Signifying Nothing

Enkindle this (aka your Mass Effect 2 mini-review)

2010-02-06T02:45:55-06:00

The sequel to Mass Effect has arrived and after about 10 days with the game I can honestly say that on virtually every dimension, ME2 is superior to its predecessor. Combat has been made a lot better; the decryption and electronics “mini-games” are much more engaging than playing Simon with the A-B-Y-Z buttons on the controller; and the voice acting and animation is a step up from the original. Overall the game definitely is more polished than its predecessor and feels more complete. After a short adjustment to the “new” rules of the ME universe, I found I really didn’t miss the elements of gameplay that were reduced or simplified.

Comparing two play-throughs of the game based on different saves from ME1, I could definitely feel a more ominous sense of Things To Come based on the differences in my actions in the two “pasts”; the consequences of past actions do not affect the main plot of ME2 drastically, but I have the sense that some of Shepard’s actions in the fight against Saren and Sovereign in ME1 will have major consequences in the third installment, as well as Shepard’s actions in ME2 of course.

ME2 definitely reflects its creators’ intentions to have a “darker” middle section of the trilogy; in particular, the lines of morality are blurred much more than in ME1 (where the only arguably morally-dubious “Paragon” choice was the decision to free the last of the rachni), and certainly what might be good for the galaxy doesn’t always align with what is right for Shepard. In the various missions you have to wrestle with the morality of taking actions to rectify past morally-dubious actions by others. If one faction seeks to impose its vision of Truth on another, is it morally acceptable to turn the tables on them and impose a different vision? Should a species that was mistakenly “elevated” without its consent be hobbled until that species’ people can mature sufficiently to deal with the technological advances that fell in their laps? Should a major piece of enemy technology be left intact for one particular race’s ethically-challenged black ops organization to discover its secrets, perhaps to be used not against the civilized galaxy’s common foe but for more immediate political advantage?

I would be remiss if I didn’t also discuss the humor that Bioware stuck in the game, including (but not limited to) self-deprecation about the excruciating elevator rides in ME1, a 22nd century take on Dirty Harry, an alien scientist who performs Gilbert and Sullivan, and ads for probably the worst production of Hamlet in recorded history. I laughed myself silly several times during the game; sometimes, it was because of something Shepard did (or a squadmate’s response to it), while other times it was just something bizarre overheard in the background—random banter between bystanders, for example.

My only quibbles thus far would be with the planet scanning part of the game (I don’t mind having to gather resources, but you’d think your multi-billion credit starship’s AI could scan for minerals on its own much faster than I could), the inability to revisit some of the interesting locations from ME1 (leading to some rather improbable coincidental encounters with important folks from those locations at other ports-of-call), and a sense that some locations just needed to be grander in scope—even some of the interesting places you visit are sealed once you complete missions in those areas, so you can’t really go and see what difference your actions made. I also miss a bit of the “party banter” from the previous game; given the much larger combination of squadmates possible for missions (and the lack of elevator rides for banter to take place), however, it’s understandable.

But the quibbles are more than offset by the positives of the game. ME2 was definitely top value for my entertainment dollar.

QotD, there-are-five-lights edition

2010-02-05T00:51:57-06:00

Why show trials always have ludicrous charges against the defendants in totalitarian states:

[F]orcing someone to admit to something he might have done does not send a strong signal of power. Forcing someone to confess to a crime that everyone knows he could not possibly have committed, on the other hand, is terrifying.

QotD, the insidious nature of Noam Chomsky edition

2010-01-17T00:33:30-06:00

Oliver Kamm on his frequent nemesis:

I don’t, as it happens, regard Chomsky as an apologist for the Khmer Rouge or for other appalling regimes. I regard him as a sophist possessed of reflexive anti-Americanism. It’s because his position is an article of faith that he’s so unreliable when it comes to describing the actual sins of omission and commission in American foreign policy. In his position, factual accuracy is secondary (his writings on the Balkans, for example, are an intellectual disgrace). His method is, as I’ve referred to, sarcasm and insinuation. He is different from his associate Edward Herman, who is best known these days as a crude denier of Serb war crimes, notably the genocide at Srebrenica.

Life imitates comedy

2010-01-15T00:16:42-06:00

Back in my misspent college years, one of my few student activities was working on the student newspaper at Rose-Hulman, the Rose Thorn. Out of boredom—and frankly a frequent lack of real advertising, since we typically gave a local pizza chain a quarter-page ad in exchange for sustenance for the staff, accounting for a sizable chunk of our income—the various people involved in production would frequently insert fake classified ads into the publication. One creation I was personally proud of was a bogus ad for an emerging spring break destination—the various and sundry republics of the former Soviet Union, complete with a fake telephone number (1–8xx-FUN-IN-CIS) to obtain further details. Presumably—hopefully!—the IQs of our readers were sufficiently high that nobody was actually being bothered by obnoxious phone calls looking for information on these exciting tour packages.

Fast forward a decade and a half, and now the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea may be getting in on the act for real. Frankly I think my fake ads may have turned out to have been more effective in drumming up interest in unorthodox Spring Break destinations. And whatever you do, don”t stay at the Ryugyong even if the doctored pictures in the brochure look nice.

QotD, deadweight loss of dead trees edition

2010-01-13T01:58:07-06:00

John Sides on open access in political science:

Every political scientist should have a webpage where ungated copies of their papers and articles are available. Period.

(Alas, mine needs work in this regard, as most of my pubs aren't there in final form, but it will be better soon.)

From the department of bad statistics

2010-01-08T00:01:57-06:00

I’m glad to see that some things never change; in this case, it’s the low quality of local news reporting in Laredo. Pro8News breathlessly reports that Mexican drivers are ‘less likely to be ticketed’ since less than 25% of parking tickets in Laredo are issued to Mexican-licensed vehicles.

This story just begs to be placed on a research methods final as one of those “identify all of the problems with this analysis” questions. Bonus points for invoking Bayes’ theorem.

Like SPSA, but cheaper and less snowy

2010-01-07T21:11:22-06:00

The slides for tomorrow’s presentation of my paper with Frequent Commenter Scott are now available online—not that they will make much sense without my allegedly-engaging patter attached.

Hope and change

2010-01-04T22:31:12-06:00

Via TigerHawk comes a useful reminder that the alleged “grownups” now in charge of American foreign policy still haven’t made any substantive change in U.S. policy towards Cuba.

Working syllabi for spring 2010

2009-12-23T02:09:08-06:00

Preliminary syllabi are now posted at the usual place, although there’s a good chance the assignments may change—requirements that seemed appropriate for a 30-student senior-level class no longer appear quite so reasonable with 45 students and counting.

Lee Sigelman, RIP

2009-12-22T14:41:18-06:00

Political scientist Lee Sigelman, probably best known as the past editor of one of the flagship journals of the discipline, passed away last evening. I never met Lee myself (the closest I got was hearing him speak at an SPSA luncheon keynote about a decade ago in Atlanta) but I was well aware of his contributions to our field and to helping to legitimize blogging among political scientists by helping launch The Monkey Cage with several of his GWU colleagues. His contributions to our discipline will surely be missed.

Yet another conference paper

2009-12-21T21:04:17-06:00

My paper with Frequent Commenter Scott™ entitled “Can We Really Have a Conversation about Race? Investigating Race-of-Interviewer Effects in the Contemporary South” is now online for your perusal at the usual place.

Where the books aren't

2009-12-17T18:52:59-06:00

The Associated Press visits the community which soon is to be the largest city in America without a bookstore, quotes a colleague, and gets the name of my employer wrong.

But at least we’re getting a snow park!

Electoral reform in Mexico?

2009-12-16T17:02:15-06:00

Via one of my Facebook contacts, the Financial Times is reporting that Mexican president Felipe Calderón has proposed some significant changes in elections to Mexico’s presidency and Congress, including the adoption of a run-off system for presidential elections and permitting members of Congress (but not presidents, breaking the regional trend of late) to seek reelection; the proposal would also cut the sizes of both chambers of the legislature quite substantially.

There doesn’t seem to be much to object to on the surface of the package—although I’m not convinced that either chamber needs a cut in its membership—but Calderón will probably need the support of many deputies from one or both of the major opposition parties for the proposals to succeed. Since the reforms would probably enhance the powers of deputies and senators at the expense of their party leaders, many Mexican legislators may find themselves caught between their partisan and personal interests.

Links that are in no way editorial comments on my employer

2009-12-10T15:44:35-06:00

These items are presented for your edification without further comment.

James Joyner notes a post by Mikita Brottman on requiring ridiculous rules in college syllabi to appease accreditors, lawyers, and legislators.
Dean Dad explains the idiocy of trying to create smoke-free college campuses.

QotD, media groupthink edition

2009-12-07T16:34:59-06:00

Megan McArdle, on today’s outburst of mass media bloviation on climate change:

If fifty-four newspapers had wanted to make a serious statement about the environment that their readers were sure to pay attention to, they might have stopped printing and distributing their energy intensive product for a day.

Spurious correlation watch

2009-12-03T23:08:41-06:00

Andrew Sullivan takes a break from spelunking in Sarah Palin’s reproductive tract to provide us with highly superficial social scientific analysis:

Ezra Klein asks:

Is there any evidence that financing wars brings them to a quicker close? Any papers examining this question?

From Bruce Bartlett’s column last week:

History shows that wars financed heavily by higher taxes, such as the Korean War and the first Gulf War, end quickly, while those financed largely by deficits, such as the Vietnam War and current Middle East conflicts, tend to drag on indefinitely.

How about a more plausible explanation: Korea and Gulf War I were conflicts against state actors that fought using traditional military tactics, while Vietnam and the Middle Eastern conflicts (particularly in Afghanistan) were/are conflicts mostly involving indigenous, non-state resistance movements or terrorist cells with some degree of local popular support (the Viet Cong, Iraqi Shiite and Sunni extremists and al-Qaeda, and the Taliban and al-Qaeda, respectively) that are engaged in unconventional warfare. The mode of funding would seem to have little to do with conflict length. Particularly since World Wars I and II were also funded by massive deficit spending, yet U.S. involvement in both conflicts was comparatively brief (although not on the order of Gulf War I).

Besides, the Johnson-Nixon era’s massive expansion of the deficit-financed American welfare state would be a serious conflating factor in attributing Vietnam’s success or failure to its funding approach, much as the effects of the Bush tax cuts likely dwarfed Iraq and Afghanistan spending as a source of the increased budget deficit over the past eight years and change; the liberal CBPP think-tank attributes the effects of one year (2004) of the Bush tax cuts as being $276 billion in reduced tax revenues (and thus increased debt), far more than the annualized cost to the Treasury of both conflicts combined even based on the most pessimistic estimates.

Why the dead tree media is in trouble

2009-11-27T15:38:21-06:00

I’ll read free news originally published in Spanish and then poorly translated into English before paying for news that was poorly written in English in the first place.

On useful idiocy

2009-11-26T06:11:15-06:00

The Economist on former CNDer-turned-EU foreign policy czar Catherine Ashton and the double standard that seems to apply to the former communist fifth column in the West:

The real scandal, though, is the West’s continuing amnesia about the cold war. Given the Soviet Union’s history of mass murder, subversion, and deceit, it is astonishing that even tangential association with Soviet-backed causes in the past does not arouse the moral outrage now that is still so readily evoked by connections with the (undisputedly revolting) regime in South Africa. Most CND veterans see their peacenik days, at worst, as romantic youthful idealism. Warm-hearted but soft-headed, maybe: but better than being cold-hearted and hard-headed.

That is a shameful cop-out. Imagine a 1980s Europe where CND had triumphed, with left-wing governments in Britain and Germany scrapping NATO, surrendering to Kremlin pressure and propping up the evil empire. Her opponents complain that Lady Ashton is ineffective. As a CND organiser, that may have been a blessing.

This phenomenon is hardly unique to Cold War era; witness the continuing relative whitewash of Stalin’s crimes in comparison to Hitler’s for the most obvious example thereof. Or the vague sympathy—rather than outright revulsion—that seems to accompany much writing by western Sinophiles about Mao’s rule of China.

In which I further undermine my tenure case

2009-11-10T23:59:30-06:00

Prof. Karlson quotes from a Chronicle debate over the question, Are Too Many Students Going to College?, specifically the reaction of W. Norton Grubb of Berkeley:

We do have a moral obligation, emerging from several centuries of concern with equity in a highly inequitable country, to make access to and completion of college more equitable. But rather than proclaiming College for All, we should be stressing High School Completion for All, emphasizing that such completion requires either college readiness or readiness for sustained employment—or for the combination of the two that has become so common.

The whole debate would be valued reading for our political masters, who seem to have a different idea.

QotD, Stupak amendment edition

2009-11-09T22:24:45-06:00

From TigerHawk’s reaction to the furor surrounding the Stupak anti-abortion amendment to the House version of the health care bill:

The real problem, of course, is that this fight reveals the ugly truth of statist health care: That personal medical decisions are no longer a matter of private bargaining, but of political argument. The fight over abortion funding is not an exception, it is a harbinger. Medical decisions are becoming more ethically complex and culturally contentious, not less. Do you really want the legislature deciding who may pull what plug, whether men can get drugs for longer-lasting erections, or whether functional neurosurgery to treat depression, addiction, or obesity is a good idea? Speaking only for myself, I would rather that my employer dangle these benefits in its campaign to retain me than have the matter settled by some clown Congressman from a safe seat in a distant state.

Somehow I don’t think TigerHawk is the only one with similar sentiments.

On excessive moderation

2009-11-04T00:18:32-06:00

As Steven Taylor notes, the third-party candidacy by Doug Hoffman in New York’s 23rd congressional district seems to have backfired, delivering a solid Republican seat for generations to Democratic candidate Bill Owens.

While some conservatives like my Twitter pal (and OG blogger) Jayvie Canono have suggested that Republican nominee Dede “Scozzafava would’ve been a vote for the Dems,” one of the iron laws of contemporary politics in the House is that the vast majority of the time, even the most liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats vote with their party. Would Hoffman have been a more reliable Republican vote than Scozzafava? Probably. But Owens, if he’s anything like the vast majority of his future colleagues, will almost certainly vote with the Democrats more than 90% of the time; even the most “disloyal” Republicans only break from their party around 35% of the time while the vast majority only defect less than 10% of the time. In other words, conservatives have probably traded a reasonably Republican vote in the House for a reliably Democratic one, which in the grand scheme of things is not likely to be smart politics.

There's your problem

2009-11-03T15:00:02-06:00

Laredo’s population: well over 200,000.

Number of bookstores in Laredo, effective January 2010: zero.

Yeah, that will fix the problem

2009-10-30T11:14:42-05:00

The SEC is going to fix its officiating problems by… blaming the messenger:

Commissioner Mike Slive told The Associated Press in a phone interview Friday that coaches who violate the conferences’ ethics rules against criticizing officials in public will face a fine or suspension instead of receiving public reprimands when they first act up.

“It became clear to me after last week that I was no longer interested in reprimands and the conference athletic directors and university presidents unanimously agreed,” said Slive, in his eighth season as the head of the SEC.

Well, I’m not an SEC coach and, frankly, Bobby Petrino, Lane Kiffin, and Dan Mullen are my least favorite coaches in the league, but when a quarter of your league’s coaches think your referees are incompetent or worse—with commentators on television openly suggesting the refs are making calls to help Bama and Florida keep their national rankings—the problem isn’t the coaches’ airing of grievances, however whiny they may sound.

Instead Slive needs to get together with the other BCS-conference commissioners and assemble a new plan for refereeing big-time college football. With the BCS and regular-season television money that the conferences are raking in, the least the conferences could do is work together to produce a competent, national pool of refs to assign to regular season and bowl games, rather than the motley hodge-podge of officials that are used now.

Things I will believe are true when they happen

2009-10-29T23:55:44-05:00

Agence France-Presse reports that the sorta-kinda-coup leader in Honduras, Roberto Micheletti, has accepted a deal that will return sorta-kinda-ex president Manuel Zelaya to the presidency, although the deal still has to be approved by the Honduran Congress; however, the BBC‘s reporting suggests things are not quite so definite as AFP would have us believe.

Your spring 2010 textbook lists

2009-10-27T23:46:40-05:00

I don’t have syllabi yet—the plan is to make a few changes to the spring 2009 syllabi but nothing radical—but here’s the list:

For PSCI 2306, Texas government (aka American State Government): Government and Politics in the Lone Star State, 6th ed. We had to pick the same book for all our sections due to Early College High School… and then they put all the kids from ECHS in the same section, defeating the purpose of picking a common book. I was using CQ’s Lone Star Politics before, which I liked and tried to sell my colleagues on using, but the lack of a test bank was the deal-breaker.

For PSCI 3320, Congress and the Presidency: The American Congress, 6th ed.; The American Congress Reader; and The Politics of the Presidency. I’ve been using the CQ Congress books for years but felt like trying something different for Congress, hence the switch to Smith, Roberts, and Vander Wielen’s books. New edition of Pika and Maltese, but otherwise no change on the presidency end, where I only spend a few weeks anyway—really I teach the class more focused on “Congress and Interbranch Relations.”

For PSCI 4320, Political System of the U.S. (which I basically treat as a political behavior class, since we don’t have anything on the books at the undergrad level that covers that stuff): Polling and the Public, 7th ed.; Public Opinion: Democratic Ideals, Democratic Practice; Citizen Politics, 5th ed., and Party Politics in America, 13th ed. I’ve decided to try to cut back on the voting behavior and interest groups material I was including before and focus more on parties and public opinion. This class was the least successful one last time around, in part because I was too ambitious in what I planned to cover. I’m also going to replace the research paper requirement with a couple of shorter papers, which hopefully will work better.

And that’s it; thankfully I’ll be doing my 3-class semester in the spring so I might actually be a bit saner and more prolific here and elsewhere (e.g. OTB) then.