My average score is over 2-1 male, and the blog is the malest--much less metrosexual than even the Insta-man And I'm a big fag. It would indeed be interesting to see whether gay male writers end up being more or less reliably identified as male by this program. My own hunch suggests that gender is a far more profound determinant of human behavior than sexual orientation.

I hate to burst your bubble, Andrew, but it's not hard to write more manly prose than InstaPundit. Here are a sample scores from TSOS selections:

Female Score: 2479
Male Score: 3885

Female Score: 934
Male Score: 1587

Female Score: 1463
Male Score: 2525

And I'm a heterosexual woman with raging hormones and an evolutionary-psychology-approved waist-hip ratio of 0.70. I'm not masculine; I just like definite articles. I'm not saying gender is socially constructed, but I wouldn't recommend that anyone look for dates based on Gender Genie scores. It's not just me and not just opinion journalists, D Magazine's restaurant critic, Nancy Nichols, reports scoring 100% male, while executive editor Tim Rogers says, "Turns out, I'm a chick."

Reader Elf M. Sternberg writes:

The Gender Genie algorithm, which first appeared in the NY Times' "science" section, is a poor popularization of the algorithm as it appeared in the original academic literature. I have the original paper and that algorithm is meant to be applied to fiction; applied to non-fiction, the authors admit, the algorithm is no better than random chance at detecting an author's gender. A much better alogrithm, the one that has an "80%" chance of detecting author's gender correctly, needs to be taught on a large sample to generate a massive statistical measure of male vs. female characteristics in text.

Even applied to fiction, the popular algorithm is not much better. It seems to think I'm a woman, at least 97% of the time.

Along those lines, this article in The Scientist caught my eye:

Microorganisms that can degrade environmental pollutants have significant biotechnological potential, but until now, the identification of such useful bacteria has mainly relied on attempts to culture contaminated sediment in the laboratory. In the October 27 PNAS, Che Ok Jeon and colleagues at Cornell University report on the use of field-based techniques that have led to the discovery of a previously unknown bacterium capable of biodegradation of naphthalene. The researchers also report that the technique has the potential for use in the discovery of yet more organisms that can biodegrade a wider variety of environmental pollutants....

"This investigative strategy may have general application for elucidating the bases of many biogeochemical processes, hence for advancing knowledge and management of ecological and industrial systems that rely on microorganisms," conclude the authors.

The article has links to primary sources, as well as technical detail I've omitted from the excerpt above.

You've mentioned earthquakes several times, and your points are all well taken, but I think people tend to overstate the danger of earthquakes, at least with respect to places with solid building construction. As a native Californian, I'm probably a little too blase about earthquakes (I tend to think that anything under 6.0 doesn't count), but I think fires are a much bigger problem, at least in Southern California. A major earthquake might come along once or twice a century in a given area, but fires are almost annual, and are harder to protect yourself against.

"Similarly, American tastemakers have for decades condemned neon signs as the epitome of commercial tackiness, and many cities continue to ban neon. Others, however, have rediscovered the lively pleasures of the lights. While some neighboring cities such as Santa Monica have been forcing businesses to take down their neon signs, Los Angeles has spent about a half million dollars helping building owners restore and relight historic neon signs. The city‚s Museum of Neon Art not only preserves vintage signs but lends them to the popular Universal CityWalk outdoor shopping area. Commercial neon has slowly regained its 1920s status as a source of public pleasure."

When I moved to Poland in 1991 the capitol was a grim, grey, grimy, filthy and depressing city. Once "the Paris of Eastern Europe" Warsaw was 98% destroyed in the General Uprising and rebuilt by socialist planners.

As things started to get better after the regime change neon signs started to appear everywhere as business became the new obsession of the Polish people. It brought light and color to this city and made parts of it a beautiful sight, at least at night. It also made places formerly considered horribly dangerous far safer after dark - and the dark hours of Northern European winters are long.

We're still living with the Site and Structure imposed by the planners, but the Skin is everywhere being refurbished and the Services are being upgraded (my water pipes are getting replaced this week). And the first sign of improvement were those signs.

Bravo for neon!

For an explanation of the references to Site, Structure, Skin, and Services, read the excerpt.

My wonderful friend Tama Starr hosted my New York book party at the cool new offices of her company Artkraft Strauss, which makes the spectacular signs that light Times Square. Tama's grandfather started the company back when electric lights were new, and it continues to flourish in the digital age. The offices include a great gallery of old signs and schematics, and the company has now put lots of its archival photos online. Lileks should love this site--much better than Hummels.

I must confess that I--though a gay man (and actively resisting sexist/homophobic construction of my body)--find your views disturbing but not at all surprising.

In the mid to late 90's the market was already reaping the rewards of a Faustian bargain made with it by the humanities at institutions of higher learning. Post-structuralisms and Post-modernisms purportedly concerned with liberating the material world (Plato's nurse) and the aesthetic from the bondage of the spiritual and the rational (de)sensitized legions of young persons who would graduate from "vaunted" institutions only to take positions in new media consulting or creative side ad work. The ploy was readily apparent even if progressives have been characteristically slow to accept the challenge to salvage progressive alliances actively wrecked by thinking such as yours (thinking and praxis that creates divides between gender/sexuality and class/race; dynamism--as it were--can be destructive if we understand it as a human conceptual or political tool capable of worse and better use and not as some natural state as Globalization seems to want us to hold).

I wish there were more Reinhold Niebuhrs in the world and more feminists as opposed to Queer Theorists. However, I fear not because the current circumstances may very well change....

I think you might fail to consider that religious progressives might finally awaken from their decades long slumber to answer the call against idolatry. One can cherish the "feminine" without relying on post-capitalist constructions of the "feminine" to acknowledge the embodiedness of gender. One can be LGBT friendly without becoming a materialist or a vulgar libertarian.

An Augustinian concept of proper use of tools (where material goods do not become idols) and a Puritan (and Jewish) reverence for a transcendent reality that casts doubt on the goodness of our actions is so strongly a part of our national culture that I do not think your vision is ultimately tenable.

It is true that the Manichean distinction of "right" and "left" no longer captures the political scene. Progressive religionists are recognizing this and will continue to make it harder for vulgar libertarians to categorize all religion as fully traditionalist, dolefully static and undynamic. In other words, the progressive churches and allies from other faith traditions are working very hard to create political connections between economic justice and social liberty (the very thing religion has often denied women and sexual minorities).

Why do people write like this?

Copy editors sometimes do improve writing. But, as often as not, the profession selects for people who demonstrate their superiority by knowing rules no one else knows.

My favorite copy editing stupidity: At the NYT, you are not allowed to use the verb design to describe anything that is not physical. You have to say devise. Hence this lovely sentence in my most recent column: "In subsequent research, he and Professor Mayzlin are working with a company to compare results from two types of buzz marketing: a campaign concentrated on opinion leaders selected by marketing executives and a campaign devised by the two professors to emphasize dispersion." That is not a graceful sentence. But all the copy editor cared about was getting ride of "designed."

Thanks to reader George Jong for the tip.

On his first point, I would say that he overestimates how worried I am by the potential for biological alterations in pursuit of personal beauty. The potential is creepy, but when you think through the way people actually behave, it becomes far less so. If such alterations are effective and low-cost (in all senses of "cost") as, for instance, hair dye is today, I'm not terribly concerned. Nor do I think such alterations will become the norm unless their cost--in money, time, pain, and risk--becomes relatively low. And, of course, they have to make people look better, or at least look more like they want to look. Bad plastic surgery that's cheap and painless is still bad. (Speaking of which, I just discovered a site called Awful Plastic Surgery, which, despite its name, includes the good as well as the bad and ugly.)

On David's second point, I am indeed far less interested in "high art" than I am in the look and feel of everyday life. Maybe it was all that Renaissance drama I studied in school, but I tend to believe that commercial art can be just as great--and certainly as significant to people's lives--as officially designated ART. That said, I was interested in the observation that a caller made to a radio show I was on in New York. He was an artist, and after hearing my definition of "aesthetics" as pre-rational, non-cognitive sensory communication, he suggested that perhaps we're seeing an aesthetic flowering in everyday life because the art establishment has drained "art" of aesthetics. Good or bad, the art that wins plaudits today is all about narrative and cognition, with any viseral, emotional impact omitted.

As someone who loves abstraction, I'm not down on "modern art." My house is full of it, and Steve and I had a wonderful time this weekend visiting the spectacular new Nasher Sculpture Center. But "conceptual art" generally strikes me as stupid--too unsophisticated in its ideas to be truly conceptual, too preachy to be art. (I'm sure there are exceptions.) Because it relies on cognition, rather than visceral responses, that sort of art is outside my concerns in TSOS. So, for the most part, is the much more important narrative art of our day, a.k.a. TV and the movies.

That corresponds to the results in my index, which is a relief--but I think I'm going to often end up using these text-searches before or instead of using indices. The former shouldn't displace the latter. (For one thing, the OCR technology used for scanning certainly isn't perfect, and so there will be references in books that won't show up in the text searches.) At first glance I suspect that'll be the way lots of researchers use this--go to the listing for a particular book and use the "search inside this book" box, rather than running a massive search-all-books-for-these-words. But the search-all-books has its uses, too-- it makes those publishers' books something more like the articles on JSTOR or LEXIS. It makes it possible to discover books that have references or sections or chapters that are of interest to you even though the book as a whole may not be. And it makes something like a citation index possible using books, something that hasn't been true before.

One of the most exciting effects of Amazon's full-text search is that it restores books to students' reference sets. As many a professor has complained, kids these days think if a text isn't on the Internet it doesn't exist. But not much written before the mid-1990s, and very little in books, can be Googled. Hence, for many young (or busy) researchers, most of the world's written knowledge might as well not exist. Amazon's search engine is a great advance for civilization--and for authors. Work that would have gone unread will now be read and, along the way, books that would have gone unsold will now be bought.

Of course, the ever-short-sighted Authors' Guild, which not long ago was criticizing Amazon's used book sales, doesn't like the new search, not one bit. Students might look things up without buying the books!!!! They might make copies for their friends!!!! They might do online things they could do by...going to the library. And authors won't get paid extra. (If the AG could outlaw libraries and used book stores, it probably would.) For the full AG statement, see this post by Eugene Volokh. Jacob Levy comments here.

The first packages at the warehouse are being prepared to send over to the Chief. Each box is been opened, inventoried and repackaged for sending. Dr. Jolie Harris' box was the first to be opened and we wish to thank him for all the dental supplies! They are desperately needed.

For more information on the toy drive and how to help, see the Operation Give site. I've set up an Amazon Wish List to allow easy ordering. (Type in my name. Please let me know if you have any problems.)

He told an interesting story about what happened to Mexico's refrigerator industry after his country unilaterally eliminated its trade barriers in 1985. Before that time, Mexican refrigerators were all made in a single factory, which was supplied by a single compressor monopoly, because the government had determined that "the industry of refrigerator compressors was saturated." Mexican refrigerators "worked exactly as John Kenneth Galbraith would predict." They had a "planned obsolescence" of about three months. So when protectionist barriers were lifted, everyone expected the industry to go under.

Exactly the opposite happened. The refrigerator maker thrived. Within less than a year, it had captured almost the entire U.S. market for small single-door refrigerators (think hotel honor bar). And its domestic refrigerators were now reliable. Turns out the company was very good at making refrigerators, and now it could import reliable compressors. Mexican refrigerator buyers benefited, but so did U.S. buyers and the Mexican manufacturer.

Oil used to be 90% of Mexico's exports, with all other goods a mere 10%. Now the numbers are reversed, even though the price of oil has gone up. Again, much of this progress happened before NAFTA, as a result of the flexibility and competition unleashed by Mexico's unilateral elimination of trade barriers.

Gil Diaz believes the PRI's legislative gains will actually help President Fox's programs, because now the PRI thinks it has a good chance to retake the presidency. As a result, legislators more willing to cooperate on reforms that improve the likelihood that PRI will inherit a sound economy.

Since NAFTA, the correlation between U.S. and Mexican industrial production has gone from 50% to 99%. As soon as the U.S. economy turns, the same thing happens in Mexico. That's been bad news the last couple of years but Mexico has been gaining industrial employment since September, when industrial production also turned up here. "We're more tightly linked to the U.S. economy than some U.S. states," he said, comparing the countries first to a married couple and then correcting himself to say, "We're more like Siamese twins than a married couple."

To reduce the corruption endemic in the customs process, Mexico is taking out the human element, "bringing automation to every part of the process." First, the customs service eliminated its in-house cashiers, allowing customs payments at banks. But that permitted graft at the banks, so now all payments must be made via the Internet. Customs offices have Internet access, but most people simply use Internet cafes or other sites.

Tyler Cowen has blogged a bit about the conference. He focuses on an exchange between Milton Friedman and Gary Becker regarding whether the government should be in the money business.

Tyler also links to the conference blogging of Matt Mullenweg, whom I met this afternoon. His blog has lots of photos and will probably include one of Matt and me later.

UC officials have defended their admissions practices at Berkeley and elsewhere, saying that the SAT, a widely used test, is a weak indicator of future college performance.

The system over the past two years has shifted to a procedure called comprehensive review to consider freshman applicants, an approach that places less emphasis on test scores and grades and more on other factors, including leadership, socioeconomic challenges and personal achievement.

"Looking at any one factor, such as SAT scores, is contrary to the whole concept of comprehensive review," said Tom Lifka, who oversees admissions as assistant vice chancellor of student academic services. "This shows us that it's just not a very relevant way of looking at things."

According to UCLA figures, 1,663 applicants with SAT scores totaling more than 1400 were rejected for this fall's freshman class, and 1,646 with SATs at that level were turned away the year before....

UCLA accepted 407 applicants for this fall's class with SATs below 1000. The year before, the Westwood campus offered admission to 525 students with SATs below 1000, including seven with scores ranging from 701 to 800. The average score nationally is slightly above 1,000....

UCLA officials also said that students with high SAT scores who were rejected by the campus were turned away for such reasons as having comparatively low grade point averages. Other rejected students applied to especially competitive programs in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Arts and Architecture or the School of Theatre, Film and Television, they said.

Still others were rejected because they failed to meet the higher standards for out-of-state applicants or because they fell short in the "personal achievement" and "life challenges" criteria used by the admissions office.

Nobody knows whether, as some suspect, the new process is a backdoor way of reinstituting racial preferences. Nobody knows because the process is opaque. That's fine for a private school, but public universities owe applicants more transparent criteria.

The full story is here.

TO: Gen. Dick Myers
  Paul Wolfowitz
  Gen. Pete Pace
  Doug Feith

FROM: Donald Rumsfeld

SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism

The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?

DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.

With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:

We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.

USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.

USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.

With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.

Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?

Read the whole thing.

USA Today's report takes the approach you might expect, contrasting the memo's bad news with the administration's positive public comments:

Despite upbeat statements by the Bush administration, the memo to Rumsfeld's top staff reveals significant doubts about progress in the struggle against terrorists. Rumsfeld says that "it is not possible" to transform the Pentagon quickly enough to effectively fight the anti-terror war and that a "new institution" might be necessary to do that.

The memo, which diverges sharply from Rumsfeld's mostly positive public comments, offers one of the most candid and sobering assessments to date of how top administration officials view the 2-year-old war on terrorism. It suggests that significant work remains and raises a number of probing questions but few detailed proposals.

Probing questions are exactly what DoD needs, no matter how unpolitic they may be. The Pentagon is set up to fight not just traditional armed forces but traditional armed forces in countries with centrally planned economies and innovation-suppressing totalitalitarian governments--adversaries who make the Pentagon look nimble by comparison. But the future security of Americans depends on responding to nimble enemies with flexible tactics. Rumsfeld is asking the right questions. And, while there will certainly be a p.r. flap over the leak, it's better to have them out in public.

The script also accuses Mr. Reagan not only of showing no interest in addressing the AIDS crisis, but of asserting that the patients of AIDS essentially deserved their disease. During a scene in which his wife pleads with him to help people battling AIDS, Mr. Reagan says resolutely, "They that live in sin shall die in sin" and refuses to discuss the issue further.

Lou Cannon, who has written several biographies about Mr. Reagan, said such a portrayal was unfair. "Reagan is not intolerant," he said. "He was a bit asleep at the switch, but that's not fair to have him say something that Patrick Buchanan would say."

And after all the suits' talk of balance, fairness, and good story-telling, Judy Davis, who plays Nancy Reagan, blurts out this amazing view of contemporary America:

"With the climate that has been in America since Sept. 11, it appears, from the outside anyway, to not be quite as open a society as it used to be," Ms. Davis said during an interview at her hotel in Montreal. "By open, I mean as free in terms of a critical atmosphere, and that sort of ugly specter of patriotism."

She added, "If this film can help create a bit more questioning in the public about the direction America has been going in since the 1970's, I guess then I think it will be doing a service."

The ugly specter of patriotism. Well, Reagan certainly stood for that.

The worst five-year period for inflation was 1977-81, at 10.06 percent a year. The worst 10-year period was 1973-82, at 8.67 percent. The worst 15-year period was 1968-82, at 7.3 percent. And the worst 20-year period was 1966-85, at 6.36 percent.

Not the greatest time to grow up.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he 'didn't want to see any stories' quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used."

Owens offered Arnold Schwarzenegger advice in a WSJ op-ed (subscription required):

In his campaign for California governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger repeatedly said enacting a constitutional cap on state spending would be at the top of his agenda. Now it's time to fulfill that promise. Mr. Schwarzenegger should use his surprisingly strong mandate to push a Taxpayer Bill of Rights (Tabor) through the state legislature at the earliest possible date. As a governor who has benefited from a decade-old Tabor spending cap in Colorado, my message to Gov.-elect Schwarzenegger is simple: Go for it.

There is no better way to tackle California's Herculean budget challenges and put the state on a stronger fiscal footing than to tie the growth in the state budget to the annual growth in inflation and population, as we have done in Colorado.

For more than a decade, we have coupled our spending cap on all levels of government with a requirement that excess revenues be returned to taxpayers -- and taxes cannot be increased without voter approval. The result is the public sector cannot grow at a rate faster than the private sector -- unless voters say so.

On the other hand, Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow is an argument that polish is enough in a female politician.

A lot of commenters (at least the ones I've been reading) have missed the forest for the trees on Easterbrook. He's not an anti-Semite, but an anti-capitalist. His attack was not on Jews per se, but on Jews who seek profit producing products he doesn't like. This is consistent with other Easterbrook targets, such as "antisocial" SUV owners, and the National Football League (he doesn't like the league's choice of DirecTV as a broadcasting partner.)

I agree. Easterbrook's easy recourse to hoary anti-Semitic rhetoric comes from his hatred of certain commercial products, not (as far as I can tell) from a hatred of Jews. Indeed, the "WTF? WTF? WTeffingF?" reaction stems, in part, from the fact that nobody expects such rhetoric from a respectable goo-goo like Easterbrook. That he slips into anti-Semitic rhetoric to attack certain movies and the people who make them just makes his self-righteous hatred more obnoxious. Of course, the slope from hating commerce to hating (or killing) Jews is one of history's most slippery.

This is a one-day story, but a revealing one.

Mr. Easterbrook said he wrote a column last week about Mel Gibson's coming film "Passion," and added: "I raised the issue that Mel Gibson professes to be an ardent Christian. Maybe he is. But his background previous to this movie is making movies that glorify violence."

"I raised the exact same question about a Christian," Mr. Easterbrook said, and "there was not a single peep."

He said Mel Gibson "worship(s) money above all else"? Where?

Aside from his self-righteous recourse to anti-Semitic stereotypes, Easterbrook's confusion of stylized fantasy violence and real-world slaughter is artistically, morally, and psychologically obtuse. For more on that subject, I highly recommend Gerard Jones's book Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Make-Believe Violence, and Super Heroes. (No, I don't approve of bringing little kids to Tarantino movies. Get a babysitter. But some of Jones's insights apply to adults as well.)

In the Sacramento Bee, columnist Dan Walters takes note of the most recent example:

Ironically, the major impact of Proposition 187 has been precisely the opposite of what its framers intended; it has actually increased the number of illegal immigrants in California.

Although its specific provisions were never implemented, its passage sent a message to politicians, including then-President Clinton and California's senior U.S. senator, Dianne Feinstein. At her behest, the Clinton administration tightened up controls along California's border with Mexico, making it much more difficult to cross.

With immigrant guides (coyotes) demanding higher payments and the border-crossing routes stretching into the California-Arizona desert and becoming more dangerous, Mexicans who once came to California for seasonal work, especially in agriculture, but maintained their homes in Mexico, found it less dangerous and less expensive to remain in the state permanently. And they began relocating their families as well.

A new analysis by the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, based on 2000 census data, finds that between 1990 and 2000 California's foreign-born residents expanded by nearly 40 percent, from 6.4 million to 8.8 million, and now make up a quarter of the state's population. Other studies have found that immigration and births to foreign-born mothers now account for virtually all of the state's net population growth. There's little doubt that the post-Proposition 187 border controls contributed to this sharp increase, which mostly came from Mexico.

The socioeconomic impacts have been immense, especially in the urban core of Los Angeles and in the farm communities of the San Joaquin Valley. Economist Phil Martin of the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues first charted the effects, noting that as California's overall economy boomed during the middle and late 1990s, poverty was increasing sharply in rural communities as they struggled to absorb year-round populations of immigrants.

As a friend of Steve's once said, always-on Internet at work is like having a TV in your office. This conference setup is actually much worse. You can tune out a TV in the background. It's much harder to read, and harder still to write, while listening, especially to a speaker far away on a stage. (I keep my computer off during the talks.)

I don't have any inside information just speculation. Dreier will be term limited out of his Rules Cmte Chairmanship at the end of this Congress. He wouldn't be the first Chairman to retire or run for another office rather than to return to being a mere Congressman.

That doesn't mean he'll run against Barbara Boxer, of course, but it's a pretty definitive answer to the "Why give up the Rules Committee chairmanship?" question.

Update: The pollsters haven't caught up with the Dreier speculation. A new Field poll shows Boxer running slightly ahead of four possible Republican candidates. Dreier, who is better known than at least three of the four, wasn't on the list.

Tuesday, production trucks lined up outside the white antebellum mansion where Mr. Perry pretended to be the governor for the cameras in a place where, any other day, he actually is the governor.

Perry, who looks sort of like an even-more-pretty-boy version of actor Chris Noth, has a few lines in a Tommy Lee Jones movie set in Texas. "With his Hollywood looks, he was typecast to play the governor of the great state of Texas," a spokeswoman told the News.

My take on politicians' looks: Male politicians have to be good looking. Female politicians just have to be polished--in control of their appearance. I can't think of any female politicians as classically pretty as Perry is handsome. Nobody would take them seriously.

But, asked several readers when I first blogged this, why would he leave a secure House seat and the chairmanship of the Rules Committee for an uncertain Senate run? One possible answer: If he loses, he can always run for Congress again, and the party would remember that he'd done Republicans a big favor.

The Times piece speculates about several alternative Dreier futures, including as successor to Jack Valenti.

Like elsewhere in Europe, many of Germany's brightest science graduates in all disciplines seek their fortunes abroad—but the stream flows fastest in the life sciences. Biotechnology companies badly need these well qualified researchers, Christoph Anz from the Confederation of German Employers'; Associations told The Scientist.

“The trouble is that we are losing our highest achievers,” Anz said. “We have reached the point where we will no longer be able to compete in the booming biotechnology sector.”

Every seventh person with a doctorate in science leaves Germany for the United States. And three of the four Germans who have won a Nobel Prize are currently working in the United States, noted Markus Albers in Die Welt am Sonntag.

“The top scientists know their own value, and they rightly insist on excellent working conditions and an appropriate level of pay. These two together can hardly ever be found in Germany,” said Helmut Schwarz, vice president of the German Research Foundation, a body that promotes research at universities and other publicly financed research institutions in Germany.

“We don't have proper career paths, people are paid according to set bands and not according to their performance. In America, scientists can earn three times as much,” Schwarz said. He added that money was not the only problem; young German researchers are hampered by government regulations.

“A passion for science and a stimulating international campus atmosphere” are also missing in Germany, he said.

You can read the whole article here, with free registration.

NRO has quietly fixed the spelling of misanthrope in its ad for Florence King's book.

I thought about making this point myself but was hoping that Jacob Sullum, who wrote the book on the drug user next door, would do so first. Now he has in a Hit & Run posting. An excerpt:

Just as there are "functional alcoholics," who continue to meet their professional responsibilities and even excel at their work, there are functional narcotic addicts whose habits may take a personal toll but do not interfere with their careers. The difference is that opioid users like Limbaugh are breaking the law simply by obtaining their drugs, so their habits may become public scandals even if they never affect their public performance.

The ad is animated, rotating among three books, so you may have to wait to see the ad for King's book. (I pulled the graphic from the page for David Frum's Diary.)

For those still unsure about the point of this post, here's another hint, courtesy of the book's description page:

By the way, as to the book's title, our favorite Misanthrope explains that "STET" is "Latin for 'let it stand,' a proofreading term that means 'Don't change the author's wording,'" while "Damnit" is one of Miss King's "milder expressions when dealing with proofreaders."

Take another look at the ad. Maybe it's the proofreaders' revenge.

Dreier has been all over the airwaves throughout the recall campaign. He's telegenic and funny. The intense statewide interest in the recall may have boosted his recognition factor enough to make him a credible challenger to Boxer in '04.

Dreier really is all over the screen. His website features a popup touting five different TV appearances this weekend alone.

"We've been trying to raise the issue with the school district for almost two years," said Ron Baiman, whose children are among the plaintiffs. "We aren't seeking any monetary awards; we're seeking a moratorium until use of the technology has been proven to be safe."

Until use of the technology has been proven to be safe. Until they prove a negative--something that literally can never happen.

First the schools, then the coffee shops and hotels.

More than 400 students -- nearly 90 percent of them minorities -- were admitted to UC Berkeley in 2001 with below average SAT scores under an admissions policy that was to have ended racial preferences at state universities, The Chronicle found in an analysis of admissions data.

UC Berkeley officials developed the policy, which considers grades and SAT scores but includes other factors, such as socioeconomic status, after voters approved Proposition 209 in 1996 to ban affirmative action in admissions.

But the analysis of the data shows that of the 422 among the bottom tier of admitted students, 378 were minorities. Seventeen were of unknown race and 27 were white.

Read the whole thing.

Growing up in South Carolina, I knew some brilliant students who posted relatively low SAT scores because they came from uneducated families. But those scores tended to be massively lopsided--350 verbal, 700 math (you learn math in school, language intuition from your family)--and even then they were well over what passes for qualified at Berkeley. Plus that was 25 years ago, long before the SATs were renormed.

I'll be on CNBC's "Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo & Tyler Mathisen" today around 4:50 p.m. ET, discussing the buzz column.

 "AS A LAWYER, judge, lecturer, writer and activist, she has spoken out clearly and strongly in her country, Iran, far beyond its borders," the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in its citation.

It said she has stood up as a "sound professional, a courageous person, and has never heeded the threat to her own safety."

"She sees no contradiction between Islam and fundamental human rights," the head of the committee Ole Danbold Mjoes said in the prize citations.

If all libertarians are blogging, Dean-leaning, Washington, DC libertarians, who at one point or another were Koch Fellows and/or have worked at the Cato Institute, then that might really throw a wrench in an election. Way to dig, Noah!

The libertarians who matter to the Republican party are mostly people you've never heard of--or really famous people like George Shultz. They aren't a few college pals hanging around Cato and IHS. And judging from the mass email I got inviting Dallasites to this Cato event, even Cato is still warily friendly with the GOP: "Our keynote speaker will be Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). Jeff will discuss the prospects for the 108th Congress and what can be done to bring limited government principles back to the Republican Party." Real Dean voters don't like Jeff Flake. (I do.)

On average, such love-it-or-hate it models moved off the lot four days faster and carried a profit margin that was $609 higher than cars that ignited little passion over styling, according to the J.D. Power survey.

"Extreme styling, when it is successful, will allow the manufacturer to charge a price premium and more importantly avoid costly incentives," Denove said. The finding"not only helps explain the growth of extreme styling vehicles, it suggests we've only just seen the tip of the iceberg," he said.

Today's aesthetic imperative doesn't mean the world is adopting Virginia Postrel's good taste. It means more people have opportunities to find pleasure and meaning in the look and feel of their persons, places, and things.

UPDATE: Because of the huge number of packages, the military can no longer handle delivery. The site does have information on sending funds that can be used to purchase s.

In related work, which I didn't have room to cover, Dina Mayzlin and Judith Chevalier, whose research I wrote about last month, looked at the effects of the reader reviews posted at Amazon.com and BN.com. They found reviews did make a difference, with bad reviews (which are relatively rare) significantly depressing sales. So if you like my new book, please post a nice review. And if you don't like the book, please don't waste your time.

Separated from their parents or orphaned in war-torn Sudan in the late 1980s, untold thousands of children, ranging in age from 4 to 12, left their towns and villages and walked across Africa in search of a safe haven. Traveling in small groups, they battled snakes, militias, and disease until they found temporary refuge in Ethiopia. When war broke out in that country, they set off again, chewing leaves, grass, and mud to stave off hunger as they looked for a way out of the seventh circle of hell. They became known as "lost boys of Sudan" because they, like the characters in Peter Pan who fended off crocodiles and pirates, covered a perilous terrain. Approximately 20,000 of the children eventually made it to an area in northwest Kenya that became known as Kakuma Refugee Camp. The survivors were mainly boys--with 1,000 to 3,000 girls....

In November 2000, the survivors started coming to the United States in one of the largest resettlement programs of its kind. Their journey has been documented on 60 Minutes II, in newspaper human interest stories, and, not surprising given its uplifting narrative arc, is soon to be the subject of a feature film (an "intimate epic" said Daily Variety). Yet among the 3,700 young refugees who were resettled in the United States on this program, only 89 are female. The other hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of girls and young women who survived the journey are still in Kakuma Refugee Camp. Many are living with so-called foster families and are being exploited as domestic servants or worse....

So why are the girls facing hardship in Kakuma while the boys are living out the American dream? Blame it on a series of blunders by the UNHCR, the agency entrusted with their protection and care. When the Sudanese children first arrived in Kakuma, the boys were placed in group homes and loosely supervised by adults. Meanwhile, the girls were placed in foster families. In theory, the foster families would provide a more nurturing environment. In practice, the girls simply disappeared.

Read the whole thing.

Want to know how your favorite obscure candidate did in the California governor's race? Here's the official tally.

A couple of rarely mentioned candidates caught my eye: Independent Nathan Whitecloud Walton (1,552 votes), a.k.a. Nate, the former captain of the Princeton basketball team and Bill Walton's son, and Republican Mike McNeilly (490 votes), whose run-ins with the mural police I recount in The Substance of Style.

By contrast, my local post office regularly runs out of stamps. Sort of like McDonald's running out of french fries.

The school district's site is here. As far as I can tell, it doesn't include any information about the lawsuit.

[T]hen there's the paragraph that reminds you that sometimes it's a good thing bureaucracies are so rule bound and innovation averse. Slate presented the ballot design problem to a few freelance designers. Two of the three examples of the work Slate displays are indeed improvements over the one official Cali ballot that accompanies the article. Oh, but that third makeover:

Hugh Dubberly, an interaction designer in San Francisco, simplified the type treatments, arrows, and boxes in his proposed Ballot B and also moved the column in which voters mark their choice to the left side of the page next to the candidate names, arguing that their proximity would minimize voting errors. He also proposed a somewhat radical solution to the 133-name-crunch problem by only printing the names of the serious candidates--the ones who'd participated in the final debate.

Yes, that would be a somewhat radical solution. Throw 128 candidates off the ballot. Certainly solves the clutter problem, and Hugh's ballot is a hymn to soothing whitespace. Eliminate the messy (but essential) details and call it interaction design. Simplify the type treatments, and simplify the hell out of democracy while you're at it.

Schwarzenegger puts to voters, in a particularly sharp way, the same question Clinton put to voters: Can you separate personal failings from performance in office. Except that in Schwarzenegger's case the dilemma is worse, because --as an LAT editorial perceptively noted--Schwarzenegger's very flaws are the very things that might actually help him perform better in office. Maybe a governor who is manipulative and mean is just the man to subdue the unions, the casino tribes and entrenched, free-spending Democratic legislators.

I'm willing to take a flyer on that possibility, given the possible upside virtues, comforted by the knowledge that, thanks to the Constitution, Schwarzenegger can't use his governorship as a steppingstone to the presidency. It's only a state we're talking about! (That's another reason the poli-sci argument against mid-term ousters of temporarily-unpopular leaders doesn't apply with much force.. We're not talking about booting Lincoln in the middle of a Civil War. We're talking about a car tax.) If Schwarzenegger flies into a fascistic, steroid-fueled rage--well, he doesn't have his finger on the button. He can't suspend the bill of rights.

Couldn't have said it better myself (and in fact I said it worse below). Votes from people like Mickey and Roger Simon go a long way toward explaining Arnold's decisive victory.

Jay Manifold reviews TSOS on his blog. He wants more math. Differential equations--the sure route to a bestseller.

On Econlib, John Nye focuses on the problem of aesthetic spillovers.

Planning bias. Again and again, critics charge the government with having no plan or strategy. Whenever the Pentagon or administration changes course, they charge it with having planned poorly. Headlines speak of events "out of control" in Iraq.

More than just hindsight bias is at work here. Many people, particularly the sophisticated sort, hate messiness. They like to know that smart managers are in charge, figuring out everything. Surprises are defeats.

In truth, the planning mind-set is exactly wrong for Iraq. Anything might have happened after the war: a flood of refugees, a cholera pandemic, a civil war--or, for that matter, the discovery of an advanced nuclear program. The fact that the Bush administration keeps adjusting its course, often contravening its own plans or preferences, is a hopeful sign. The administration's decisions to raise rather than reduce troop levels, to ask for $87 billion that it never planned on needing, to go looking for help from the United Nations--all this suggests not that the Iraq effort is failing but that the administration is more flexible than its rhetoric.

Only trial and error, otherwise known as muddling through, can work in Iraq. There is no other way. Muddling through is not pretty, but never underestimate America's genius for it. Abraham Lincoln and George Washington never enjoyed the luxury of planning, but they were two of the finest muddlers-through the world has ever known, and they did all right.

Whether Bush will prove a gifted muddler is at present unclear, to say the least. Bush might be a better president if he took fewer risks. But risk-takers must be judged by their results.

Read the whole thing.

The California Election Code stipulates the use of specific typefaces, minimum and maximum point sizes and margins, and other specifications--but these requirements aren't based on any accepted design principles. The result is the confusing sample recall ballot distributed by the secretary of state's office last month. On the sample ballot, the candidates' names are listed in alphabetical order according to a randomly chosen alphabet (RWQOJMVAHBSGZXNTCIEKUPDYFL). The order of the list rotates from district to district, like a batting order, so as to offset what's called "the primacy effect"--the natural advantage lent to candidates appearing near the top of a list. From an information-design perspective, this is insanity.

The customary A to Z, like any form of standardization (miles, dollars, pounds) helps us navigate the world. While a random R to L order might be democratically fair to candidates, it makes it harder for voters faced with finding their chosen candidate on a list of 133 names. As almost any designer would tell you, it would be far better simply to rotate through the trusty A to Z from district to district. This would ensure that no one candidate benefited from being at the top of the list and also that no frustrated voter gave up on finding the name she was looking for.

Then there are the ballot's myriad typographical missteps. Changes in typeface usually are a way of signifying meaning--this is a chapter title, this is for emphasis, this information is less important than that. Here, the "OFFICIAL BALLOT" headline, rendered in bold-faced capital letters, is followed by several lines of graphic schizophrenia: One line consists of condensed caps, the next of bolded lowercase, still another is shrunk to 9 point. One sample version of the Oct. 7 ballot uses 16 sizes and styles of type. Greater consistency of type would allow us to immediately pick out the words styled differently and grasp their significance.

The story includes some alternative ballots produced by well-known graphic designers and a final recommendation that could have come out of The Substance of Style:

The reality is that the whole voting experience could use a redesign. Election officials should spend some time at Starbucks, the company that turned an overpriced commodity into an empire by focusing on its customers' experience. Imagine if all polling places had an inviting, recognizable logo; if they were well lighted and comfortable; if they offered an intuitive environment with clearly presented information. Maybe voters could get a free cup of coffee, too.

Why won't that happen? I explained the underlying problem in this NYT column.

Arnold's whole persona is of a bigger-than-life figure who gets his own way, likes an audience, and makes jokes at other people's expense--the sort of guy who'd grab a woman's breast in public and laugh at her discomfort. (Probably not the type of man who'd attack a woman in private, however. The audience is key.) And Hollywood is not a place of refined manners. It's not exactly surprising that a lot of women say he bullied and fondled them, nor that these women don't want their names in print, lest they offend a well-connected superstar.

Age and fatherhood may have improved him. People do change, and I assume Arnold wouldn't approve of a man similarly grabbing and intimidating his daughters. But the stories are creepy, the general pattern is believable, and that pattern suggests that Arnold is, or was, a person of bad character.

That doesn't mean he shouldn't be governor, given the circumstances and alternatives. Good character is desirable in a governor, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient. I don't countenance poisoning one's enemies at dinner, but Machiavelli had a point. The essential public virtues are different from the essential private ones. And which public virtues matter depends a great deal on the political system. I wouldn't want a man of Arnold's private character to wield power in a illiberal system.

Roger Simon, who understands California well, has several good posts on the subject. An excerpt:

I will be voting for Arnold tomorrow, but with a heavy heart. The recent disclosures of the way he treated women are deeply repellent, even if only some of them are true and even if they were disclosed in a reprehensible manner. I can only hope and assume that we will see nothing of this kind of activity if he is elected. But if we do, I will do everything I can to support his immediate recall or worse....

I am stuck with Arnold. He's about as imperfect as you can get, except for one thing in his favor--he hasn't spent his life as a politician. Perhaps when he gets to Sacramento he will remember why he was sent there and apply an intelligent amateur's common sense (and a little of his movie charisma) to moving the State of California in a postive direction. I also hope he will abjure party politics and stick with the kind of pragmatism for which many of us voters would be electing him.

And from another of Roger's posts:

I will go one step further with what those conservative minds (and I chose that adjective deliberately) at the LA Times don't get. The very things that they are publicizing in Arnold are the very things the public loves about him--not that he was a groper or mistreated women--but that he is AWAKE. Unlike the others competing against him (Davis, Bustamante, McClintock), he is a vibrant personality that interests and attracts people. The LA Times is the opposite of that--a paper that is so gray it out grays the "gray lady" NY Times by miles. In the city that gave the world Hollywood, these folks don't realize how much the public craves theatre. If they had, they might have known the best way to defeat Schwarzenegger was quietly, reducing a larger than life figure to the humdrum world of the state politician, peppering him with obscure questions of budget and tax law, not by sliming him with outtakes from the Enquirer.

SHOCK JOCK? Shock jock? Yes, that's how NPR referred to me this morning in an account of Arnold's campaign trip yesterday: "AM radio shock jock Hugh Hewitt quickly prompted the crowd to see what they thought about the Los Angeles Times."

I think they ought to have described me as "Long time public television personality and host of the PBS series Searching for God in America Hugh Hewitt..." But that might have caused heart attacks across the NPR landscape.

Hugh is fierce Republican partisan who loathes the L.A. Times. That doesn't make him Howard Stern, though I must admit that the comparison occurred to me during my visit to his studio. Like Howard, Hugh has a studio full of guests, only some of whom are scheduled. But no one strips.

Again, my profuse apologies to local readers who had planned to attend my talk, and even more profuse apologies to those who showed up without seeing the last-minute posting about the cancellation. I will be at the Stanford bookstore (on campus, not the one in downtown Palo Alto) tonight at 7:00 p.m.

I am doing a dissertation about volunteering following the Kobe earthquake and did fieldwork last year in Kobe and Osaka. Sean Kinsell was right about many things but I would add a few things. Along with thick tile roofs and wood walls, typical Japanese houses are not built on foundations so they are even more susceptible to earthquakes. Also, many urban Japanese live in large concrete apartment complexes (dubbed, ironically enough, "mansions") rather than houses. These complexes, especially those built in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, are poorly made and floors are liable to collapse on each other in a strong earthquake.

Government planning was of course terrible, particularly because nobody expected that the next big quake would happen in Kobe. Also, it was centrally-planned from Tokyo and they moved extremely slowly. Strangely, in a country prone to earthquakes, they have very little in the way of disaster relief planning. They don't even have the equivalent of FEMA. The government also initially rejected any outside help, such as from the International Red Cross or American military stationed in Japan, because the bureaucrats thought they could control everything.

Outside of the government, there were no local institutions or national NGOs that were qualified or experienced enough to help coordinate the disaster relief. Over a million people volunteered, which was remarkable in a country that lacks a history of voluntarism, but it was extremely difficult to effectively use these volunteers without proper coordination.

Here's a 1998 Reason piece on the aftermath of the Kobe quake. I commissioned it after the LAT ran early stories on the problems of reconstruction but didn't follow up. I wanted to know what happened, and one great thing about being a magazine editor is that you can assign people to find that sort of thing out. Here's a Gary Becker column on a more positive assessment by George Horwich of Purdue University (citation: George Horwich, "Economic Lessons of the Kobe Earthquake," Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol. 48, no. 3 (2000), pp. 521-542.).

That's where the 74-year-old architect's new business, Gehry Technologies, comes in. The enterprise, which launches this month, builds on his firm's 13 years of experience with CATIA, a design software originally developed for the aerospace industry by Dassault Systemes of France. Years ago (but not long enough ago to have been of full use in designing the Disney Hall), James Glymph, a senior partner at Gehry's firm, was looking for a way to help contractors better understand the demands of Gehry's increasingly complicated designs. He chanced upon an aerospace engineer who recommended the CATIA software; the computer programmers on Gehry's 130-person staff have since modified it for architectural work. Now the software brings Gehry's curvy roofs and walls to life in three dimensions: After he designs his buildings, still using just cardboard, wood, and paper, a specially developed tool traces his models and translates them into 3-D images.

Perhaps more crucially for other architects, the software can also be used by contractors to produce exact measurements of the steel, wood, and other materials needed in a project. By linking dozens of such suppliers on a single software platform, the construction of complex buildings becomes vastly more efficient. "They have reconceived the process of construction," says William Mitchell, a longtime Gehry collaborator and dean of the school of architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which hired Gehry to design a computer center that is now under construction. Gehry Technologies was formed to provide training to architects who buy the software and related programs, and the firm will work with IBM to market CATIA. "We couldn't do what we do without it," says the architect, who doesn't actually use a computer himself.

While he's at it, Gehry would also like to see more cooperation between architects and contractors. In many cases, architects hand over designs to builders, who often prefer to have as little contact as possible with them thereafter. Some contracts even prohibit architects from going to construction sites. This, they say, is the best way to prevent the architects from trying to make expensive changes, the cost of which is borne by the construction company. Gehry, however, works with the builders and contractors to cement, so to speak, the design and budget early on. "We spend a lot more time with the subcontractors so when we get to the final drawings, we solve most of the technical problems," Gehry says. "You know where you are going before you start construction, so you minimize the surprise from the owner's standpoint. You get all the bad news up front."

Aesthetics is already a major source of demand for IT, and that demand will only grow--good news for computer and chip makers who need reasons to entice people to buy more-powerful machines.

On the night of September 25th volunteers from the Revolutionary Cells attacked a subsidiary of a notorious HLS client, Yamanouchi. We left an approximately 10lb ammonium nitrate bomb strapped with nails outside of Shaklee Inc, whose CEO is both the CEO for Shaklee and Yamanouchi Consumer Inc. We gave all of the customers the chance, the choice, to withdraw their business from HLS. Now you all will have to reap what you have sown. All customers and their families are considered legitimate targets.

Hey Sean Lance, and the rest of the Chiron team, how are you sleeping? You never know when your house, your car even, might go boom. Who knows, that new car in the parking lot may be packed with explosives. Or maybe it will be a shot in the dark.

We have given all of the collaborators a chance to withdraw from their relations from HLS. We will now be doubling the size of every device we make. Today it is 10lbs, tomorrow 20....until your buildings are nothing more than rubble. It is time for this war to truely have two sides. No more will all of the killing be done by the oppressors, now the oppressed will strike back. We will be non-violent when the these people are non-violent to the animal nations....

The rest of the email is here. KGO-TV had a background report on the group a week ago; its report of the recent news is here.

I look forward to the vigorous condemnation--not "we do not condone" but "we unequivocally condemn"--of this terrorism not only from "respectable" animal rights groups but also from all the people who routinely (and rightly) condemn anti-abortion terror.

My sincere and profuse apologies to any readers for whom this last-minute cancellation causes problems. I will be appearing at the Stanford bookstore (on campus) tomorrow night at 7:00.

The design site Boxes and Arrows has a review of The Substance of Style, along with an interview in which I discuss some of the book's implications for designers in general and interaction design in particular. Interviewer Steve McLaughlin, who also wrote the review, actually got me to say things that I haven't already said a million times--fresh material, folks.

Lileks on our multiparty Hugh Hewitt Show appearance Tuesday: "Hugh had two other guests - a California legislator [John Campbell--vp] and famed SacBee blogger Dan Weintraub, and for the next hour we all discussed the internet and its effects on campaigns. Great fun. And I can say with some confidence that I was the only person on the show who spent most of the time ironing pants." And I can say with some confidence that I was the only person on the show who drank three Diet Cokes while on the air.