sure, although I suspect it’s simply a matter of opportunity.

2004-02-10T16:55:00.000-06:00

IF SCIENTISTS AGREE, THEY MUST BE WRONG

It's been brought to my attention that Michael Crichton has given a talk on why global warming is a crock. I thought that, being someone who studies global climate change, I was fairly familiar with the various arguments used by the nay-sayers. And indeed, Crichton does drag out the tired old "uncertainty necessitates passivity" and "innovation will save us" and the like.

But he also makes a couple of claims that caught me off guard. First, he attempts to disparage the entire field of modelling on the grounds that it involves manipulating a whole lot of parameters that "nobody knows," and that "models just carry the present into the future. They're bound to be wrong." Second, he argues that scientific consensus is irrelevant--unscientific, in fact--since many famous scientific discoveries went radically against the accepted wisdom at the time.

The modelling question is not going to be resolved by arguing about the merit of our parameter estimates, or by pointing out the very wide range of scenarios used in predicting the future climate. This is a question of moral philosophy: given that our ability to predict the future is highly uncertain, should we do the best we can with what we know today, and try to influence the present toward what we believe will be the best future, or should we abandon all attempts at prediction and stick to blind faith?

Crichton's lack of respect for consensus is somewhat amusing on second thought. He states that "the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus . . . Science . . . requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world." One wonders how he thinks results are verified if not by other scientists.

2004-01-28T16:09:00.000-06:00

Like most liberals, next fall I intend to vote for any Democrat capable of getting him- or herself nominated. But I have had enough of primary season. Not just this particular primary season--I've had enough of the whole concept. Why is the race treated as all but over after one caucus and one primary? I'd be pointing fingers at a devious media conspiracy designed specifically to encourage passivity in the voting public, but I don't believe the powers that be in the media are sufficiently crafty and strategic for that. They just like big stories.

So let's give them one. It's time to designate national Primary Day, and get all the states on board for the same one. The media can have their fun, and all 50 states can have equal weight in the outcome.

2004-01-14T16:55:00.000-06:00

MY BIG FAT CONFLICT OF INTEREST

I've been giving some thought recently to the sharp contrast in attitudes of two of my most beloved political interest groups regarding a certain issue, which is to say, the issue of fat people as seen by feminists and environmentalists. The most recent issue of Bitch, which arrived in my mailbox yesterday, contains a paragraph that really fleshes it out, so to speak.

In a piece on the tendency of famously emaciated women to brag about how much they eat (apparently Cameron Diaz likes french fries), Ms. Ricki Wovsaniker writes:

One might conceivably determine that the move toward eating a lot, and eating carelessly, as a cultural standard is a good thing for women, a removal of the pressure to eat like a bird as a mark of one's femininity. After all, it implies a knowledge of - and respect for - one's own body and its needs, without calibrating those needs to the expectations of others. It implies a certain lack of shyness about using resources, and a belief in one's right to exist in the world, to literally take up more space.

I find it hard to buy the idea that any but a few Americans of any gender need encouragement to take up more resources - we're quite skilled at it already. Wovsaniker's comments suggest that if she were a sheep-owner in "The Tragedy of the Commons" (non sequitur: a moment of silence for the passing of TotC author Garrett Hardin, who has an unusual obit in the current U of C alumni mag), she'd be running her sheep all over the field, and setting her dogs on the neighbors' sheep to boot.

The problem, I think, is a refusal to separate the issue of fat as a health/gluttony problem, symptomatic of a society determined to consume itself to death, from that of "fat" as equated with "not a supermodel." I hesitate to make sweeping statments about feminists in general, but there is a tendency among us to make a quick leap from attacking the media's obsession with unrealistic body types to disparaging any condemnation of fatness of any degree. The latter approach leads Wovsaniker to convert greed into a virtue.

2004-01-06T01:08:00.000-06:00

In tomorrow's Times David Brooks' column suggests that everyone who discusses links between the White House and Neo-cons needs to report for a tin foil hat fitting. On substance, he ignores social networks and the informal channels through which weak ties can be mobilized. A general "move along, nothing to see here sort of effort."

Why I'm not ignoring him like I do Safire is a curious parenthetical remark at the top of the 5th paragraph. He says "(con is short for "conservative" and neo is short for 'Jewish')." I'm trying hard to figure out if this is a joke. His odd usage of "neo-" seems to imply that critics of the neo-Conservatism (cf Coser and Howe(eds.) The New Conservatives, Meridian 1973) and particularlyDemocratic candidates are anti-semitic. This wanton invocation cheapens the concept generally. It recalls the Administration's charges of anti-Catholic bias when the House Judiciary held up arch-conservative nominees. There is surely too much religious, ethnic, racial, and class hatred in the country to spend outrage and spill ink over criticisms that have not the first thing to do with religion.

ed- I really hope this isn't some obscure use of neo- that I'm unfamiliar with. I'd feel silly.

2004-01-05T12:58:00.000-06:00

To break the silence if briefly: I've always been a huge fan of propaganda. Even more so that of my side. Regardless of affiliation or lack thereof, everyone should take a look at the finalists in the MoveOn ad contest.

I surely enjoyed them. It is scary to contemplate a state of affairs where such charges could be legitimately leveled (some more than others). Also interesting how much better the volunteer ads are than the professionally developed DNC ads from the last cycle.

2003-12-03T10:38:00.000-06:00

Fun with pictures!

2003-12-01T11:21:00.000-06:00

DR AND MR SMITH . . .

First of all, congratulations to Clint and Kelly! In their honor, and because I just got back from a wedding in Chicago, here's a post about some of the politics of gettin' hitched.

In a recent post at Crescat, Amanda Butler brings up the oft-quoted statistic that female academics are more likely to be married to other academics than male academics are. (You can also insert "scientist", "lawyer", etc, for "academic".) People generally seem to find this surprising, or objectionable.

But folks, it's just a numbers game. There are more male academics (scientists, lawyers) than female, and marriages occur (at present) only between members of opposite sexes, so naturally the proportion of women married to other fill-in-the-blanks is going to be larger. It is plausible to be concerned about some of the implications of that fact--women may be less likely than men to have a spouse with a less-demanding job and hence more time and energy for caretaking at home--but the fact itself is not going to change until the academe reaches gender parity.

2003-11-25T17:36:00.000-06:00

Rats! I'm missing the annual Latke-Hamentash debate moderated by the venerable Ted Cohen, professor extraordinaire of Logic (though the debate relies on nothing of the sort).

2003-11-24T00:48:00.000-06:00

I'll pass on the following without comment. It's interviews with the journalists on the ground in Iraq conducted by the CBC. CBC News: Deadline Iraq - Uncensored Stories of the War

2003-11-19T17:23:00.000-06:00

Josh Marshal hinted at and then linked to this article in the Washington Monthly. It essentially claims that popular liber-con e-mag, TechCentral Station is wholly owned and operated by a right wing lobbying firm specializing in "astroturf organizing" (creating the illusion of grassroots/broad based support for programs or policies). Moreover, Confessore suggests that content in TCS was manipulated to meet the needs and specifications of the clients of the lobbying firm. Dan Drezner, Chicago prof and occassional TCS contributor avers he has never been censored by TCS and has even written posts their contrary to the interests of the firm's clients.

While I rarely agree with Professor Drezner, the methods and values he brings to his analyses are laudable and I have nothing but the highest confidence in his integrity as an intellectual and as a scholar. On this question, I think he thoroughly misses the boat. It is of no consequence whether his stories on TCS were manipulated. It seems to actually strengthen Confessore's condemnation if they weren't. Sounds odd but stick with me. Were TCS an unabashed mouthpiece of its corporate backers, the ideas expressed there would not enjoy the regard that they do. By mixing corporate propaganda with legitimately conceived ideas, TCS obscures the gulf extant between the two. Were I among the writers whose work was used as a stalking horse for this malfeasance, I would surely not defend them. Instead, TCS and its backers deserve to be fully condemned by thinkers of all stripes for their efforts to manipulate the marketplace of ideas.

2003-11-18T23:43:00.000-06:00

As promised below, the letter received this weekend from Carl. A few things to put the contents into context. First, Kelly and I are getting married. I meant to send out announcements (and still mean to) but am not good at such things, I always feel silly making them, so I put it off. Second, in my letter to him, I complained about a general lack of intellectual community at UNC and particularly that no students or colleagues challenged my often wrong-headed ideas.

With caveats behind, let us turn to the text. Parathetical remarks are his (I’ll indicate any additions/omissions/clarifiers with brackets). Forgive transcription errors.
begin text--
November 8th, 2003
Dear Clint;
I am writing my collective letter to my collective letter to my friends to you rather than Beth because I felt a congratulatory epistle concerning your impending nupitals [sic] was proper and fitting; besides which, I have yet to receive a copy or print of Botticelli’s Castello Annunciation from Beth to adorn my wall locker with. You wouldn’t believe how much a smattering of high culture improves life. The worst thing about Basic is there is a complete void where one would expect man to be playful and to strive towards the transcendant. Everything is mundane and stripped of any significance it has beyond its utility for killing or keeping you alive to kill. Church services are dreadful-maudlin hymns, insipid sermons and a treacly sickening cheerfulness oozes from every one of them. I would pay $75 ot listen to a Bach cantata in peace and quiet- $50 for a Buxtehude fugue, and $15 for a few hours in an armchair with Locke or Luther. Just to speak with someone who knows Faust is he who makes a deal with the devil (or better yet, recognizes the fellow from Augustine’s life) rather than the old deceiver himself would be worth a couple of brutal smokings.
Thank you for your postcard & letter. Concerning the universal obligation to perform military service-it’s all contingent upon the singular nature thereof and to wha extant one must support a government willing to betray the ideals of the society it is supposed to befit (a deliberately vague word), but which still embodies them well enough so that resistance would be neither prudent nor justified. Also, feel free to come up for graduation on Dec. 3rd. I’ll be free from 14:00 Dec. 3rd to 20:00 on Dec. 4th if you have the time, pecuniary resources, and the inclination to do so. You may ask my folks for futher information. It would be great if John and Beth could be snookered into coming down as well.
Marriage-whoa! Way to be, chief. It’s odd and a little droll to be informed of your troth-plight in the midst of so many crumbling marriages of kids. (The wives are realizing that if 9 weeks is bad, a 6 month drought would be unbearable.) I have a great many half-baked thoughts about marriage (among other things) that I’ll refrain from sharing now. Those sorts of thoughts only tend coagulate anyhow when the issue at hand becomes directly pertinant to my life.
I’m also pleased you’re enjoying the act of teaching and still take such delight in bad puns. It’s a shame the environment in which you find yourself ins’t more stimulating-sufficient to say, I have a sneaking suspician it has an edge on Basic. I hope to speak with you at some point about the relation of the social sciences to history. I expect that any differences we had in the past were mere logomachies and not over issues of substance. Folks here are not uniformly evangelical Bush backing Limbaugh fans (although many of them are), but, regardless of their political stripe, their views are invariably poorly thought out and ill-informed. Here too one peers into the minds of one’s fellow men and sees thought processes occuring only to satiate their avaricious, gluttonous, lustful, and slothful passions.

November 10th, 2003
It’s not that the other deadly sins are without their appeal, but anger, pride, and envy involve a certain spiritedness that is decidedly lacking (folks are exhausted). We just got back from a 10k road march (wearing 80lb rucks) after doing hand grenades all morning and afternoon. They are much more powerful than one may have been led to believe by the movies. People are tired and are bickering up a storm. We’ll be left alone for the rest of the evening, moreover, since tomorrow is Veterans Day we’ll just be raking leaves and mopping floors. Pretty dawggone pleasant. We need another Sunday after the cleaning we had to perform yesterday. Uffda!
I wish I could watch the Fire. It sounds as though they’re having a fairy tale season. I recall Bradley left-they must have found something of a diamond in the rough for his replacement.

November 11th, 2003
Armistice Day! Boots are shined, the wall locker’s squared away (inspection at 5p.m.), the bay is damn well near immaculate, and I’ve read enough of Kings I (or II, depending on yr. Preferred nomenclature.) We got our mop replaced by a blue phase (final) banner today- 22 days ‘til graduation. Tomorrow will be taken up issuing Class A (dress) uniforms, so that we won’t be doing real training ‘til Thursday.
There’s not really a lot to say about Basic Combat Training that I haven’t written about in this and other letters. Breakfast is the best meal-the chow is comparable to that of Woodward- a cut below Pierce, but still much better than the dross & slop purveyed in the typical high school cafeteria. We had to eat standing up (holding our trays) a few nights ago when some bonehead decided to hold his tray with one hand when serving himself at the salad bar (he was supposed to set it down.) It is less brutal than one may be led to believe from watching Full Metal Jacket, but just as course, nasty, and boring (and degrading-they love mocking the officer candidate.)
Kings I-IV is well worth reading. The ambiguities of power, nature of providence, and the problems of idolatry (the finite claiming infinite significance for itself) are probed and dealt with on a level far deeper than one one might suspect from a cursory reading. It helps to go with the KJV insofar as the archaic language is not only rolling and powerful, but forces one to slow down one’s pace. I recall Spengler correcting noting that truth is not properly ascribed to such works, but there are only different levels of depth. The previous sentence cries out for a serious expatiation in order to avoid becoming a mere wishy-washy platitude, but I’m going to eschew such an onerous labor at this time. Too many damned distractions.
I wish I knew more about graduate school-it really sounds as though you would be well served by transferring to a school with a more stimulating academic environment. While bright, you are certainly not so clever that your ideas should not be assaulted, or at least challenged. An echo chamber must become a mite tiresome. That said, your current life, especially seen from my current perspective (as do most aspects of civilian life) strikes me as both charming and pleasant. I presume you’re eating grits on a regular basis (I wish they’d serve me oatmeal instead, but this is Kentucky.)
I think that’s about it. Once again, my congratulations to both you & Kelly. Please tell everyone to refrain from sending mail after Thanksgiving, as mail typically takes four days to arrive and December 4th is the last day on which I will receive mail. Along those lines, please feel no obligation to maintain a fast & furious correspondence; write when and as much as you please.

Sincerely,
Carl Thunem

PS. Oompa, loompa, doompity doo,
I’ve got a little story for you,
You can suck a fat baby’s dick,
And lick its fat hairy lips. (Fontenot’s song-lyrics by DS Faust

P.P.S. Please forward my gratitude to Claire L. and John for their missives

--end text

2003-11-17T22:04:00.000-06:00

REG RAT TO GALLIVANT AS CRES-CAT
Until Monday next week, I'll be posing as a Cres-cat. Please come visit me there.

2003-11-17T11:04:00.000-06:00

Just got back from Chicago. I have less than no interest in teaching this afternoon. We spent $250 at the Co-op before we dragged each other out to avoid more damage.

The new gym is striking if wholly out of place.

I have a letter from Carl that I'll type up and post this evening.

2003-11-14T15:03:00.000-06:00

ALUMNI INTERVIEWING
I, too have had the pleasure of making my mark on adolescents' odds of attending the U of C. The first thing I notice in their bright little eyes is shock and horror upon beholding my youthful appearance. I can see the thoughts forming in their skulls: "Where's the middle-aged coot? Is this a trick? Oh my God, my application is so bad that they sent someone my age to evaluate me! Damn! Someone so fresh from high school has to know that National Honor Society is a joke."

For me, the college interviewing process was wretched and awful: finding homes in parts of the city I'd never heard of, eating pancakes when all I wanted to do was vomit, and in one case, having the interviewer come to my home and talk to my parents. Part of my motivation to do U of C alumni interviewing (besides my utter devotion to my alma mater) was the awesome experience I had at the U of C interview (the only awesome experience in any of my twelve or so interviews). First, the interviewer suggested a location that he knew was familiar to me - the library across from my high school - no driving to obscure parts of the city or restaurants with smoking sections. And the interview itself was more of a conversation than an interrogation. Instead of asking me questions about my extracurricular activities and favorite classes and all the junk that admissions officers glean from applications, he started off by telling me about the U of C. He told me about the Seminary Co-op and the core and the architecture. It was pleasant, took the pressure off of me, and naturally evolved into a format in which he could extract relevant information from me.

As alumni interviewers, (the interviewees don't know this) we don't have any parts of their applications so we can't make qualified statements about their academic preparedness (unless we attended the same high school, as happened with one of my interviewees) but we can pick up obscure pieces of info about them: idiosyncracies that are characteristic of maroons. I knew one fellow would probably be a decent fit for the school when (on top of his stellar academic record) he mentioned that he liked to study in the cemetery. One of my favorite tricks is revealing the unofficial motto of the school (where fun comes to die) and assessing the interviewee's reaction. Who knows? Maybe our end of the process is incredibly capricious. That's why I use the report to mostly write what they say instead assessing it. I'll leave it to Ted O'Neill and the other professional student pickers to quantify and translate applicant idiosyncracies and statements made under duress into fitness for the U of C.

2003-11-14T13:17:00.000-06:00

Kelly and I are headed to Chicago in a few hours and I'm so excited that I've given up on work for the afternoon (and on teaching coherently in an hour, sorry NC's future). We're (stand-by flight willing) going to a soccer game tonight with John and Clare, going to a wedding, seeing lots of Chicago people, spending time in Hyde Park for the first time since we moved 18 months or so ago.

Most exciting, we get to go to the Seminary Co-op! I know this makes me a giant dork but I've been salivating over this for weeks. I've even denied myself trips to the utterly inferior bookstores around here to conserve money and shelf space. Today is payday and this weekend we're going to blow it all on books (and probably booze and food and Fire paraphenalia).

Let me reaffirm that I love the world where I can teach from 3-4 at the University of North Carolina and catch a 7:30 kickoff at Soldier Field in Chicago. As many things as I take issue with, this is fantastic.

2003-11-14T13:08:00.000-06:00

I also just filed an alumni interview report (2:30 am last night). I entirely agree with Claire's assessment below. My major qualm, though, is the lie they tell the poor kids about them. The students are explicitly told that the interview will not have an impact on their admission and that it is an opportunity for them to meet an alum and ask questions about the college. We then, on the basis of this chat, are encouraged to say whether or not they should get to attend the U of C. In both of my interviews, the first 1/2 hour was spent with them trying desperately to not give a "wrong" answer. The second half was spent with them telling the truth or something that resembled it more closely. Both of mine were primarily attracted to the U of C because of relatives who live in the city. Odd way to choose a college.

2003-11-14T11:14:00.000-06:00

LEST YE BE JUDGED

On Wednesday I had the fascinating experience of conducting my first alumni interview--that mildly uncomfortable conversation inflicted by ivory towers upon their applicants. I never went through one of those for the U of C, but I did for other institutions. Having now sat on the other side and read the interview guidelines, I suspect it might be a good thing for me that I didn't.

The entire application process can be a biased, capricious thing, but it seems particularly troublesome to try to assess whether someone is a "good fit" for Chicago or not. (I am assuming here that the applicants are uniformly academically and intellectually qualified.) College is often as much a shaping process after the fact as a sorting process before, and I think many people, at the U of C and elsewhere, choose colleges a bit randomly, for a few good reasons and many bad ones. Once there, they figure out if the place works for them or not, and maybe they learn to love it, but I doubt my own ability to identify the people who will fall into that category.

And just to keep up with the folks at Crescat Sententia, here's a gratuitous Tom Lehrer quote:

We will sleep through all the lectures
And cheat on the exams
And will pass, and be forgotten with the rest.

Lehrer, of course, went to Harvard.

2003-11-12T22:01:00.000-06:00

INFLAMMATORY IMAGES
If you have any interest in gastroenterology, then you should check out the following websites. Given Imaging, an Israeli company, developed a disposable capsule that replaces many traditional, invasive forms of endoscopy. Basically, you swallow the capsule and images of your GI tract are conveyed remotely to your physician while you go about your daily activities. If you've ever had an endoscopy, you can appreciate the minimal invasiveness of this procedure as compared to traditional endoscopy - tube rammed down your GI tract (through one end or another) while under heavy sedation, being pumped full of air, barium enemas and other unpleasantries. I especially recommend the inflammatory bowel disease videos from this magical little capsule. There are some great ulceration pics to geek out over, especially the Crohn's disease videos. You might also be interested in some hemorrhoid images from a site devoted to this ubiquitous disease. Warning: these images are not for the vasovagal prone.

2003-11-12T21:33:00.000-06:00

MATRIX OPERATIONS
I love the Matrix and linear algebra too much to think about Revolutions any longer. Therefore, I point to Mike Shecket's commentary on the movie and am done with it.

2003-11-12T21:26:00.000-06:00

This is why I didn't go to law school.

2003-11-12T17:21:00.000-06:00

ANOTHER PRICEY GIFT
If the FAO Schwarz camper didn't break your bank, perhaps you can buy your sweetie the Victoria's Secret Fantasy Bra and Panty. Yes, you're reading that price correctly. Before the decimal there's an eleven and six zeroes. Call me practical, but I can't imagine it to be very comfortable having compressed silica and carbon hugging all those sensitive areas. Do you think pricing varies with size?

2003-11-10T20:59:00.000-06:00

In posts below, Beth and Claire (welcome by the way) both say the gender genie identifies them as male. There are only two appropriate conclusions
1. Beth and Claire are actually men
2. Beth and Claire plaguerised from men throughout college and into graduate school.

The internet is never wrong!
For what its worth, I'm identified as male on every paper I've tried. Even a short, supportive paper on feminist theory came back strongly masculine. Kelly is also a man.

2003-11-08T17:15:00.000-06:00

APOLOGY AND CLEANING REC
Ok. I know that my blogging hasn't been all that productive since my guest tenure at Crescat ended and I sincerely apologize to any high-brow Crescat readers I may have dragged here in hopes of reading intelligent posts from me. I can only tell you that soon my mental juices will be replenished and I hope that you don't abandon my blog altogether. (Perhaps my cobloggers will pick up my slack??)

In the mean time, following the lead of great bloggers evalutaing vacuums, I would like to make a recommendation about an excellent product that I recently purchased after my beloved schipperke vomited on multiple areas of the carpet. After weighing the benefits of renting vs. buying, I decided to shell out $259 to buy the Hoover Steamvac to assuage my hypersensitive sense of hygiene. Folks, if you have it in for dirt and you have carpet, it's worth your while to own one. First, I'm satisfied that it thoroughly cleaned the offensive areas. But perhaps more importantly, from a clean-appearing, low-traffic 6 ft. by 4 ft. area of carpet, the gallon of water/detergent post-steam was black. Black and incredibly filthy. So black and filthy that I'm tempted to think that there is some component of the detergent that turns the water black to allow suckers like me to visualize results. Could Hoover do that? Hmm. Maybe my new toy will just give me a complex about how dirty my apartment is but I have to admit, I get a rush seeing how disgusting the water looks after I steam. The filthier, the better.

2003-11-07T18:40:00.000-06:00

Thanks much to Beth, for the welcome and for the generous invitation to join the blog world. I'm not sure if I will be at all regular as a blogger, but I'm entranced at the idea of a little soapbox of one's own. My favorite compliment I have ever received (with the possible exception of "you smell like an old saxophone") is "you're the coolest opinionated person I know." As such, why not take the opportunity to shout out those opinions into an unknown pool of readers?

This was all inspired by my response to Beth's comments on the Gender Genie, which takes pieces of writing and attempts to identify the gender of the writer via a clever algorithm. Like Beth, I write like a boy. I gave the "gender genie" nineteen samples of my writing--fifteen essays on assorted topics, most of them from college, and the four essays I've just written for my application for graduate funding from the National Science Foundation. Of these, two came up female. Those two were my "how you will enhance education and diversity in science" essay for NSF, and a final paper I wrote for a Biogeography course in college. Unlike Beth, I wrote many pieces in college on gender issues, and those were all (supposedly) male-authored.

My interpretation is that all of this has much more to do with genre than with gender. The algorithm simply counts frequency of use of a number of words, and from these assigns a "maleness" and a "femaleness" score. But in the original article that generated the algorithm (you can get to it from the gender genie site; I haven't totally figured out linking yet), the authors note that words characteristic of women's writing are also found more frequently in fiction, and words characteristic of men's writing are found more frequently in nonfiction. Many many different kinds of writing--memoirs, journalism, scientific articles--fall under the heading "nonfiction," and it is fairly obvious that these will all have different typical uses of language. I am therefore skeptical as to how much of the algorithm's success can be attributed to differences in language use by men and women, and how much to differences in the types of writing typically done by men and women.

2003-11-07T08:28:00.000-06:00

WHICH EL LINE ARE YOU?
In the spirit of self-exploration, Will Baude points to this quiz. Apparently, I hold true to my south side roots.

You are the green line. You dwell in the ghetto,
and damn, you're proud of it. The streets of
your kingdom may not be paved with gold, but at
least you have a place where you know you rule.
Just don't go cruising too late at night
without a shotgun.

Which Chicago 'El' line are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

2003-11-07T07:53:00.000-06:00

NEW REG RAT
I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce a new reg rat, Claire Lunch, biology PhD student at Stanford and math/stat/bio alumnae of the U of C. Just to round up, though we pontificate on much more, disciplines now represented are biology, math, statistics, law, sociology, medicine, and public health.

2003-11-04T14:02:00.000-06:00

HOW INFORMED IS MY CONSENT?
A reality TV show in which unknowing heterosexual men become intimate with a pre-operative transsexual (who I might add is quite stunning) has been stirring up a lot of talk by Will Baude at Crescat Sententia and by the Curmudgeonly Clerk. While the legality of the issue at hand is beyond my knowledge, I, like Will, find disclosure-as-part-of-informed-consent daunting. How much information does a person need to disclose before participation in behavior with that person is consensual? Common sense tells me that people need to take responsibility for themselves when entering into "risky" behavior and that others shouldn't be misleading. But how much required disclosure is enough, and how much is too much?

Disclosure laws for HIV and other communicable diseases seem to be the easy case (as opposed to Will's other examples of bad breath, sexual ineptitude, etc.) because HIV is deadly and not obvious for potential partners to detect. Mandatory HIV disclosure laws are a useful tool of public health, but they make me very uneasy, and not because of the privacy/ personal freedom consequences to the infected. Rather, I take exception with mandatory disclosure laws because they undermine a person's responsibility to be accountable to himself. I've been talking a lot about liberty lately and how I believe that every man has a right to act as he sees fit without infringing upon others' basic rights. But crucial to that concept is that it is the responsibility of each man to be accountable for his actions. Yes, we should not be hindered from choosing our occupation or books or sexual partners and we should be free to reap the benefits of our labor and our decisions. But freedom means that we reap all the consequences of our actions, including the liability.

I believe wholeheartedly that anyone with a communicable disease (and knowledge of that disease) should inform his partners of their risk. But it isn't right, in all cases, to legally compel him to do so. Though I don't think that a person should be legally compelled to say "I have HIV" before getting intimate, I do think that the person is required to tell the truth if asked by his partner, or to inform his partner of newly detected infection if the partner asked at a prior time, or to inform a spouse of an infection acquired from a breach of contract (or other means). Misleading is fraud and should be punished. But a person's consent should not be considered uninformed if he doesn't ask and proceeds anyway.

2003-11-02T11:14:00.000-06:00

GENDER GENIE
Crooked Timber points to this algorithm that professes to guess your gender based on a writing sample. According to the genie's analysis of 25 of my writing samples for classes (yes, she has nothing better to do on any given Saturday night --ed.), I'm a boy! Only one of my samples tested female positive, and it was a (required) paper on Aristophanes' Assemblywomen in which I had to include a lot of words like "sexual," "equality,", and "women." If you couldn't tell, I'm not a big gender studies fan and will go to great lengths to avoid anything that stinks of psychology. I'm interested if there are quality differences between male and female program-designated texts of similar subjects. My guess is that scientific and philosophical texts the algorithm designates as male receive higher grades than those designated female and that "female" texts in fuzzy topics like gender and culture studies score better than corresponding "male" texts. Anyone have a large enough sample to try?

2003-11-01T22:57:00.000-06:00

DUTY TO SERVE
This week I heard from my friend and fellow U of C alumnus, Spc. Carl Thunem from boot camp in Fort Knox, Kentucky. As Carl is not exactly what I envision as the typical army private, I asked him to share his motivations behind joining the army. Spc. Thunem was nice enough to give me permission to publish his thoughts. Here’s the excerpt from his letter dealing with the reasons for his military service:

Service in the military is categorically different from every other occupation sanctioned by state and society; moreover, it is necessary for the survival of both. I am not well-suited to professional soldiering (just ask my drill sergeants), but am convinced of the moral necessity of my service. In a society professing its allegiance to the ideal of democracy, all persons should be accorded dignity based, not on their talents, but on their moral use thereof. Since all persons possess equal potential dignity (since they are all capable of moral action), they all participate in the culture and are stakeholders in society. They have thereby incurred the duty and the privilege of serving it in various and sundry roles. I believe I will best to that as a lawyer. That said, the fact that military service is unique and necessary in a manner that no other service is makes it universally obligatory, lest it fall alone on those for whom it is financially attractive. If the elites fail to serve, they will have eschewed their responsibility and undermined the society which has so richly rewarded them by betraying its ideals. Period. To reserve military service for the lower middle class (as we effectively do through our financial incentive programs) is to claim that my lifeblood is worth more than theirs. This is something an 18th century English aristocrat might do with ease (and quite properly as the peasants could not achieve full humanity [which mutually implies] society did not accord it to them), but I cannot. (It can work in reverse too – Sparta). Besides which, societies in which the elites fail to serve in the military (late Rome, Abbasid caliphate, Heian Japan) have a mighty poor track record. America will not be well-served in the long term by a professional military.

At one time I was inclined to agree with Carl on the value of an obligatory citizen army to a democracy. We all benefit from our democracy because it accords all of us equal chances, so each individual is unencumbered by law from pursuing what matters to him. There aren’t laws preventing me from becoming a physician because I’m female, or the daughter of non-physicians, or because I live in a town that already has a thousand physicians. Because my form of government affords me equality of opportunity and doesn’t put artificial limitations on the fulfillment of my potential, don’t I owe it something? Don’t I, as well as everyone else who enjoys these benefits, have the duty to protect this system, to ensure that its ideals aren’t destroyed by a malicious outside entity?

As wonderful as our democracy and its resulting freedoms are, and as noble as I think it is to pledge one’s life to protecting them, I think that it is a dangerous mistake to believe that it is our society or government that gives us the opportunities and freedoms we cherish, that our freedoms must be bestowed upon us by a government or even our fellow men, in essence, that the freedoms we cherish are rightfully subject to taking by others. This isn’t to say that freedoms aren’t taken by others: I could point to any one of a number of governments whose citizens are prohibited from the most basic of freedoms. And it would be very difficult (to say the least) for a person to enjoy the kind of liberty we do without government cooperation. But does that mean that our government gives us our liberty? Our form of government is great because it (in general) respects our individual choices and liberty. But that liberty is rightfully every man’s, regardless of government and therefore, it’s a travesty to believe that we owe our government or society for respecting it.

To talk of the moral necessity of all who enjoy it to protect their freedom is to undermine it, to degrade its value and basic nature to man. Yes, it is true that the kind of society we have does not arise and isn’t maintained without conflict but I am not saying that we do not need an armed force: I am saying that it is not a government or society’s place to conscript an armed force.

Spc. Thunem states that he is compelled to serve because if the elites do not, then the burden falls on those with lower socioeconomic status. Volokh Conspirator Jacob Levy blogged on this issue some time ago. Here’s what he had to say:

But another name for "conscription" is "compelling young men [and, in Israel, women] to accept below-market-clearing wages for military service." If we needed to increase the number of men and women under arms by a quarter-million, there'd two ways to do it. One would be to raise military wages and salaries, and keep raising them, until enough fit candidates were willing to enlist, accepting the opportunity cost of years of prime educational or career time as well as the cost of risk to life and limb. This would require everyone (well, all taxpayers and future taxpayers) to bear the cost of this big new army. It would also, presumably, reduce the much-hyped racial and class inequalities in who enlists, since the financial opportunity cost of three years of one's life is higher the higher one's earning potential.

The other would be to say to the young men [and, maybe, women] who will bear the risk to life and limb that they must also bear the financial burden, by compelling them to serve at a suppressed wage. It's more-or-less unavoidable that the primary life and limb risks involved in national defense will be borne by healthy men and women who happen to be young adults at the time a war happens to strike. It's not unavoidable that the older, the less fit, and the younger and the future generations that will presumably benefit from increased security be spared the expense of equipping an army, that those bearing the greatest risks also be forced to bear the financial cost. Conscription seems to me a deeply unfair concentration of burdens and sacrifices, just the reverse of what's claimed for it.

Even if the elites were not able to find a way out of conscription, the burden of serving would still be greatest to the poor because if service is required, wages need not be competitive. If we truly value our freedom, then the way to protect it is not to compel service, but to pay what the market demands to those willing to risk their lives to protect it.

2003-10-31T15:50:00.000-06:00

Volokh Conspirator Randy Barnett points to this NRO piece about how anti-Semitism is fashionable among educated people. A few nights ago, I was struck by the protesters with various anti-Israel posters as I was entering an Alan Dershowitz speech titled, "The Case for Israel" (the same title as his book). The protest surprised me because Professor Dershowitz advocates a two-state solution.

2003-10-31T12:56:00.000-06:00

Home sweet home

Link above is to the venerable hometown paper and its reporting of a small bison stampede problem in town the whole day. As they say in the blogosphere, "read the whole thing."

2003-10-28T16:55:00.000-06:00

PERFORMANCE PAY
Will Baude wants to know why test-prep teachers (Kaplan, Princeton Review, etc.) aren't paid based on improvement in score. This is an intriguing idea, that is, if I actually learned anything from that twerp who taught the MCAT class. People who take test-prep classes generally want to know what exactly is on the test so that, if the test is a knowledge based test like the MCAT, they can study all the relevant info, or if the test is akin to the LSAT, they can learn how to construct clever syllogisms in time to get that 180. We pay for the books that tell us how to do it and the schedule of study that is supposed to prepare us in three months and, if you're like me, ignore the talking head who guides you through the mysterious process. We also shell out the grand to take practice tests to establish pace and ease anxiety. The product you are buying isn't a service by a teacher but rather, the materials you have access to - all those books and practice tests. Kaplan values their materials so highly that I had to sign a contract stating that I would never sell my MCAT prep books. So why pay the talking heads based on improvement in test scores when their performance is irrelevant to success on the test (or at most a minor contributing factor)? As for paying the test-prep company based on performance, that's another post.

2003-10-27T20:20:00.000-06:00

Hello to all. After months of being bothered, I join the ranks of my fellow alumni in the blogosphere. I am grateful to Beth for inviting me into the sacred domain of the reg rats.

It is with great disappointment that I must remain anonymous. The purpose of my anonymity is for one reason: to ensure some chance of becoming a clerk for a federal court in the near future. Just like ASCAP, which sends thousands of secret agents to report back copyright infringement of every beach party that plays a Gary Glitter tune, the federal government is always looking for ways to destroy the career of young lawyers who actually have an opinion on the law. I am no exception.

However, I do wish to give a few clues about myself. I attend law school in the mid-west. I have several degrees from the UofC but not a PhD. I speak several languages (Hebrew, German, and Japanese). I am a very bad law student. If any of these attributes are compelling to you, and you are the hiring partner of a law firm, please contact me!

In the future, I hope to dig up the nine years of experience I had at the UofC and apply it to the real world---you know, that place on 53rd and Blackstone.
As an opening shot, I would like to declare that I don't miss Hyde Park (another clue! I don't live in Hyde Park). It was just a few weeks ago that a fellow alumnus was pining for the UofC in my presence. We happened to turn on WGN--the lead story: dead baby found in trash can on 50th and Blackstone. Why that was just a scant three blocks from my former abode! But how could the police ever find the baby in the trash can: a beleaguered spokesperson for the CPD looks into the camera faintly smiling, "We would never have found the dead baby if it weren't for the trash workers' strike." Ah, Chicago, how could I have left thee (clue: I no longer live in Chicago)!

2003-10-24T12:13:00.000-05:00

DOG LICENSES
The New York times analyzed licensed dog data and reports that (surprise, surprise) Manhattan has a lot of shih-tzus and the bronx has a lot of rottweilers. More interesting to me, though, was that 80% of New York dogs aren't licensed. As an owner of a properly vaccinated and socialized schipperke, I'd like to know why I should buy a license. Obviously, it isn't possible for a city like New York to enforce licensure requirements. Are there benefits to having a license? New York makes you pay $8.50 or $11.50 for a dog license (depending on whether the dog is neutered). Presumably, the dog license is useful in case your pooch is lost, but so is a dog tag that you can buy at any pet store or a microchip that your vet can inject under your dog's skin. Maybe licensure helps cities gauge and pay for pet-related services? If anyone has any insight into this, I'd love to know.

2003-10-24T08:51:00.000-05:00

I'M BACK...
Well, I'm back in the stacks but hopefully I've dragged a few Crescat readers with me. Thanks again to Will and everyone at Crescat Sententia for allowing me to guest-blog and for all the emails I received. Hopefully, email addresses and a blogroll will appear soon so that readers can contact us and see what we read.

Also, I'd like to take the opportunity of introducing a new reg rat, Toll Monkey. Tolls (not his real name) is an alumnus of Our Fair Institution and prefers to remain anonymus, at least for now, because of clerking aspirations.

I look forward to his contributions. Please email him and me (once our emails appear on the side) lots of comments.

2003-10-21T09:08:00.000-05:00

As the consumate social scientist, let me give a cit. to back up my wild speculation below. On the question of the stabilizing effects of marriage, Laub and Sampson argue in their book Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives that marriage as a life event and the investment that went along with it ended many a criminal career. Again as the consumate social scientist, let the caveats fly: their data is from the the first half of the last century, changing social meaning in marriage could change its conditioning impact, it could be that those who wanted to end criminal careers got married instead of those who got married ended criminal careers.

Back to studying up on logit and probit regressions.ck

2003-10-18T00:29:00.000-05:00

I feel so abandoned, so alone, its like the B-Level at 2 am (before the computers were added).

I've been half watching Crescat this week while being buried by my teaching load. As for the debate about marriage, I can offer very little as my Chicago magazine hasn't arrived yet. Generally speaking, though, its dangerous to judge someone's work based on Alumni Solicitation Monthly. Waite's finding was presented in her book The Case for Marriage. I haven't read the book but she pumped it repeatedly when I was in her methods class. Seeing as I went to a very small fraction of the class meetings I can't even say much based on that.

Generally, her findings sound right but I'd be surprised if she makes the strong causal argument the article suggests. Anyhow, assuming her findings, let me pull out my speculative sociology hat.

This is about as far away from what I study as you can get and still be in Sociology but I will suggest a few mechanisms that may explain the finding:

1) Nagging. Part of the health benefit is found in a mutual monitoring for health problems. Married couples have a higher transaction cost of leaving a relationship than cohabbers and thus invest more in prolonging it.

2) Kids. Beyond pure monitoring of syptoms, I suspect that a spouse is a stronger watchdog against medium to high risk health behaviors (injection drug use, alcohol abuse, smoking, fat, salt, carbs). I say this not because cohabbers don't care (we do!) bubut because married are more likely to have kids (depending on her coding) and kids are a strong deterrant to high risk behavior.

3) Insurance: Fewer employers each year are offering comprehensive health care benefits. By law in most places, though, if 1 spouse has coverage, the other can buy in cheaply (relative to buying privately). Being married, then, offers a substantial increase in the probability that 1 spouse has a job that provides employer paid health care. People with insurance use more preventative care, ounce of prevention,pound of cure...

Up next, I write about how health insurance is the root of all that is wrong with America. I'm on an insurance kick (why will be clear in a few weeks) and will use Beth's space to fill her Free-Market blog with Socialistic and Marxish ranting. That'll teach her to blog w/ undergrads.

2003-10-17T07:26:00.000-05:00

GUEST-BLOGGING
Though midterms have had me maintaining radio silence, contact resumes today. I'll be guest-blogging for a little while over at Crescat Sententia. Please stop over and visit.

2003-10-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

UNC's e-mail servers were down for the past 36 hours returning most of the campus to the stone age (1992). People had to (GASP!) walk down the hall to ask a colleague a question.

The interesting part of this, for me, is that the reaction was evenly split between "E-mail is broken so I can't get work done" and "E-mail is broken so now I can get work done". I was a fence rider on this particular question. Got lots of work done but felt vaguely isolated from the outside world (unable to ignore the pressing messages in my inbox).

While the servers were down, they backed up over 500,000 incoming e-mails waiting to be delivered. These are getting dropped into my in-box in a seemingly random order (not ordered by time, name, or source). It lends to e-mail checking that anticipation of unanticipated surprise found at easter egg hunts and when opening a Cracker Jack box.

I have some thoughts on markets but not on hospitals in Ohio. I plan to share when my to do list gets under the 25 item bar.

2003-10-10T12:56:00.000-05:00

CAN THEY DO THIS??? MORE ON COLLUDING HOSPITAL LEGISLATION
Background:
According to the Ohio Chapter of the American College of Surgeons, which has so far not taken a position on HB 71,

"House Bill 71 was introduced largely at the request of central Ohio community hospitals that are opposed to the recent construction and development of 'boutique' orthopedic hospitals in Columbus suburbs. The community hospitals contend that boutique hospitals will 'cherry pick' the most profitable patients from the community hospitals' revenue base thus leaving the costlier low-pay and non-pay patients. It is argued that boutique hospitals will financially undermine the ability of community hospitals to continue to provide the same level of charitable care and less profitable services to the community."

Specialty or boutique hospitals are for-profit hospitals, usually physician owned, that provide a narrow range of health services, such as orthopedics, or psychiatry, or heart care. Think of them as an advanced group private practice - physicians get together, invest their own capital, and open a practice in their trained specialty. Only their practice offers services that a person only used to be able to get at a large hospital. For instance, when I injured my foot in gymnastics 15 years ago, I went to an orthopedic specialist who referred me to a surgeon based in a community hospital, where the surgery was performed. If I had the same injury now, I could make an appointment at a specialty hospital, where my injury would have been diagnosed, operated on, and followed-up. Specialty hospitals appeal to some physicians because they are smaller, more intimate environments that can provide continuity in care and physician control over their output and compensation. Specialty hospitals appeal to some patients because their existence enables more choice in service, they are efficient, intimate, and they can be more cost-effective. As one Columbus Dispatch letter to the editor put it, "There are no $5 aspirins in a boutique hospital." Boutique hospitals don't provide the entire spectrum of services in a specialty. Generally, the rarer, more complicated surgeries must be referred to the academic medical centers (community hospitals). Community hospitals get a lot of their revenue from surgical procedures that can be performed in specialty hospitals. Community hospitals also provide emergency services and medical care to the indigent.

Legislation:
If passed, HB 71 puts a two-year moratorium on construction and expansion of all for-profit specialty hospitals. If a for-profit hospital in existence meets certain criteria, such as operating a 24-hr emergency room, hiring physicians who don't have investment interests in the hospital, disclosing physician investment interests to patients, providing indigent care, and other criteria the hospital is exempt from the expansion moratorium. The bill also prohibits all hospitals from discriminating in hiring practices with relation to financial interests in the hospital, meaning that for-profit hospitals can't not hire someone only because he doesn't have an investment in the hospital and other hospitals can't not hire someone only because he has an investment in a for-profit hospital. The bill outlaws physician referrals for in-patient services to a hospital in which he or a family member has a financial interest and sets up a committee to study, among other things, the impact of specialty hosptials on the community.

My two cents:
This legislation is bad all-around. Boutique hospitals are profitable because they meet a market need. Patients demand community hospital alternatives for any number of reasons: they are smaller, scheduling is faster, they are more cost-effective, they are closer to home, and they give patients more time/continuity with their physicians. Physicians are ready to meet this need because they are tired of not having control over their output. The previously referred-to letter to the editor (available online only to Columbus Dispatch subscribers) mentions that at community hosptials, physicians are not paid for treatment of the non-paying patients (hospitals are subsidized by the federal government for non-payers but not physicians). It also mentions that in community hospitals, physicians don't always have control over staff and supplies. The physician writing the letter stated that he sometimes worked with assistants who didn't know what surgery he was performing or even which organ he was operating on. Specialty hospitals give physicians the opportunity to control their environment, who they work with, how they're paid, and how they interact with their patients. Being financially invested in a hospital seems to me an excellent quality assurance mechanism. If a for-profit hospital provides sub-standard service, consumers won't choose it and it loses money. The physician's profit actually correlates with the quality of service he provides. If hospitals are required to hire people without financial interests in their organizations, they are undermining their quality assurance mechanism. Also, a community hospital can decide to charge $5 for an aspirin, and we have to pay it if that hospital is the only game in town. Now that other hospitals want to compete, the community hospitals have decided to collude and that's not right. Community hospitals argue that care for the indigent burdens them and other services pay for it. If someone else can offer other services better than they can, people won't come to them for those services and they can't pay for the indigent. The answer is not preventing others from offering better services. Even if indigent care suffers, why should it subordinate basic freedom? Also, if a competitive market is allowed to operate in health care, eventually, health care costs will go down, benefitting the indigent.

2003-10-08T23:11:00.000-05:00

NAKED DOCS AND COLLUDING HOSPITALS
The rising cost of medical liability insurance is causing some doctors to forego coverage altogether. Linear algebra demands my time right now but I will blog more about this issue in the coming days and weeks. Overlawyered.com links to blog-posts discussing docs "going bare."

Also, legislation putting a two-year moratorium on new and expanding for-profit hospitals passed the Ohio House and was introduced to the Senate a couple of weeks ago. I'm no lawyer so HB 71 will take me a while to sift through. This bill summary is excerpted from the Legislative Service Commission bill analysis:
- Establishes a two-year moratorium on establishment, development, expansion, or construction of a new for-profit special hospital unless the project meets certain requirements that except it from the moratorium.
- Creates the Special Hospitals Study Committee.
- Requires a physician who has a financial interest in a hospital to disclose the interest to patients in writing when the physician refers to the hospital.
- During the moratorium, prohibits a physician who has a financial interest in a for-profit hospital from referring patients to the hospital for inpatient services.
- For a two-year period, prohibits a hospital governing body from discriminating against a physician for hospital staff membership or professional privileges on the basis of whether the physician has an ownership or investment interest in a special hospital.

Thoughts to come after I take a closer look at the bill. An initial scan gives me the shivers. As far as I can tell, the "certain requirements that exempt it from the moratorium" depend on whether the Department of Health think that the hospital serves the public need.

2003-10-08T00:09:00.000-05:00

I knew there was a good reason (other than an insufficiently stocked sociology gravy train) that I didn't subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly. According to this NYT article, they've tossed their hat into the college ranking ring. They offer America's HS students (parents) another, much less sophisticated*, measure of where to spend four years drinking. They base their ranking on "rejection rate, median SAT scores, and class rank of its applicants" The commonality amongst these metrics is that each of them has only the loosest connection to any college experience. They measure essentially the competition in the admissions process (assuming a quantatively based admissions criteria).

Ordinarily, I would let this slide, I'm in grad school, the students I teach at UNC won't change composition in the coming years based on this**. The great sin of The Atlantic that provokes this is their method drops my beloved (sometimes hated) alma mater from 13th (USNWR) to 39th. UofC drops because it is a great school whose admissions standards are, with regard to numbers, quite low. Last week I shilled at a local college fair and went through the "uncommon app" with high school students pointing out that 'Chicago' wanted to get to know them as people and to make sure that their fit with the place went beyond mere cognitive ability.

Still you ask, why does this bother you?. Pride is my first answer. My second is more noble. I'd hate to have a good kid who would fit in at UofC miss out because he/she/his/her parent applies an entirely irrational selection criteria to the question (ie I'm only applying top 25). Also, I'm generally annoyed when claims don't match metrics. In this case, they should rename their list "America's toughest colleges to get into based on quantitative factors". Probably wouldn't sell well from the newstands.

*basing this on the NYT article, I have yet to see this on a newstand
**Because the outstate/instate composition is set in the legislature and out-of-state admission is so insanely competitive anyway, externalities like a ranking seem to me unlikely to sway anything very much around here.

2003-10-07T21:34:00.000-05:00

Nobel Prize Rumor U of C lets someone else win one? If this is true the reaction will be far more entertaining than the awarding as such. Nowhere near as amusing as "soccer"'s nomination (and rumored consideration) a few years back.

Announcement rumoured at 4pm tomorrow (swedish time) I guess but don't know for sure that's 10am est.

UPDATE: announcement now set for 11am (Swedish) on Friday. 5am here?

Stole the link to DeLong from Calpundit

2003-10-07T17:47:00.000-05:00

ANOTHER ONE FOR THE T-SHIRT
Alexei A. Abrikosov of the University of Chicago's Argonne National Laboratory wins this year's Nobel Prize in Physics.

2003-10-07T15:05:00.000-05:00

MORE ON BIAS IN ACADEMIA
Professor Jacob Levy of The Volokh Conspiracy comments on my experience with classroom bias.

Professor Levy makes a point that I wasn't able to articulate very well:

"It's the little jokes, one-liners, casual asides, and obviously-everybody-knows comments that you've got to watch out for. This is a familiar point with regard to hostile environments against, e.g., women. But it's also true as regards whether the classroom is experienced as a place open to political disagreements. The more a prof's lecture is peppered with these little asides and dicta, the more the impression is created that views other than the prof's own won't be given a respectful hearing."

Public health study is perhaps different from a lot of academia because the end-goal of academic programs in public health is the improvement of public health, not necessarily understanding it or questioning its value. In history or poli-sci classes, policies and events are scrutinized from all perspectives and no ends or methods are accepted without question. The goal is better understanding, not promotion. In many of my public health classes, it's taken for granted that public health is the ultimate end, and as students of public health, we're just trying to find ways to reach that end. To me, personal freedom is of the highest value and I don't believe that it should be subordinate to even the loftiest of public health goals. I'm all for improving public health, but not at the expense of liberty and I'm in school to study public health to draw my own conclusions about what should be changed, why, and how-- not to be taught that public health is the supreme goal and that x,y, and z policies are the ways to improve public health.

The "little jokes, one-liners, casual asides, and obviously-everyone-knows comments" I've experienced in my program aren't just left-leaning comments promoting regulation. They are evidence of the unquestioned attitude that public health is the supreme goal and that our job as public health practitioners is to change public policy to promote this goal. I don't accept those premises and therefore am uneasy with a lot of my coursework.

2003-10-07T00:15:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm here and the technology seems to be working so I may as well poke my head above ground and say hello. I suspect that at least most of you (its only now occured to me to ask Beth who's reading this) know about who I am. For those of you who don't, the blurb below gives the key historical points.

To give everyone a sense of where my source material comes from, my bedside table reading stack (aside from what I'm supposed to be reading for classes I take/teach) includes Carl Ernst's Following Muhammad, Thucydides' History of the Pelopennesian War (bedtime reading) and the current editions of The New Yorker, Harpers, The New Republic, Bitch, AJS, and Daedalus.

Blog/online wise I read Talking Points Memo, Crooked Timber, Calpundit, The Volokh Conspiracy, Dan Drezner, Political Aims, Atrios, Slate, The New York Times, and last but not least, the good old hometown paper.

Its a long shopping list and explains, most likely, why my MA progress has been slow since the start of school a few months ago.

Substance will follow eventually.

2003-10-06T06:22:00.000-05:00

PLURAL TITLE NOW MAKES SENSE
Welcome to the newest Reg Rat, Clint Key. Clint, a Montanan, ex-ranch hand, University of Chicago alumnus, sociology graduate student at the University of North Carolina, inveterate reader, and self-described huge dork will be joining the blog. When the spirit moves him, I look forward to his posts.

2003-10-03T09:08:00.000-05:00

YET ANOTHER LAUREATE
Congrats to JM Coetzee (pronounced kut-ZEE-uh), this year's Nobel Laureate in Literature and visiting professor at the University of Chicago. I guess the t-shirt needs updating.

2003-10-02T13:42:00.000-05:00

UP-CHUG
My milk expertise is quoted on the venerable Crescat Sententia.

2003-10-02T13:15:00.000-05:00

WHO'S PAYING?
The New York Times reports on required hospital services to the indigent. Hospitals are required by law to provide emergency room care regardless of ability to pay. Is this right? I venture to say that even if hospitals are not required to provide such care, doctors and nurses aren't going to allow someone right in front of them to die. In a true emergency, ability to pay is not the first thing considered. People rushed into an emergency room on the brink of death are treated as fast as medically possible and the bill is sorted out later. When you dial 911, the operator doesn't ask, "And how might you be paying for the ambulance today?" However, true emergencies don't comprise the majority of visits to the ER by those who can't pay. Because the ER is required to treat without compensation, it is often used as a primary care physician's office for those with limited resources, reducing the quality of care to those with real emergencies and burdening hospital resources. Why should a private hospital subsidize these activities? The usual reply is "because health care is a necessity or universal right." Well, isn't eating also a necessity? Are grocers required to give away food just because someone says he can't afford it? If the person takes it without paying, isn't that considered stealing to even the most soft-hearted among us? The article mentions that the State of New York puts a tax on all hospital bills which goes into a state-controlled fund, distributed to hospitals to compensate for care of the poor. However, also according to the article, $847 million is the fund's total payout and actual unpaid hospital bills amount to $2.5 billion a year. Hospitals have to shoulder 2/3 of the burden of caring for the poor. Might I also add that the other third is shouldered by the paying hospital patients whose care is compromised by abuse of the system. My public policy suggestion is to scrap the legislation and levy altogether. I contend that in true emergencies, hospitals will provide care first and worry about bills later. People who use emergency rooms for purposes other than emergent medical problems will be dissuaded to because of the prohibitive cost and hospitals will be able to improve the quality of care they provide by freeing resources. It's in a hospital's best interest if it works out an installment payment plan for those with limited resources, and for the true charity cases, a hospital can decide its own way to fund care. Even if the hospital charges other patients a fee for it's charity as part of providing service, this has to be more efficient than the government mandating a state-controlled kitty.

2003-10-02T10:51:00.000-05:00

GIANT APES AND LIZARDS DESTROYING CITIES
The old arcade game Rampage is available to play for free here. A highly recommended distraction from tiresome required reading.

2003-10-02T10:45:00.000-05:00

ALWAYS TAKE THE WEATHER WITH YOU
Ohio State University's School of Atmospheric Sciences has a great weather server. Not only can you get up to date weather info for anywhere in the U.S., you can also learn about such weather topics as convective inhibition, storm relative helicity, and radar.

2003-10-01T20:11:00.000-05:00

KILLER BOOBS
The Washington Post reports that women with breast implants have higher rates of suicide than other women. The study includes data from Swedish, Finnish, and American women and the data indicate a threefold increase in suicide rate compared to non-augmented women. This should not be surprising, as most women who elect for an expensive and invasive surgery to improve sexual appeal can't possibly have very good self-esteem to begin with. Supporting this is the finding that women who have undergone breast augmentation after mastectomy don't have the elevated suicide rate. As a group, people who want to change their normal, albeit humanly varying breasts can't be expected to be as mentally sound as people who would like to change disfigured body parts that remind them of a horrible disease. Also, suicide rates in general are higher for western women, i.e., those who can afford the surgery and are thus more likely to think about and undergo the operation. (most recent death by suicide stats per 100,000 women: US-4.1, UK-3.3, Finland-10.9, Sweden-8, Peru 0.4, Thailand-2.4, Brazil-1.8 to list just a few). Why do rich women kill themselves? Lack of better things to do? Do they have nothing else serious to worry about so they obsess over themselves? Short answer: probably. Long answer: there's also a lot more to it. However, it's ridiculous to claim any causation between breast implants and suicide. Take a close look at the sample population before claiming that silicone makes you crazy.

NB: The previous link is to World Health Organization data. The WHO site is an excellent database for all kinds of health statistics, especially mortality and birth data.

Thanks to OxBlog for the pointer.

2003-09-30T15:01:00.000-05:00

WINNING THE WEE HEARTS
Chief Wiggles, a soldier in Iraq has started a massive toy drive for Iraqi children.

Some no no toys:

Any guns of any kind
No violent action hereos
No violent toys
No barbie dolls or dolls skantily dressed
No toys that shoot something, no projectiles
No water guns
Lets just keep it simple, simple toys, just the basics, these kids have
nothing.
Crayons might melt, so probably not the best thing to send. It was 107 degrees in Baghdad today.
Quick update from the first comment, Colored pencils would be wonderful!

Send toys to:

Chief Wiggles
c/o CPA Chaplain
CPA-C2, Debriefer
APO AE 09335

A good idea is to go to the Toys R Us website and have them shipped directly there.

2003-09-29T16:17:00.000-05:00

MISSING CHICAGO...
Jacob Levy writes on not encountering viewpoint discrimination in academia. Prof. Levy mentions in his blog that his experience is based on his time at Brown, Princeton, and The University of Chicago. Today marks my fourth day into the foray of graduate education at The Ohio State University School of Public Health and I can tell you that I definitely miss my dear alma mater and especially Prof. Levy's vibrant, intellectually honest, and thoughtful class. In all of my four years at the U of C, I can't recall a single instance in which a professor used his position to advance a particular political position or in which I ever felt the integrity of scholarly argument threatened. However, the blissful days of rigorous questioning in class seem to have ended for me when I began this program. In just four days, I have encountered an extreme left bias that I will demonstrate with the following example. Today in class, the instructor posted the following quote in his powerpoint presentation for the sole purpose of ridiculing it:

"As far as I am concerned, any restaurants should be able to operate without a license if they are willing to post a sign that states that this establishment is not inspected by the health department." -Chairman of House Committee to selected local health department representatives when discussing new food safety legislation.

After posting the quote, he laughed mockingly, derided "our stupid legislators" and the class responded with giggles of agreement. I really can't see what's so obviously wrong with the statement to dismiss it with such scorn. As a lover of the free market, I support elimination of licensure in many cases and would like to consider this case further but was heavily dissuaded from doing so in class. (Might I add that this class is required for the degree). To add insult to injury, the instructor concluded his regulatory rant with this quote:

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion." -Thomas Jefferson

For the instructor to be consistent, Thomas Jefferson must have also added to the end of that one "...except for in the case of choosing restaurants. Dining out cannot be entrusted to the people and therefore restaurants must be lisenced by the government."

My point in this example is not just to bitch, (although it feels good to get that out) but to suggest that perhaps Prof. Levy's experience with integrity in academia has to do with the quality of his institutions. Brown, Princeton, and the University of Chicago are top-tier universities because of a devotion to academic integrity and therefore won't tolerate discrimination for political biases. It's been a big blow for me to learn that every university department isn't as committed to scholarly integrity as is the University of Chicago.

2003-08-27T22:24:00.000-05:00

This image is worth wallpapering your desktop with. Apparently Berlin has a feral boar problem. The best line of the article is the suggestion of curbing pig populations by "putting birth control substances into acorns." As crazy as it seems, birth control in animals isn't uncommon. Practically every female critter you've seen at the zoo has an IUD implant (zoo husbandry programs are quite sophisticated, aimed at enhancing diversity of captive populations to promote conservation missions, ergo, "accidents" almost never happen). Birth control methods have also been applied to feral animal populations such as monkeys in Hong Kong. Actress Brigitte Bardot is campaigning to control feral dog populations in eastern Europe through sterilization/release programs as well. Though I consider myself as weighing in on the side of animals, I find Bardot's efforts misguided and the acorn tri-cyclin idea ludicrous. In Bucharest alone, there are estimated to be at least 300,000 stray dogs. As far as I know, Romania is not a rich country and would be far better off allocating its resources elsewhere. Sterilized dogs also pose a significant public health problem. Think of it this way: wouldn't you be upset if Mayor Daley spent a lot of money to release a pack of 300,000 dogs onto Chicago when those dogs could have more cheaply and just as humanely been eliminated? As far as the pill-in-the-acorn idea goes, imagine the consequences to other acorn eating animals such as squirrels, not to mention the possibility of birth control hormones leaching into the water human Berliners drink. The Hong Kong Monkey Plan, on the other hand seems more on target. First of all the monkeys, though not native, just need to be pushed back a little, not eradicated as there is ample space for them in the surrounding hills. Secondly, monkeys are simians and we as humans should feel a great responsibility to treat other primates similarly to humans. Thirdly, Hong Kong seems to be able to afford this elaborate birth control plan and the monkeys are a beloved component of the city.

2003-07-01T14:20:00.000-05:00

The New York Times reports today on pruritis. Itch, an under-loved sensation, is really quite interesting. When studying opioids in class I learned that one of the most common side effects of pain-killers is pruritis and that the reason for this is most likely that pain masks itch. Opioids may attenuate pain but itch originates from another center and by disguising the pain, itch becomes evident. And by scratching an itch, you produce a slight sensation of pain which masks the underlying itch. The term for the phenomenon of hiding one sensation by engaging in another is counterirritation and it's responsible for more than just relieving itches. When you have a headache and you massage your temples, that's counterirritation, except you are not using pain to mask itch, you're using pressure to mask pain. The same principle applies to acupressure and acupuncture. These ancient medicinal practices are believed to be effective in alleviating pain by giving your brain something else to think about. To draw the concept out beyond sensation and to other realms of the body, think about the autoimmune disease, MS. In patients with MS (multiple sclerosis), the immune system basically starts attacking itself with debilitating consequences. One experimental treatment that provides people with some measure of relief is bee sting therapy. Many sufferers of MS subject themselves to repeated bee stings to slow the progression of the disease. The idea behind bee venom therapy is to give the immune system something else to attack rather than itself: the bee venom acts as a decoy, in much the same manner that pain distracts you from itch.

2003-07-01T13:56:00.000-05:00

Geoffrey Nunberg, professor of linguistics at Stanford University spoke today on Fresh Air about slippery slopes. The full text of his speech is here. Key excerpts follow. I haven't learned to indent yet so anything inside of the >><< is Prof. Nunberg's words.

>>It's a convenient way of warning of the dire effects of some course of action without actually having to criticize the action itself, which is what makes it a favorite ploy of hypocrites: "Not that there's anything wrong with A, mind you, but A will lead to B and then C, and before you know it we'll be up to our armpits in Z."

Or sometimes the slippery slope is invoked in the course of making an argument about the impossibility of drawing clear moral distinctions -- if you can't draw the line between A and B, then how can you accept one and reject the other? That's an argument you always hear from abortion critics -- where does a fetus end and a child begin? It's an instance of what Greek philosophers called the fallacy of the heap, or the Sorites Fallacy. If you start with a heap of sand and take one grain away, you're still left with a heap, but if you keep repeating the process you wind up saying that a single grain of sand is a heap all by itself. The mistake is in assuming that if a distinction isn't clear-cut it can't be drawn at all.

But the real problem with slippery slope arguments isn't their logic, but the rhetorical games people play with them -- they're a way of turning every decision into an unprecedented step into the void. In theory, you could use Scalia's logic to run the metaphor uphill -- you could just as easily say that refusing to overturn the Texas statute would open the way to laws restricting nose rings, public dancing, or other things that voters might find morally unacceptable. But nobody ever brings up the slippery slope to argue for a change in law or policy -- it's always an argument for maintaining the status quo. The English legal scholar Glanville Williams once called the slippery slope "the trump card of the traditionalist, because no proposal for reform is immune to [it]."<<

2003-06-21T08:47:00.000-05:00

Mr. Bruce Farley, a fantastic high school physics teacher and a kind human being died on Monday of a heart attack. Mr. Farley imparted such life to physics that anyone who attended his class really did come to believe the acronym he lived by, PIF: physics is fun. If anyone ever deserved a New York Times obituary, it is he. Alas, the world doesn't celebrate high school physics teachers and his death is commemorated only by the Indianapolis Star. Those whose lives he touched remember him fondly and regret his untimely passing. PIF forever!

2003-06-18T15:13:00.000-05:00

The New York Times reports today on Nude Summer Camp. While I advocate the practice of liberty, especially when it comes to flouting social convention in such a seemingly benign fashion, I am concerned about the safety of kids running around the forest naked. No, it isn't poison ivy in those sensitive areas that unsettles me: it's exploiters. Pedophile outsiders who could sneak in or trusted insiders who are potential predators would make me think twice before allowing my teen to spend the summer au natural with his peers. The article mentions that there are extensive security measures, including tall fences, security gates, and guards. However, those measures didn't stop an unwelcome visitor from entering the pool area while campers were swimming. It also mentions that the camp runs extensive background and criminal checks on personnel but not all predators have prior convictions. In theory, the risks to campers at Nude Summer Camp are like those at other camps - they participate in all the same activities as campers at "regular" camps with adults who have been deemed responsible supervising. And pedophiles target children regardless of their clothing status. But it seems to me that liberty seekers aren't the only ones attracted to the idea of nudity. Don't you think that weirdos might envision such a camp as a smorgasbord? The elevated risk I imagine might be unsupported but it still makes me uneasy. On the scale of public good, does the civil liberty benefit outweigh the potential safety cost in this case? If the camp were for naked adults, there would be no question in my mind. They know and understand the risks and should not be hindered from their free expression. But 11-18 year olds? If safety concerns were not an issue, I believe that adolescents are competent enough to make decisions about their bodies, including going to naked summer camp. So for me it all hinges on whether these kids are at elevated risk for predation and exploitation by weirdos and pedophiles while at camp. If they are at special risk, are they still competent to choose naked summer camp? All summer camps should take precautions to protect children from weirdos and my gut tells me that naked summer camps should be extra-stringent in their precautions.

2003-06-12T13:05:00.000-05:00

Australia is considering implementing a fat tax. Obesity, the west's greatest public health problem, not only places undue burden on hips and thighs but on the stretched-thin health care system. It's about time fat people carry their own weight!

2003-05-22T14:53:00.000-05:00

My friend Clint has linked a Hell-boundedness test to his blog. He's a lot more virtuous than I suspected. I, on the other hand, am destined for at least the City of Dis.

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Very Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Moderate
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	High
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Very High
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very High
Level 7 (Violent)	Moderate
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	Very High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	High

Take the Dante's Inferno Test