Over-Enthusiastic Organ Procurement?

Reading about a case described in the National Review by Wesley J. Smith,¹ Kevin Drum wonders “if there really are serious moves afoot to redefine “death” in order to expedite organ harvesting.” The case in question concerns a Colorado man, William Thaddeus Rardin, who shot himself in the head. His organs were procured for transplantation. In his report on the death, however, the local Coroner, Mark Young, ruled that proper procedure hadn’t been followed, that Rardin’s brain death hadn’t been properly established and so the cause of death was the organ procurement itself. The local Organ Procurement Organization (OPO), Donor Alliance, has strongly rejected this charge.

An answer to Kevin’s question, and some commentary, below the fold.

How do Swear words get to be swear words?

In my Contemporary Moral Issues course I’ve recently been teaching about hate speech codes on campus. Well, it was contemporary a few years ago, and still interests me. So it was fair enough for one of my students to email me a question I can’t really answer:

Yesterday I found myself wondering why bad words are bad. I can’t seem to figure it out. I understand that some people find these words to be offensive but I don’t know why that is. Any comments?

I started an email rambling on about conventions, taboos, and common knowledge about certain uses (eg, various racist epithets enjoy their status as deeply offensive and hurtful words because we all now they are routinely used by racists for that purpose); and of course I realise that conventions depend on background practices and contexts (it is awfully difficult, in America, to come up with a hurtful and ‘racist’ term for English people, because, well, their just isn’t the social context or history to support such a term). But swearing doesn’t have exactly the same sort of route, and within each group of bad words there seem to be different paths. And, truth is, I feel that I’m just restating the existence of the phenomenon he’s wondering about. If you can answer his question I can either steal your answer and sound smart (and hope he doesn’t read the site) or just point him here.

Iterated PD

Tyler Cowen had a discussion of this a few days ago, but I think it worth a mention here: tit-for-tat was beaten in a recent iterated PD computer tournament. The winners entered a large number of different strategies programmed to communicate with one another. By signalling their existence to their confederates and adopting master and slave roles, some strategies were able to gain full exploiter’s advantage over many rounds and thereby build up huge scores. Non-confederates were systematically punished by strategies from this stable, thus damaging the scores even of conditionally co-operative rivals. Full details here .

Linkage

Two must read pieces by David Glenn and Mark Schmitt (discussion below fold).

Quantifiers and Sports

It’s impossible to think about anything other than baseball today, so time for a little Yankee-bashing. One of the odd things about the Yankees self-promotion (which I’m sadly exposed to being back in NY) is their frequent comparison between themselves and all other teams in the world. This can lead to problems, because while the Yankees have won more titles than any other team in major North American sports, they haven’t won more titles than lots of teams in major sports outside America. But it can also lead to interesting questions. Here’s an example from Steven Goldman, who is in general one of the best sportswriters on the internets.

New York has won more sporting championships than any other city in the world.

Is this true?

My first instinct was that Glasgow would have more championships that New York running away, but maybe that’s overlooking the New York teams (especially the baseball Giants) that have left. Or maybe it’s unfair to include Glasgow. It’s certainly unfair, for example, to include all the AFL championships won by Melbourne teams from back in the years when all, or all but one, of the AFL teams were from Melbourne. So which is the most successful sporting city in the world?

Iaora Tahiti

Pop quiz: name a wily old political operator who relies on the French Right to keep him out of jail and in power indefinitely while he out-manoeuvres the opposition and bamboozles the tax-payer.

No, not Jacques Chirac. His buddy Gaston Flosse, aka Papa Flosse, the president-in-waiting of French Polynesia. Chirac’s unbending desire to keep Flosse in power has thrown French Polynesia into a political and institutional crisis, sparking the biggest protests ever seen in Tahiti, and accusations by the French Left of a legal coup d’etat.

It's not too late

Bush is pushing Congressional leaders to pass the 9/11 Commission bill as soon as possible. The bill is in conference now. Katherine has a good post about the language re: outsourcing torture in the House bill. (The Senate bill has no such language.) It’s an exemplar of the saying, “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays virtue”. Under the House bill, we’d still ship suspects to countries where they could expect to be tortured (like we did with Maher Arar). But we’d first get worthless assurances that the suspect wouldn’t be tortured (like we did with Maher Arar). Outsourcing torture is not only immoral, it’s irrational- since when do we trust Syria? Says Katherine:

It had occurred to me that even if one accepted that torture was good policy, it did not make much sense to rely on countries like Syria and Egypt to interrogate suspects under torture for us and faithfully describe their confessions. At a minimum, they were likely to exploit it to harm domestic opponents as well as dangerous terrorists.

We have an opportunity to contact the members of conference committee to politely let our concerns be heard. Here they are.

House Democrats:

Robert Menendez (NJ)
Jane Harman (CA)

Ike Skelton (MO)

House Republicans:

David Drier (CA)
Pete Hoekstra (MI)

Henry Hyde (IL)

James Sensenbrenner (WI)

Duncan Hunter (CA)

Senate Democrats

Joe Lieberman (CT)
Carl Levin (MI)

Dick Durbin (IL)

Jay Rockefeller (WV)

Bob Graham (FL)

Frank Lautenberg (NJ)

Senate Republicans

Susan Collins (ME)
George Voinovich (OH)

Norm Coleman (MN)

John Sununu (NH)

Pat Roberts (KS)

Mike DeWine (OH)

Trent Lott (MS)

Time management tips

If you’re reading this, it’s a fairly safe bet that you’re in need of time-management tips¹. On the other hand, the idea of a blogger giving time management tips is problematic, to say the least. Undaunted by this contradiction, I’m going to offer a few. The details reflect my main activity, which is academic research but may be more or less adaptable to other kinds of jobs.

Baby pictures on homepages

If anyone has the time, I would love to see a systematic study of how many male versus female academics (or other professionals) portray themselves on their Web sites with or without babies. I realize the complications, e.g. really hard to sample people’s homepages, really hard to control for whether said person portrayed on a Web site even has a baby, but I’d still be curious to see someone gather data on this.

Here’s my motivation for the question. I recently saw a job talk where the candidate had pictures of his kids on his computer’s desktop. I have never seen a woman give a talk with this kind of background illustration (granted, I had never before seen a man give such a talk either). It made me think that this person could pull it off because as a guy he does not have to be concerned about committee members wondering whether he has a spouse who will need a job as well or whether he will take his work seriously despite the fact that he has children. But I recall plenty of cases of women who are married without children or on the market as mothers worrying considerably about how to downplay such personal information.

My impression is that men tend to put up pictures of their children on their professional Web sites more often, but I do not base this observation on any systematic analysis of the situation. I suspect the reason for this (assuming it really is the case) is that for male professionals to show themselves with a baby counts as a positive quality, or, in the least, will likely not count as a negative. It suggests that he is a concerned and proud father who takes his parental duties seriously (okay, that may be a leap:), he is an enlightened man. In contrast, I suspect women still feel that they have to prove themselves as professional first, parent second (or in the least prove that the latter doesn’t trump the former) thus prompting them not to be quite as forward about personal information on their Web sites. I guess one could argue that if for someone a proud father means an enlightened man then a proud mother should not come with negative repercussions, but it is not clear that the mothers feel that way about it.

Just among the people I know, I can think of at least a few couples where the man’s Web site has relatively prominent family information whereas the woman’s site downplays any such content. Even if it is simply about the parents projecting onto their environment how they may be perceived, that is already something to consider about how mothers versus fathers are made to feel about their family situations in professional settings.

May-December Marriages Again

For the sake of reducing the general level of snarkiness in the world, the pursuit of truth to its innermost thingys, and of course the children, I’ve looked a bit further at the question of May-December marriages and what that tells us about revealed preferences. As is often the case, the data tell us both more and less than you might think. The amateur demography continues below the fold, at Holbovian length.

Parliamentary prerogatives

Dan Drezner and I have been conducting a friendly argument over whether or not the European Union is a standard international organization (i.e. a creature of its member states) or something more. The minor crisis surrounding Rocco Buttiglione, incoming Commissioner for Justice and Home Affairs should be an interesting data point for our disagreement. The European Parliament has the right to vote no confidence in the European Commission as a whole. Over the last several years, as the Economist notes, the Parliament has assiduously sought to expand this right into the power to make or break individual Commissioners whom it doesn’t like. The Parliament has very cleverly expanded its powers far beyond the intent of the member states, by instituting “confirmation hearings” in which it claims the right to judge whether or not individual Commission members are up to the job. Clearly, it doesn’t think that Italian nominee Rocco Buttiglione is suited for his responsibilities - he’s a conservative Catholic whose personal views on gay rights and single mothers sit rather awkwardly with his responsibility to protect minority rights. A majority of MEPs seems to be willing to vote Buttiglione down; but Italy, a powerful member state, is refusing to back down and withdraw his nomination. The Commission President, who decides the portfolio of individual commissioners, is caught in the middle. As the Economist says, this dispute is a reflection of “a broader philosophical question: where should power really lie in the European Union?”

The Economist’s hopes to the contrary, it seems that the Commission President has decided that it’s more important to please the Parliament than the member states. According to the FT, he’s negotiating a deal whereby Buttiglione would have his powers over human rights and minority affairs stripped away from him. Even more pertinently, the President seems to be contemplating a settlement in which Parliament’s powers vis-a-vis the Commission would be expanded very substantially. This would lead to a very clear shift in the balance of power within the European Union, in which the influence of member states would be weakened, and the Parliament’s relationship with the Commission would start to resemble that between the US Congress and the executive branch. If this comes to pass, it will be very hard (perhaps impossible?) to square with theories of international relations that emphasize the power of states to determine international outcomes - it would be a development that (a) certainly wasn’t anticipated in the Treaties signed by the member states, and (b) clearly wasn’t in member states’ interests. It would also have the incidental benefits of embarrassing Berlusconi’s government, and clipping the wings of a rather dubious potential Commissioner (regardless of his views on gay people and women, his enthusiasm for camps for immigrants should be enough to disqualify him for the job).

Who lets foreigners vote?

James, in comments to my Condorcet post, writes

It will only anger the American voter to suggest that foreign nationals should be involved in electing the US President.

Of course (some) foreign nationals are allowed to vote in British general elections (Henry, Kieran and Maria would be if they were resident). I’m guessing that there are other countries that also allow (some) foreign nationals to vote in national elections. [1] Information?

¹ EU citizens can vote in countries other than their own in European elections and in the UK I think they can vote in local elections too.

The imperial presidency

Teresa Nielsen Hayden makes a very interesting aside in a long post about how GWB’s way of dealing with criticism reminds her of vituperative slushpile authors with middle-management backgrounds.

You know how topical jokes are generally formed by adapting earlier groups of cognate jokes? I’ve been looking into the current batch of GWB jokes, and find that many of the jokes from which they’re drawn were originally about Stalin. But I digress.

This seems to me quite telling. Mark Schmitt makes a good case for GWB as a “bad CEO,” but the administration’s refusal to brook criticism and wilful contempt for “reality” seems more grotesque and dangerous than that. It verges on what the French call ubuisme (from Alfred Jarry’s Pere Ubu). When I read Ron Suskind’s article on the administration, I couldn’t stop thinking of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book on the last days of Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia, The Emperor.

It was a small dog, a Japanese breed. His name was Lulu. He was allowed to sleep in the Emperor’s great bed. During various ceremonies, he would run away from the Emperor’s lap and pee on dignitaries’ shoes. The august gentlemen were not allowed to flinch or make the slightest gesture when they felt their feet getting wet. I had to walk among the dignitaries and wipe the urine from their shoes with a satin cloth. This was my job for ten years.

Ask the audience or Condorcet goes to Washington

What is the US Presidential election about? Well, one possible answer is that it is about which of George W. Bush and John Kerry would make the best President of the United States. Now there’s certainly room for disagreement about the relevant qualities to be best President, but much of the media and blogospheric discourse is couched in such a way as to appear to be discussing a matter of fact: best translates as “most competent”, “wisest” etc. I’m going to assume — for the purposes of this post alone and contrary to my saner instincts — that a matter of fact is indeed involved. Given that simplifying assumption, the matter of determining who would be the best President by a democratic vote is something we might justify by invoking Condorcet ’s jury theorem. According to the jury theorem (which I cite in Zev Trachtenberg’s formulation [1])

the probability that majority is correct ( Pm ) is given by the formula
v ^h-k/(v ^h-k+e ^h-k ), where number of voters = n = h+k , where h is the number of voters in the majority, v is the probability that each voter will give the correct answer, and e is the probability that each voter will give the wrong answer.

This has the remarkable consquence that just in case we expect each voter’s competence slighly to exceed the tossing of a fair coin (say we expect each voter to be right 50.1 per cent of the time), and just in case we can interpret “each voter” to mean “the average voter”, then with an electorate of, say, 100 million, the probability of a majority getting the result right approaches one. Of course, there’s a flip side to this: if the each voter has a < .5 probability of getting the right result, the majority will almost certainly be wrong!

So what should we think, ex ante , about the competence of the average American voter? The votemaster at the excellent electoral-vote.com opines:

Are the voters stupid? It is not considered politically correct to point out that an awful lot of voters don’t have a clue what they are talking about. A recent poll from Middle Tennessee State University sheds some light on the subject. For example, when asked which candidate wants to roll back the tax cuts for people making over $200,000 a year, a quarter thought it was Bush and a quarter didn’t know. And it goes down hill from there. When asked which candidate supports specific positions on various issues, the results were no better than chance. While this poll was in Tennessee, I strongly suspect a similar poll in other states would get similar results. I find it dismaying that many people will vote for Bush because they want to tax the rich (which he opposes) or vote for Kerry because they want school vouchers for religious schools (which he opposes).

(Lest Carol Gould or her apologists think that this post reflects the anti-Americanism of a sneering Brit, let me say (a) I’m quoting an American and (b) that I’m far from convinced that citizens of the UK would fare much better than the people of Tennessee were their competence to be evaluated in a similar poll.) [2]

¹ Trachtenberg, Making Citizens p. 281 n. 6

² A commenter to a recent post of mine asked, sarcastically, whether the I thought flipping a coin would have been superior to having the Supreme Court decide on the outcome in 2000. Actually, I do think flipping a coin would have been a better method then. Whether it would be a better method than having the US electorate decide is questionable, although if voter-competence is such that individuals are more likely to get the wrong answer than the right one, it would yield a better chance of choosing the best President. Observant and thoughtful readers will also notice that, since Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote in 2000, I ought to believe that either Bush was the right answer then or that average voter competence has declined below the .5 level in the past four years….or perhaps I should believe that voter competence then as now exceeds .5 and that Kerry will inevitably triumph, or …..you do the permutations.

Other People's Money

Sinclair Broadcasting, the company which is forcing its stations to run an anti-Kerry film this week, fired one of its bureau chiefs for speaking out against its decision. As Joe Gandelman at the Moderate Voice points out, this rather strongly undermines the premise that the film is a news event.

In the event of a Kerry victory, Sinclair is painting a big bulls-eye on themselves that says “FCC, screw here”. But even if Bush wins, they’ll be too radioactive for the new Bush administration to help. Kerry supporters are furious at Sinclair’s unprecedented descent into blatant electioneering on public airwaves. They’ll continue the boycott of their advertisers, challenge the FCC licences, and use every means possible to punish Sinclair. Either way, Sinclair is not going to get the deregulation they need to stay viable.

In the words of Lehman Brothers, airing the film “has no upside and only multi-dimensional downside”. And it’s not as if this company was in a strong position to pull a stunt with their shareholders’ money. From their most recent 10-K:

Time to degree

Kudos to Duke for collecting and making public data about the time to degree and the rates of completion in their PhD programs. I would be curious to see similar data from other campuses. It’s unclear how many schools collect such data systematically and they certainly don’t make them public very often as the details are usually not very glamorous and can seem pretty discouraging. But it’s important information for people to have as they prepare for their graduate school experiences. It can also help students from other campuses as they try to argue for better/longer support for their training.

More on flying the friendly skies

I couldn’t (but why oh why?) let Kieran be the only one with interesting flight experiences. The other day I was on a flight that taught me why you don’t want to take the last flight out.. and why giving flight attendants the power to throw people off planes may not be such a good idea.

We were sitting in the waiting area quietly waiting for the plane to board. Twenty minutes before boarding we were told that the flight crew’s plane was getting in late so we would be boarding late. The person telling us had a nice sense of humor and everyone seemed pretty low-key about the issue. Eventually the crew arrived and we boarded the plane. Some people didn’t seem so calm anymore. There was some bitterness going around about fitting luggage into various compartments. One of the flight attendants was among the most annoyed people. And sure, passengers can be very annoying, but her reactions seemed a bit excessive.

At this point we were only about fifteen minutes behind schedule. But nothing happened. And still nothing happened. Eventually we were told that we would not be taking off for another half an hour as we were the last flight out and so we had to wait for one more plane that had passengers connecting to our flight. Take note: go for earlier flight next time.

A man in the row in front of mine noticed that there was a cart of luggage still sitting next to our plane. He mentioned it to above referenced bitter flight attendant. She clearly had no idea what was going on and dismissed his comment as none of our business. So he asked again. Next, the following exchange took place:

Broadening the Coalition

In describing his approach to Iraq, John Kerry has stressed that he would involve other countries to a greater extent than the present administration. Critics have been quick to doubt his ability to generate support from other countries. Indeed, some European representatives have been decidedly skeptical about his ability to widen the coalition. And not unreasonably, it has seemed to me.

Education Week on Bush and Kerry

Here, via Laura, is Education Week’s take on the education policies of Bush and Kerry. Not exactly Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But not far off it.

With God on Our Side

Anyone who gets the Sundance Channel should check out the Documentary “With God on Our Side,” showing at 7pm ET this evening. I haven’t seen it yet (nor do I get Sundance) - but I feel confident in recommending it, as it’s produced by David Van Taylor, who was responsible for A Perfect Candidate, the best documentary on American politics that I’ve ever seen.

Conservative Cultural Engineering

“Lexington” of the Economist can sometimes be pretty weird, but his most recent column is more than weird - it’s somewhere out there in the Gamma Quadrant.

Global warming bombshell?

UPDATE: Apparently it’s a dud. In fact, John Quiggin defused it last month. Well, that’s a bit silly not to read my very own weblog. (I knew it was a bit suspicious, what with it being good news and all. What a world, what a world.)

I’ll tuck what now looks to be nonsense under the fold, for the curious. Comments are quite interesting below. And Tim Lambert has an interesting post up in response to the general question. Turns out this is a newer model than Quiggin discussed before.

Eating Your Seed Corn

An interesting, if disturbing, post from Phil Carter of Intel Dump; the Army is deploying the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment to Iraq. This regiment usually serves as the opposition force in training exercises intended to toughen new soldiers. He links to this LA Times article, but comments:

The article misses the most important point: deploying the OPFOR is like eating your seed corn. This unit is responsible for training other units and raising their level of expertise and combat readiness. The 11th ACR is being replaced by a National Guard unit. That’s like replacing the Dodgers with a high school baseball team. Sure, they can both play baseball and wear the uniform — but one is a whole lot more proficient and experienced at its job. The OPFOR has a reputation as a tough enemy, and that’s a good thing because it forces units training at the NTC to become better themselves. By replacing this unit with National Guard troops, the Army has hurt its ability to produce good units for Iraq in the future. Suffice to say, National Guard and active units that go through Fort Irwin aren’t going to get the same tough experience they would have with the Blackhorse regiment as OPFOR — and that means they’ll be less ready for combat when they get to Iraq. This is a desperation measure, and I think the Army will come to regret it.

Remind me again about how the best way to ensure we don’t have a draft is to vote for Bush?

Ignatieff on Hersh

Former (?) liberal hawk Michael Ignatieff reviews Sy Hersh’s Chain of Command in the New York Times:

The war on terror began as a defense of international law, giving America allies and friends. It soon became a war in defiance of law. In a secret order dated Feb. 7, 2002, President Bush declared, as Hersh puts it, that ”when it came to Al Qaeda the Geneva Conventions were applicable only at his discretion.” Based on memorandums from the Defense and Justice Departments and the White House legal office that, in Anthony Lewis’s apt words, ”read like the advice of a mob lawyer to a mafia don on how to . . . stay out of prison,” Bush unilaterally withdrew the war on terror from the international legal regime that sets the standards for treatment and interrogation of prisoners. Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few bad apples, but the direct consequence, Hersh says, of ”the reliance of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion — and eye-for-an-eye retribution — in fighting terrorism.”

Pursuing the Truth

David Bernstein in lofty principle:

Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned, but aren’t universities supposed to stand for the pursuit of truth, “even unto its innermost parts” (Brandeis’s motto). Will a faculty member who pursues such truth get hired to teach Women’s Studies? Will a student who pursues such truth get a good grade?

David Bernstein in empirical practice, one paragraph earlier:

EVER HEAR OF “REVEALED PREFERENCES”? An article in my alma mater’s (Brandeis University) newspaper, The Justice explains that two Brandeis Women’s Studies professors argue that (surprise!) what most of us think of as gender (or, some would say, “sex”) differences are actually mere stereotypes. Maybe it’s unfair for me to comment without reading the professors’ entire book, not to mention the numerous studies on which they claim to rely.

Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned, but would it really be too much effort to do a bit of reading beyond the alumni magazine before blandly dismissing something as lefty claptrap just because it contradicts “revealed preferences that seem blatantly obvious” to you? Especially when one believes in, you know, pursuing the truth unto its innermost wotsits? The preferences revealed in this case suggest the answer is “Yes.”

Thank you Jack White for the fiber-optic Jesus that you gave me

I’d just like to point out that the best album of 2002, The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, is fully audible on the band’s homepage. (Click ‘music’, then ‘album audio player’.) This is particularly notable in light of the recent inclusion of a bonus track, “Thank You Jack White”. I would also like to mention that the artwork for the album is lovely, and the videos are all worth watching. And all good Christians, I trust, trust that 2005 will be the year “Christmas On Mars” finally enoys some sort of cinematic release, so we can stop just watching the trailer.