Kieran Healy

Chatroulette

If you are one of the few remaining people not to have tried it out, watch this movie or this Daily Show clip and then come back here. The rest of you know that Chatroulette is a human slot machine where pretty much every other round comes up with some guy abusing himself or demanding that any ladies within range expose themselves. As a trained observer of human behavior I was professionally obliged to investigate. Bearing in mind the second sort of modal user, I used the following image:

Selected perfectly SFW results follow.

[Read more →]

Carroll on Colbert

Cosmic Variance’s Sean Carroll doing a very good job indeed on The Colbert Report. That shit is hard. Along the way he makes deft use of a Dara O’Briain line (“Of course science doesn’t know everything — if science knew everything, it would stop”) that I believe I introduced him to, so therefore I take full credit for all the laughs he got and expect to receive a check for any royalties accruing from Colbert-related sales.

Lists and Loops in R

Following up on some work Gabriel has been doing, here’s a way to accomplish the same sort of thing, with less reliance on loops and more on functions that work on lists. Also, a way to manage the conversion of the .png files to an animated .gif without having to manually rename files. As I say in the comments over at Code and Culture, if the code works as a loop there’s not necessarily a strong reason to vectorize it, but I’d be interested to see whether this approach was at all faster. (The use of the pipe command does make it more convenient to manage the files created by igraph’s plots, though.)

Gained in Translation

Brad DeLong:

DragonDictate for iPhone had better learn not to write “Martian” when I say “Marshallian”. Just saying.

It’s not often you see a case where the jokes literally write themselves.

Easily display information about R objects in Emacs/ESS

I found this post that provides a nice function for conveniently showing some information about R objects in ESS mode. ESS already shows some information about functions as you type them (in the status bar) but this has wider scope. Move the point over an R object (a function, a data frame, etc), hit C-c C-g and a tooltip pops up showing some relevant information about the object, such as the arguments a function takes or a basic summary for a vector and so on. As written it’s a little unwieldy to use it on large dataframes, but it would be easy to modify the function used to summarize a particular class of object. Here’s the code:

There’s also a quick screencast of it in action:

Pretty handy. I’ve incorporated this into the Emacs Starter Kit.

Crocodile Tears Lie Thick on the Page of the American Political Science Review

I was reading Cohen, March & Olsen’s “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” this week and, by coincidence, also looked at some of World Society: The Writings of John Meyer, a collection of Meyer’s most important work edited and introduced by Georg Krücken and Gili Drori. Sadly it is far, far too expensive and only available in hardback at the moment. (I got it after reviewing a manuscript for Oxford.) In “Reflections: Institutional Theory and World Society”, Meyer takes on a string of critics. Here’s one bit connected to the Garbage Can paper:

External models flow into the structures of actors in highly decoupled ways. Policies and structures tend to be poorly linked to each other, and often poorly linked to internal subunits and to practices. This is true on an individual case by case basis even when at the systemic level there is a good deal of overall coherence. The decoupling idea has the most massive empirical support in studies of individual actors as in the famous gaps between norms and behavior. It is a central finding in the study of organizations … It is a routine observation in studies of nation states … And it is well-theorized in institutionalist reasoning. … Realists have the greatest difficulty with the decoupling idea. They imagine that social structural rules arise because powerful political and economic actors want them in place, and want them implemented. If this doesn’t happen, someone is cheating, or someone is asleep, and in any case great long-run stresses must be resolved. Permanent decoupling … is a problem for most realists. One can see the extreme tension, for instance, in an attack on a precursor of institutionalist thinking – the famously imagistic paper by Cohen, March and Olsen called “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice” (1972) – by Bendor et al. (2001) thirty years after the original paper was published. The original paper had some creative imagery about decoupling at its core, and was widely cited for this: it also had some illustrative simulation models that were given little subsequent attention. Unable to effectively attack the core imagery, Bendor et al. devote extraordinary effort to destroy the simulation models, clearly attempting to undercut the whole subsequent institutionalist development (2001: 189): “We believe it is possible to revitalize the [theory] … this operation would deprive the [theory] and the March-Olsen variant of the new institutionalism of a certain mystique. Without this bold move, however, there is little chance that these ideas will shed much enduring light on institutions.” Crocodile tears lie thick on the page of the American Political Science Review

On Knowing when to Stop

Bill Watterson gives an interview, his first in quite a while:

Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved—and are still grieving—when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them?

This isn’t as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say. It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

I’ve never regretted stopping when I did.

On Knowing how to Start

Mark Pilgrim:

I’m a three-time (soon to be four-time) published author. When aspiring authors learn this, they invariably ask what word processor I use. It doesn’t fucking matter! I happen to write in Emacs. I also code in Emacs, which is a nice bonus. Other people write and code in vi. Other people write in Microsoft Word and code in TextMate+ or TextEdit or some fancy web-based collaborative editor like EtherPad or Google Wave. Whatever. Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening—really listening—to what people say about your writing. This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and—if you can manage to get anybody’s attention—get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed! And you’re asking me what word processor I use? Just fucking write, then publish, then write some more. One day your writing will get featured on a site like Reddit and you’ll go from 5 readers to 5000 in a matter of hours, and they’ll all tell you how much your writing sucks. And most of them will be right! Learn how to respond to constructive criticism and filter out the trolls, and you can write the next great American novel in edlin.

Not your Father’s Communicative Action

Here is Jürgen Habermas’ Twitter feed. No, really. One can’t quite be sure, of course (maybe a German speaker can point to some coverage of this in the German press?), but it seems on the level. If so (even if it’s him via an assistant), that is pretty outstanding, because my ASA Publications Committee slogan can now be “Jürgen Habermas is on Twitter but ASR still requires paper submissions”.

Update: Looks like I need a new slogan. Boo.

Naturalizing the Social, and Vice Versa

Via Cosma Shalizi, reports of a very interesting piece of work: Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behaviour, C. Eisenegger, M. Naef, R. Snozzi, M. Heinrichs & E. Fehr, Nature 463, 356-359 (21 January 2010). The abstract:

Both biosociological and psychological models, as well as animal research, suggest that testosterone has a key role in social interactions^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}. Evidence from animal studies in rodents shows that testosterone causes aggressive behaviour towards conspecifics⁷. Folk wisdom generalizes and adapts these findings to humans, suggesting that testosterone induces antisocial, egoistic, or even aggressive human behaviours. However, many researchers have questioned this folk hypothesis^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6}, arguing that testosterone is primarily involved in status-related behaviours in challenging social interactions, but causal evidence that discriminates between these views is sparse. Here we show that the sublingual administration of a single dose of testosterone in women causes a substantial increase in fair bargaining behaviour, thereby reducing bargaining conflicts and increasing the efficiency of social interactions. However, subjects who believed that they received testosterone—regardless of whether they actually received it or not—behaved much more unfairly than those who believed that they were treated with placebo. Thus, the folk hypothesis seems to generate a strong negative association between subjects’ beliefs and the fairness of their offers, even though testosterone administration actually causes a substantial increase in the frequency of fair bargaining offers in our experiment.

Al Gore, Type Nerd

Al Gore asks for, and gets, a redesign of the Roman ‘1’ in Brioni, the typeface used to set his new book.

Biblatex and the Textmate Latex bundle

I’ve been using Philipp Lehman’s biblatex package to manage citations in (xe)latex documents. When compiling in TextMate using cmd-R (with latexmk.pl enabled), the bibtex files are not processed properly. BibTeX cannot find the citations and exits (in the html window) with

Found 0 errors, and 0 warnings in 0 runs

bibtex exited with status 2


Biblatex works in part by generating an additional bibfile called file-blx.bib in the same directory as the file.tex being processed. This is in addition to whatever main.bib file is being used to store actual citations and located in the BIBINPUTS directory. The problem is that that TextMate can’t find this file during its compilation sequence:

The solution is to explicitly append the current directory to BIBINPUTS in Preferences > Advanced > Shell Variables, so that instead of , say,

/Users/kjhealy/Library/texmf/bibtex/bib


you have,

/Users/kjhealy/Library/texmf/bibtex/bib:.

Note the period at the end there. That way Textmate will search the current directory for bibtex files in addition to looking wherever your .bib files are. This has been your weekend bit of Textmate nerdery.