Meet Marion and Herb Sandler. They’re good people, you’ll like them. As two of the most prolific and committed philanthropists currently supporting progressive causes, they are currently major funders of ProPublica (investigative journalism), the Centre for American Progress (activism), the Centre for Responsible Lending (anti- payday loans, financial fairness) and the American Asthma Foundation. The contribution of US$1.3bn that they gave to the Sandler Foundation was the second largest charitable contribution of 2006, according to Wikipedia. They are a bit too keen on testing and measurement in education for my taste but you can’t have everything, and they are at least advocates of “multiple measures”.

Meet the Pick-A-Pay Option ARM. This was a lending product that, among other features, allowed for “negative amortization” – a feature under which the principal was not repaid but rather rolled up, meaning that the borrower was effectively dependent on future refinancing. It was not a subprime product, but it allowed people to take on huge amounts of mortgage debt, and contributed to the “payment shock” which sent so many of them into repossession and bankruptcy. As the link above shows, the Pick-A-Pay mortgage product was the subject of a number of compensation settlements with affected borrowers.

What’s the connection? Well, as founders of Golden West Financial, a mortgage lender which was sold to Wachovia Bank in 2006 (the proceeds of which financed that very large charitable contribution), Herb and Marion Sandler were responsible for introducing the Pick-A-Pay mortgage to the market.

Ah.

Read on, there’s two or three more twists before the end of this story …
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Once upon a time, when I was in graduate school with some free time on my hands, I ended up co-writing a paper with my friend Barb Serfozo on the dubious sexual origins of the American right’s depiction of women as feminazis. One passage that I found, from Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen’s co-authored novel, 1945 has stayed with me. The hero of the book, evocatively named “James Mannheim Martel,” is watching a Nazi parade.

Again, Martel became uneasily aware of how his own blood was set racing by the sense of power and glory that drenched the entire artificial drama. It was like being aroused by a woman one despised. No matter the revulsion, despite the inner certainty that never would one yield; beneath all moral rectitude there lurked a dark, compelling attraction.

Lurid misogyny, and a political fantasy and sexual fantasy that are so intertwined with each other as to be indistinguishable, all wrapped up in one enticing bundle!

At one point, Gingrich was supposed to be writing a novel with his friend, noted authority on the political attractions of Fascism, Jerry Pournelle. I don’t know what happened to it, but I imagine it would have made quite interesting reading (Inferno, Pournelle’s ‘Benito Mussolini redeems himself in an updated version of Dante’s hell’ schlock-epic with Larry Niven, is certainly entertaining if your tastes run to certain varieties of kitsch).

Helen Ladd and Ted Fiske have an excellent piece in today’s Times explaining the relationship between educational inequality and income inequality, drawing on Sean Reardon’s contribution to Whither Opportunity?: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances. An excerpt:

The Occupy movement has catalyzed rising anxiety over income inequality; we desperately need a similar reminder of the relationship between economic advantage and student performance.

The correlation has been abundantly documented, notably by the famous Coleman Report in 1966. New research by Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University traces the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families over the last 50 years and finds that it now far exceeds the gap between white and black students.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores across states is associated with variation in child poverty rates.

International research tells the same story. Results of the 2009 reading tests conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment show that, among 15-year-olds in the United States and the 13 countries whose students outperformed ours, students with lower economic and social status had far lower test scores than their more advantaged counterparts within every country. Can anyone credibly believe that the mediocre overall performance of American students on international tests is unrelated to the fact that one-fifth of American children live in poverty?

The most striking graph in Reardon’s chapter shows the change in achievement gaps between black and white students (which declines from Brown on) against the change in gaps between children from the highest and lowest income deciles (which starts to rise as income inequality starts to rise, perhaps unsurprisingly):

More on Whither Opportunity? another time, but for now read the whole thing.

Following some discussions among the CT crew:

1. We are amending our comments policy to state (addition in bold) “We respect the preference of many genuine commenters for pseudonymity and will protect their privacy. However, this respect entails an obligation to abide by the rules set out above. In cases of serious abuse, including those of racist and sexist abuse, serious defamation and disruptive sockpuppeteering, we will, if appropriate, publish the identity of such abusers and share their identifying information with other sites.”

2. In the past, we have applied this policy in the most lenient way possible. Commenters who have used sock puppets to make abusive comments, frequently directed at CT members, have been warned off, rather than being publicly exposed. In the future, no warnings will be given. Where sock puppeteers or abusers of pseudonymity are identified, they will be publicly exposed. As a guide to commenters, if you wish to comment on matters involving race or gender, or that might be considered personally defamatory, do not write anything you would not wish to see published prominently under your own name.

Old friend and former grad student buddy Lawrence White (not sure where he’s teaching these days—Lawrence, are you out reading?—pointed out that this might be a useful teaching tool. Plus it’s just kinda fun.

Speaking of teaching, this is one of two seasons of the year in which I feel quite gleeful that I no longer have that responsibility. You people really shouldn’t be surfing the web unless your grading is done, you know.

Understanding developments in the European crisis has become rather like Kremlinology, trying to figure out the meaning of subtle changes in wording, and rearrangements of the Politburo on the podium for May Day parades. In particular, Mario Draghi of the ECB goes back and forth, sometimes suggesting that the ECB will do what nearly everyone else can see is minimally necessary to the survival of the euro (namely, print lots of them, and use some to buy EU government debt, as was done by the Fed and the Bank of England). At other times, though, it’s as if Jean-Claude Trichet is doing a ventriloquist act.

In one respect, todays EU agreement was anything but subtle. The fact that the Eurozone countries and those aspiring to join them were prepared to go ahead without the UK (and a few others) suggests that they have something serious in mind. But what – the announcement is pretty much a restatement of the Growth and Stability pact, and under present circumstances, the deficit targets can only be seen as aspirational.

Applying one of the approaches that used to be standard in Kremlinology (not necessarily a reliable one, then or now) I’m going to assume that the EU leaders are acting with some sort of coherent goal in mind and work from there. In particular, I’m going to assume that everyone who matters now recognizes the need for a big monetary expansion and the use of newly created money to resolve, or at least stabilize, the debt crisis. [click to continue…]

I’ve been using the Readmill ebook reader on-and-off. I like it quite a bit. Using it prompted me to make an ebook of my own. Because I moved my own website over to Octopress a little while ago, everything I’ve ever written on it going back to 2002 is now in Markdown format. So over lunch yesterday I took advantage of John MacFarlane’s amazingly useful Pandoc, which can make EUPB format ebooks out of markdown files, selected thirteen posts from the Archives and made a little anthology called Books I Did Not Read This Year (epub). It’s free to download, because I’m such a generous person. Enjoy it on Readmill, iBooks, your or any other EPUB-compatible reader. Daniel kindly made a Mobi version for Kindle owners. I plan on making a few more of these, forming a Press (e.g. “Harbard University Press” or “Pengiun”), and then adding them to my Vita.

Eric Schwitzgebel has a fascinating post about how little influence baby boomers have had in philosophy. He uses a nice objective measure; looking at which philosophers are most cited in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. He finds that of the 25 most cited philosophers, 15 were born between 1931 and 1945, and just 2 were born between 1946 and 1960.
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I can’t believe the Obama administration caved on this.

For the first time ever, the Health and Human Services secretary publicly overruled the Food and Drug Administration, refusing Wednesday to allow emergency contraceptives to be sold over the counter, including to young teenagers. The decision avoided what could have been a bruising political battle over parental control and contraception during a presidential election season.

Thanks a lot, Kathleen Sebelius. God knows we wouldn’t want one of the groups least likely to use contraceptives properly to be able to easily get their hands on some Plan B. Up next: banning over-the-counter sales of paracetemol. Ha.

Belated Update: Reading below I do see that excerpt is misleading if you haven’t read the whole article; they didn’t take Plan B away from existing over-the-counter-sales, they just refused to extend it to full OTC status which would extend to those 17 and younger.

You’ve probably all already seen this Ryan Gosling Biostatistics tumblr, but just in case…I’m here for you. Totally not suggested by Cosma, at all. He didn’t even ever hear about it till now, because he is a serious researcher, and busy reading, and stuff.

My desire to see a Classics-themed Zachary Quinto tumblr is insufficient to overcome the inertia that would be needed to carry it out. So just go to google image search and then imagine a lot of excessively precise directions for wagon-building, a la Hesiod, interspersed with Pindar-like confusion as to whether gold, fire, fame, or perhaps even something else, is the best.

That’s the name of the new government of Belgium, inaugurated yesterday, which got off the ground after fivehundredfourthyone (that is: 541) days of negotiations (mind you: that number is written in Globish, not Oxford English). Elio di Rupo, leader of the Francophone social-democrats, had been trying to form a coalition for quite some time, but whether by coincidence or not, soon after Belgium’s credit rating worsened about 10 days ago, the agreement between the 6 negotiating parties quickly emerged. For those of you thinking that 6 parties make a government unworkable: a 6-party coalition is not unusual for Belgium. In fact, until quite recently this would be better formulated as 3 ‘party-families’, since it was assumed that the ideological line (being green, liberal, Christian-democrat or social-democrat, for example), was overwhelmingly more important than the linguistic identity of a party. But those days are gone, which means that we now do have 6 parties, rather than 3 party-twins.

I haven’t been following the coalition negotiations in detail, so mainly want to open up space for those of you who want to discuss whatever you want to discuss regarding the new coalition. Just three brief observations below the fold.
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Tom Bartlett describes the efforts of two psychologists to publish replication results for an article, which had purported to show that people could use ESP to predict whether they would be shown erotic pictures in the future. The replication found no observable effect, but (according to the authors’ account of it)had a difficult time finding a publisher.

Here’s the story: we sent the paper to the journal that Bem published his paper in, and they said ‘no, we don’t ever accept straight replication attempts’. We then tried another couple of journals, who said the same thing. We then sent it to the British Journal of Psychology, who sent it out for review. For whatever reason (and they have apologised, to their credit), it was quite badly delayed in their review process, and they took many months to get back to us.

When they did get back to us, there were two reviews, one very positive, urging publication, and one quite negative. This latter review didn’t find any problems in our methodology or writeup itself, but suggested that, since the three of us (Richard Wiseman, Chris French and I) are all skeptical of ESP, we might have unconsciously influenced the results using our own psychic powers. … Anyway, the BJP editor agreed with the second reviewer, and said that he’d only accept our paper if we ran a fourth experiment where we got a believer to run all the participants, to control for these experimenter effects. We thought that was a bit silly, and said that to the editor, but he didn’t change his mind. We don’t think doing another replication with a believer at the helm is the right thing to do … [the] experimental paradigms were designed so that most of the work is done by a computer and the experimenter has very little to do (this was explicitly because of his concerns about possible experimenter effects).

Although the Bartlett piece doesn’t make this suggestion, I can’t help wondering whether the reviewer was one of the authors of the original piece. Myself, I’ve had a couple of interesting interactions with editors over the years, but nothing that even comes close to matching this. I suppose you could make an argument that if you think that psychic powers are plausible subjects of investigation, you have to account for the possibility of compromising psychic effects, but the potential for abuse (e.g through claims about ever-more speculative ways in which the experiment could be compromised) is obvious.

1. Female Genital Mutilation, Everywhere, Ever.
2. Women Getting Raped in Far-Away Lands, like Afghanistan. AND YOU DON’T EVEN CARE!
3. Growing Gender Imbalances in China and India (Also known as “Where’s Your Precious Right to an Abortion Now, Missy?”)
4. Sexist Islamic Law Codes (“Wait, why just—” “Shut up.”)
5. World Hunger (But not through those programs where they only give micro-payments/loans to women on the basis of research that it is more effective.)
6. Lack of Access to Clean Drinking Water For The World’s Poorest Citizens, Because, Hey, While You’re There.
7. Africa. Is Some Shit Just Fucked up There, or What? Get On That.
8. Access to The Most Basic Knowledge About Human Reproduction and Assistance of Midwives Can Lower Peri-Natal Deaths Tremendously, But Please Don’t Tell Anyone About Contraception or Abortions.
9. Forced Prostitution, Sex Slavery, Human Trafficking.
10. Are We Seriously Just Not Even Trying to Go to Mars Anymore? Really, Though? We Made it to The Moon in Like 5 Years With Some Slide Rules and Horn-rimmed Glasses and Shit, and Now All We’ve Got is These Weaksauce Telescopes Peering Back in Time. What the Fuck? Mars, Bitches!

Now you know, ladies. Sorry any sexism in developed nations up to and including your own personal experiences of sexual assault didn’t even make it on the list, but better luck next time!

For the record, I’m just going to go out there and say the Siri thing was a conspiracy—of one. One pro-life programmer who cared about it a LOT, and 8,000 other programmers who let the error stay in through multiple testing of multiple versions due to (in this case) malign neglect; they just never looked. The claims that Siri is worse than Google only when and where it relies on Yelp seem to have been falsified; the program really looks to have something of a significant blind spot, too significant to be chalked up to error. I’m willing to give the Apple programmers the benefit of the doubt and say they are not juvenile frat-boy assholes. There’s just this one asshole, and then a large number of men and some women (some of both of whom are no doubt, living in this fallen world as we do, also assholes), who never tested the program along this particular axis. People have bitched about it; Apple will fix it; the next time someone will check first. This is often how you fight sexism in ordinary life. You don’t dive in front of that Afghani girl about to take a bottle of acid to the face and shoot the guy attacking her. You just influence the people around you by expression your opinions forcefully. Should we all donate money to the many thousands of feminist organizations working overseas to combat the life-threatening situations many of the world’s women face? Yes. Really. And you should take that fucking sandwich out of your mouth and give the money to OxFam. Pro Tip: “Afghanistan, infinite no backsies!” is not a valid argument to the effect that a given woman should shut up about some given topic.

Okay, this is too easy to pass up.

The WaPo reports that Teva Pharmaceuticals has applied to the FDA to sell Plan B over the counter. W00t! No more worrying about when the pharmacy closed or whether or not the pharmacist is gonna pull some conscience-clause bullshit on you, shy teenagers with broken condoms or forgotten birth control pills can sneak it into a shopping basket disguised with a magazine just like they do their tampons, things will be just a little easier from here on out.

BUT NO NOT SO FAST, MISSY.

“When anybody can buy an emergency contraceptive like this over the counter, you open the door for all sorts of abuse, and especially so when it comes to child abuse and child exploitation,” said Janice Crouse of Concerned Women of America.

Yes! If children who are being raped  or forced into prostitution prevent themselves from getting pregnant, then they are destroying valuable evidence, and that would be wrong. Or at least I assume that’s the reasoning here; surely Ms. Crouse doesn’t think that potential child rapists hold themselves back only for fear of not being able to force-feed their victims Plan B after raping them. Does she?

She’s also concerned that over-the-counter Plan B will make it harder for parents to be, um, “involved” with their children. Poor choice of words there, but let’s ignore it.

“When you are talking about selling something like this over the counter, you are opening up a can of worms when it comes to parental involvement in their children’s lives.”

Again, this is a TOTALLY VALID objection. It’s vitally important that parents have the power to force their underage children to bear them grandchildren, or at least to make them have to get an abortion rather than preventing the pregnancy in the first place.

Ah, but wait.

“It’s not a drug that prevents life — it’s a drug that destroys life,” said Jeanne Monahan of the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group. “If we define life as beginning at fertilization or conception, then this drug can be an abortifacient.”

This is my favorite part of the whole article. Let’s redefine “life” so that we can classify things as abortifacients! I’ll start:

If we define life as beginning at the moment a man first sets eyes on a woman, then not putting out for every dude on the street is an abortifacient.

If we define it as beginning the moment the ring is on her finger, then every business trip is an abortifacient.

If we define it as beginning with ovulation, then menstruation is an abortifacient! MENSTRUAL PADS MUST BE PRESCRIPTION ONLY.

Your turn!