The NYT’s Bits blog introduces us to unvarnished, a site where you can “review” another person anonymously.

Here is how it works. For now, you must be invited by an existing user, and to formally register, you must first write a review of that person. Any member can review any other member, and if someone does not have a profile on the site, you can create one for them without their permission.

The person being reviewed has very little control over what is written; they cannot delete a review, but can offer a written response, or perhaps ask their friends to contribute more positive portrayals.

Facebook has a similar application called Honesty Box that allows you to leave anonymous assessments of those with a facebook page. I guess this application brings the scathing critque “straight to you”!

My initial impression is that no good can come of this. It does raise the question how we perceive our digital obligations onlines. Ilana Gershon gave a great talk at the MaCarthur Foundation’s 2010  Digital Media and Learning conference I attended last month in San Diego.  Her talk was called “Keepin’ It Real: Facebook’s Honesty Box & African-American Verbal Artistry.” The gist of the talk was that there were key differences in how White and Black students viewed “honesty box.” While White students Many white students saw the app as an unwelcomed opportunity to “say mean things” while African American students preferred to know if people out there had negative assessments about them.

While I haven’t read the paper, it brings up an interesting puzzle for me.  Should I confront negative assessments of me on the part of anonymous others.  For example, before this post, I had no idea if I am on Rate my Professor.com.  I didn’t want to know.  But since I was writing this post, I went on anyway and got this:

a really stand up prof! used the book a little but the majority of the work was online. he is funny and can ignite class discussions that make going to class a joy. go to this class and feel free to voice your opinions. marichal is one of the best teachers at cal lutheran.

Whew! So far so good. But then I also got this.

he never followed the syllabus so it was insanely confusing! He made it sound like we were going to cover all kinds of relevant current events, but we stayed on one topic for almost 6 weeks. By the add/drop dealine, there were NO grades in the gradebook. We were let out of class late everyday.

Ouch! But here’s the thing…is the anonymity liberating students to be authentic and thus confront me with at the very least a valuable perspective on my strengths and shortcomings or is the anonymity a unwelcomed invitation to “be mean.” If the web affords us these venues to give unsolicited and unattributable assessments of others, then how should we be in these venues? Do we give them over to spiteful nastiness? Do we try to steer them towards “authentic” critique?

So a side hobby of mine is trying to figure out what this President Obama guy is up to politically.  I might be proven wrong, but I have a strange sense about this president’ political skills, backed up with very little empirical evidence (health care notwihtstanding).  These is something unique and mercurial about his political style than I think is an outlier in studying trends in American politics.  Maybe it’s his mixed-race, multicutlral background or his age or his intellect, maybe it was David Plouffe, amybe it was the Internet but I have a sense that this fall isn’t going to go as my political science brain tells me it should, with big off year gains for the Republicans.  So I’ll go out on a limb and say that the Dems lose fewer than 10 seats in the House this fall. 

All I’m saying is, anybody who can reference a song which contain lyrics that say “If you’re feeling like a pimp, …go on brush your shoulders off” and make it work is playing a different game than the rest of Washington.

The problematic lyrics notwithstanding…it is a meme in his approach to opponents. What I get from his first year and a half in office is that he’s happy for the opposition to get all exercised about socialism and death panels and the like while he waits to expend his political capital when it really counts, like two weeks before a vote on health care. Play it cool, recognize that you’re in charge and strike carefully and methodically. He’s the first hip-hop president and it might work for him.

Here’s a good example, Ezra Klein. is puzzled as to why the administration is opening up offshore drilling opportunities in the face of its own environmental interest groups. Frankly I am too….is he “feathering the bed” for a big victory on cap and trade? What about immigration? Is he going to act on this to energize the Latino base? Whatever he does, he’s going to let his opposition get all angered and annoyed at the “government takeover” of something or another and slowly build the coalition necessary to get things done. He’s playing another game, or as Jay Z would say —

“I’m not a business man. I’m a business. Man! Let me handle my business, damn!”

The New York Times BITS blog has an interview with Andrey Ternovskiy, a 17 year old from Moscow that invented the next big thing on the Internet. If you haven’t heard of Chat Roulette by now then I’m surprised you’ve found your way on to a blog to read this post!  From Wikipedia:

Chatroulette is a website that pairs random strangers for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website randomly begin an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection.

The possibilities of this application are fascinating to me. I’m a big fan of any spaces left on the Web that promote randomness and spontaneity.  Think about the bravado it takes to subject yourself to a random conversation with anyone, anywhere in the world.  This is probably why you see young people visiting the site is greater numbers. I mean you always run the risk of getting this:

The possibilities for teaching and scholarship are immense. How about assigning your student a discussion question to ask the random stranger on chat roulette and then bringing the answers back to class. Stuff like this makes me hopeful about the transformational possibilities of the Internet as a medium. BTW I’m giving a paper on this topic at the Western Political Science Meeting this week in San Francisco…stay tuned for details, or maybe I’ll just give the presentation to random people on Chat Roulette!

Andrew Sullivan links to a chart produced by Will Wilkinson. The chart compiles data from the world attitudes survey and shows a convergence in attitudes towards more tolerance for homosexuality.

Important advance IMHO but my question is whether these are abstract changes that signal a shift in those practices we deem as tolerable, rather than concrete changes where we accept gays and lesbians into in our daily habitus as full and equal members. Tolerance does not equal political equality.

Apologies if this dips too far into the metaphysical, but I think this sentiment is an essential aspect of critical theory as I read it:

Sin is evasion of time. In giving way to nostalgia, for example, we flee from time into the past. Evading time is accomplished mainly, however, by constructing worlds — orders of life in which everything has its assigned place, and all events are foreknown if not willed. There are personal worlds, occupied perhaps by only a single individual; and there is also ‘the world,’ the surrounding order of society, treated as objectively knowable, humanly controllable, and morally final. A world is always a kind of fortress against time.

From Glen Tinder’s “The Fabric of Hope: An Essay” via From Andrew Sullivan

Jonathan Chait at the New Republic has an interesting post up Concerning Obama’s political style. Rather than capitulate to Republican demands as his critics on the left suggest he is doing, he’s using the rhetoric of bipartisanship to draw out the Republicans.

One way to deal with that kind of bad-faith opposition is to draw the person in, treat them as if they were operating in good faith, and draw them into a conversation about how they actually would solve the problem. If they have nothing, it shows. And that’s not a tactic of bipartisan Washington idealists — it’s a hard-nosed tactic of community organizers, who are acutely aware of power and conflict. It’s how you deal with people with intractable demands — put ‘em on a committee.

Since I’m a soccer fan, the Republicans remind me a whole lot of a team playing 10 men (or women) “behind the ball” in the hopes of preventing the other team from scoring. It’s kinda like a prevent defense in American football for those misguided souls who think soccer is boring. How do you break a “bunker” defense in soccer? You’re patient. You pass the ball around in the hopes of “drawing out” the other team from their goal area. You try to force them to make a mistake that frees you up for a shot on goal. It doesn’t always work but it’s the only chance you have. This health care summit is Obama’s version of trying to force the Republicans into a mistake. Let’s see what happens.

Via Matt Ygelsias.

Now we need some enterprising young students to do a positivism vs. hermeneutics battle.

Put down your New Yorker… here’s the bottom line!

Although:

It’s a bit hazy, but the yellow bar shows approval rates for the last six presidents among Whites.  It suggests that Whites are being unduly hard on a president!  The continuing significance of race indeed! Unless you really buy this socialist thing! It suggests that race and the economy have an interaction effect. When the economy is bad, race becomes salient and perhaps amplifies negative perceptions of the president among Whites, when things are good economically, race is less salient?

In the interest of ensuring our readers live longer, happier lives, I bring you perhaps my favorite TED talk (of which I have many). In this talk, Dan Beuttner gives us 9 factors that he and his research team argue will extend and improve our lives.  The Presentation Zen blog give us a nice summary of his key points.  I’m not up on my happiness research, so I’m not certain how empirically valid all these findings are or whether “happiness scholars” view this work as an advance, but it certainly did give me things to think about. As a political scientist and public policy scholar, I’m particularly interested in how these findings are converted into narratives that can yield better policy outcomes.

Rockitbaby lets you compare online musical preferences between two cities. Hamburg and New York have a six percent overlap in music preference. By contrast, my current home (Los Angeles) and my birthplace (Miami) overlap at 49%. Not sure what that means, but it’s fun to play with.