“Redskins” forever?

Posted on October 31, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

(Note: this post was revised and updated on 5 November 2013)

Some (many?) people find the Washington “Redskins” team name and logo to be highly offensive. (What about the Chicago “Blackhawks” (see below) hockey team, by the way?)  What, if anything, should be done about this state of affairs? Here are some possible approaches:

1. Impose a complete ban on the use of offensive team names or logos (or some other form of regulation and coercion)

2. Engage in voluntary bargaining, also known as “Coasian bargaining,” in which the NFL or some other group offers to “buy out” the rights to the Redskins trademark from Dan Snyder, the hapless owner of the Washington Redskins

3. Do nothing

Which approach do you prefer?  Can you think of any other possible solutions?

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How likely is it that your boyfriend/girlfriend and you will break up?

Posted on October 30, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Jon Kleinberg, a researcher at Cornell University, and Lars Backstrom, an engineer at Facebook, recently posted this fascinating paper, “Romantic Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties: A Network Analysis of Relationship Status on Facebook,” on the open-access science website arxiv.org.  The researchers analyzed a large dataset of over 1.3 million Facebook users listed as being “in a relationship” and then used the concept of dispersion to measure the probability that any given couple might break up.

In summary, couples with high dispersion have mutual friends who are not well connected, while couples with low dispersion have mutual friends who are well connected.  The researchers found that the more well connected their mutual friends were, the more likely they were to break up.  That is, if you and your partner share the same social circle on Facebook (low dispersion), each partner is less likely to have his or her own life and the relationship is thus more likely to implode.

What do you think?

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Should the third year of law school be optional?

Posted on October 28, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Why does it take three years to get a law degree?  Why don’t law schools do their students a favor by dropping the third year altogether, or at least making it entirely optional?

Bonus link: Teach blogging in law school?

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How long did the gunfight at the O.K. Corral last?

Posted on October 26, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

And how many rounds were fired?

File:Tombstone fire insurance map 1888.jpg

According to Wikipedia, about 30 rounds were fired in 30 seconds during the famous gun battle at the O.K. Corral. Here is more:

Despite its name, the gunfight actually occurred in a narrow lot six doors west of the rear entrance to the O.K. Corral on Fremont Street, and also in the street. The two opposing parties were initially only about 6 feet (1.8 m) apart. About thirty shots were fired in thirty seconds.

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Why did Jeff Bezos buy The Washington Post?

Posted on October 25, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

After buying out the Graham family–the old owners of The Washington Post–for $250 million, Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeffrey Bezos formally took control of The Post on 1 October 2013, but why?

(a) because he wants to revitalize the newspaper industry and modernize how news is reported

(b) because he wants to influence Congress and be taken more seriously by Washington elites

(c) because he is a megalomaniac

Sometimes the simplest, most parsimonious explanations are the best.

Extra Credit: did Bezos pay too much or too little for The Post?

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Prosecution Bias?

Posted on October 24, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Are jurors Bayesians?  Should judges ban Bayes’ Rule from the courtroom?  prior probability is reblogging this post because of our fascination with the Bayesian approach to probability and with the application of Bayesian methods to law and the legal process.

Bonus link: Fun with Bayesian Priors

jeff's avatarCheap Talk

Why are conditional probabilities so rarely used in court, and sometimes even prohibited?  Here’s one more good reason:  prosecution bias.

Suppose that a piece of evidence X is correlated with guilt.  The prosecutor might say, “Conditional on evidence X, the likelihood ratio for guilt versus innoncence is Y, update your priors accordingly.”  Even if the prosecutor is correct in his statistics his claim is dubious.

Because the prosecutor sees the evidence for all suspects before deciding which ones to bring to trial.  And the jurors know this.  So the fact that evidence like X exists against this defendant is already partially reflected in the fact that it was this guy they brought charges against and not someone else.

If jurors were truly Bayesian (a necessary presumption if we are to consider using probabiilties in court at all) then they would already have accounted for this and updated their priors…

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Why are law reviews so dull, tedious, and boring?

Posted on October 22, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Adam Liptak’s recent report in the New York Times on “lackluster law reviews” is fun to read and highly recommended. Here is an excerpt:

Law reviews are not really meant to be read. They mostly exist as a way for law schools to evaluate law professors for promotion and tenure, based partly on what they have to say and partly on their success in placing articles in prestigious law reviews.

All this is true, but Liptak ignores the most obvious problem with the law reviews: law review editors don’t know how to edit. (*) The proof of this statement is in the law review pudding, so to speak, or the fact that most law review articles are simply dull, tedious, and boring. The editing process, by piling on so many extra footnotes, probably makes them even worse.

Worse yet, the average number of words in a typical law review article has now reached enormous proportions. Compare, for example,  the length of the articles appearing in the most recent issues of the Yale Law Journal or Harvard Law Review with the length of the most recent scientific reports appearing in the journals Nature or Science, and you will get some idea of how bloated and unnecessarily long law review articles are. (**) After all, who wants to read a 50+ or 100+ page article with 300+ plus footnotes?

No one. (***)

* Clarification: law review editors certainly know how to edit footnotes and citations but not the content and style of the articles themselves.

** Could there be an inverse relationship between the truth value and originality of an article and its length?

*** prior probability suspects that even law professors don’t really enjoy reading law review articles

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Should “revenge porn” be a crime or a tort?

Posted on October 20, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Or neither? The State of California recently created a new misdemeanor offense–that of posting identifiable nude photographs of another person online without his or her permission, but only when such public postings are done with the intent to cause emotional distress or humiliation. Why not make such non-consensual postings a civil law tort, thus allowing the victim to recover compensation, including punitive damages (with the level of damages depending on the amount of humiliation suffered), and why we’re at it, why not extend civil liability to any third-party website that does not take down such postings upon the victim’s request?

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“If you’re never wrong …

Posted on October 18, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

… you’re never interesting.”

–Felix Salmon

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“Beam me up Scotty”

Posted on October 17, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Who said that?

According to this pithy report by Karl Smallwood, Captain Kirk never uttered these precise words in the original Star Trek series. Captain Kirk comes close, however, on several occasions.  For example, he says “Scotty, beam us up, fast” in the original episode of Star Trek and “Beam us up” in another episode.

Yet, as Mr Smallwood notes, this phrase “is universally and intrinsically linked with the original Star Trek series.”  So, who coined this famous phrase, if not Captain Kirk?  Nobody really knows.

For additional examples of “wrongfully attributed statements,” check out this essay by Corey Robin.

Hat tip: digg

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