Top 6 Songs of 2010

Several years ago, I used to send out a list of my Top 6 albums of the year every New Year's Eve.  I don't really buy enough albums anymore to make a credible list of the bests albums of the year, so I am just going to limit this my favorite songs.  It is remarkable to me how dominated this list is by female singers, considering how averse I used to be bands fronted by women.  This is even true of the songs that just missed the list (Sprawl II by Arcade Fire would probably have been #7, while I only excluded Crown on the Ground by Sleigh Bells and Bad Romance by Lady Gaga because they were actually released in 2009).

6.) Beach House - "Zebra"
I actually think the band is a bit overrated given what indie critical darlings they were....many of their songs put me to sleep.  But the chromatic ascension to start the chorus on this one really hooked me in.

 5.) Vampire Weekend - "Giving Up the Gun"
"Contra" would have definitely been my album of the year if it weren't so damn consistent.

4.) Sleigh Bells - "Rill Rill"
"Treats" would have definitely been my album of the year if it weren't so damn inconsistent.

 
3.) Klaxons - "Echoes"
This song was all the rage in England when I was there in August....and you know I had to have some Britpop represented!

My top two picks are both from relatively new bands still obscure enough not to have wikipedia entries, one a single-woman project and the other a husband and wife duo.  But they were my two musical obsessions this year...one the perfect winter song with Bjork-inspired vocals and beats, icy electronics, and cathedral harmonies that evoke finally waking up from a long hibernation; the other, the perfect summer song with lo-fi guitar and keyboard backed by retro girl-group vocals singing of sailing at night off the coast of Florida.   I've probably spoiled the suspense now, but here they are...

2.) Glasser - "Apply"

(It seems like many of the videos for this song online are from an earlier version that I don't like nearly as much.  This is the (IMO superior) album version.)

1.) Tennis - "Marathon"

(I don't think the song has a music video, and all the live performances I can find are terrible quality.)

The Sing Off Update

I got caught up on The Sing Off tonight between Atlantic City trips.  There are five groups left as of when I am writing this; the fourth (and penultimate) episode airs tomorrow, but I probably won't be able to watch it until Sunday.   I think overall, the judges have generally made good decisions....the eliminations of Men of Note on the first episode and Eleventh Hour the second were easy choices; the other groups knocked off in the first two episodes (Pitch Slapped and the Whiffenpoofs), could have defensibly made it through, but I don't miss them.  Groove for Thought, eliminated last night, was a talented group, but they didn't really have the range to be a serious contender to win.

At this point, one group has clearly emerged as the clear favorite in my mind: Street Corner Symphony.  They have been by far the most consistent performers, and they have shown a wide range without pandering to the judges.   I haven't heard a lot of Radiohead acapella, and I thought their rendition was the highlight of last night's episode.  If this year parallels last year's vote, SCS's superior blend and arrangements will pull off the victory over pure showmanship of On the Rocks, with The Backbeats finishing third.....but I am inclined to believe this year will go a little differently and Committed will make the finals over OTR.   I almost think The Backbeats are the most likely of all to make the finals, simply because they are the last group remaining the any female members (the competition started with 6 male groups and 4 coed).

Circuit Ring!

I'll write a more about this tournament a little later on when I have more time, but I won a WSOP Circuit title yesterday in the Omaha Hi-Lo event, certainly my biggest poker accomplishment thus far (although not quite my biggest cash).  Here's the article from the WSOP website:

Nicholas Goedert Score High Marks at Harrah's Resort

Partisanship & Ideology in Southern CDs

I thought I would post a small tidbit from the data I have been looking at recently for my dissertation on congressional redistricting. My data set here consists of all congressional races from 1972 through 2008, a bit more than 8000 races.

Although somewhat tangential to my research, one of the major controversies in redistricting is whether 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act, thought to mandate the creation of “majority-minority” districts in states with significant racial minority populations (e.g. a districts where the majority of the population was African American), actually hurt the substantive political interests of those (presumable liberal) minorities by increasing the likelihood of electing Republicans in other districts.  This was particularly relevant in the South, where since 1992, many white moderate Democrats in Congress have been replaced by either African-American liberals or very conservative Republicans.  So do these additional Republicans more than offset the gains made by the African-American delegation in the South through majority-minority districting?  The chart below, while very crude in its measurements, offers some insight.

Effect of Southern region on partisanship and ideology of congressional delegation, pre- and post- majority-minority districting constraints

		1972-1990			1992-2008
Probability of Republican Seat (Probit)
State GOP Pres. Vote		2.573	**		2.560	**
		(0.266)			(0.203)
Nat'l GOP Cong. Vote		2.200	**		2.006	**
		(0.486)			(0.372)
South Indicator		-0.432	**		-0.154	**
		(0.047)			(0.055)
Constant		-0.003			0.036
		(0.044)			(0.027)
Estimated Ideology of Representative (Linear Regr.)
State GOP Pres. Vote		0.976	**		1.225	**
		(0.064)			(0.067)
Nat'l GOP Cong. Vote		0.568	**		0.343	**
		(0.119)			(0.128)
South Indicator		0.041	**		-0.023
		(0.011)			(0.019)
Constant		-0.046			0.076
		(0.011)			(0.009)
n		4342			3914
**p<.01

This chart measures the likelihood that a congressional district will elect a Republican, and how conservative that member of congress will be (measured by Poole & Rosenthal DW-NOMINATE scores), controlling for two electoral trends.  The first is the average Republican vote in presidential elections over the course of a decade at the statewide level (so that this value does not depend on the actual gerrymander).   The second is the Republican vote at the national level in a given congressional election year. 

All these variables are scaled such that positive values indicate a Republican/conservative leaning and negative values indicate a Democratic/liberal leaning.  In all cases, the coefficients on the two electoral trend controls are large, positive, and highly statistically significant, but this doesn’t really tell us anything that isn’t already obvious.  It simply indicates that (a) states that vote Republican in presidential elections are also more likely to elect Republicans and conservatives to Congress, and (b) more Republicans and conservatives are elected to Congress in years when Republicans win a greater share of the national congressional vote.

What we are interested in here is the “South indicator”, which takes the value 1 for all congressional district elections in twelve Southern states, and a 0 otherwise.  What we are essentially asking with this variable is “Do Southern states elect a more conservative congressional delegation than we would expect given their presidential voting trends?”  And as we see from the different coefficient values in the two columns, the answer heavily depends on what time period you are talking about.

In districts drawn prior to the enactment of the VRA amendments creating majority-minority districts (the 1970s and 1980s), we see a significant negative value on the probability of a Republican win, and a significant and large positive value for ideology.  This indicates that while the South was much more likely to elect Democrats than the rest of the country, these delegation were nevertheless substantially more conservative than we would expect even from presidential voting patterns. 

Yet in the 1990s and 2000s, when many more districts were drawn to assure African-American representation in the South, both of these coefficient values are slightly negative.  This indicates that while the Republican party achieved more success in the South during this period in terms of number of electoral victories, the overall delegations in these states were actually slightly more liberal than we would expect from the presidential voting data (albeit by a statistically insignificant margin).   This doesn’t mean more liberal overall, since the South was also becoming dramatically more Republican at the presidential level during this period.  But it would appear that to the extent that these delegations became more conservative, it is because voters in the region began voting more Republican at all levels, and if anything, the new redistricting regimes in the South impeded these trends in Congress rather than exacerbating them.

As racial gerrymandering is not the focus of my dissertation, I discovered this through informal exploration of my data and am aware of the many methodological criticisms that could be brought against it conclusion.  But I thought it was an interesting little finger on the scale in the debate over substantive and descriptive representation.

College Football Premier League

Below are my thoughts about how to fix college football.  Realistically, as these changes would radically reshape the entire sport, and I know college football is extremely conservative, I realize there is no chance of anything like this being implemented; but I can always dream.

Be advised that my ideas are coming from someone who has almost no interest in college football as it is currently constituted (other than the annual Harvard-Yale game).  I am an avid fan of several other sports, including professional football and college basketball, but college football has always left me cold, both because I don’t have a “natural” rooting interest, and because the end of the season always seems like such a let down.  I’m just not the type of person that gets excited about a postseason that consists of a series of arbitrary teams playing against each other at an arbitrary location for seemingly no reward.  And while college football proponents extol the virtues of the constant pressure of the regular season, realistically, the top teams only play three or four games each year where the outcome is ever in doubt.  If the current bowl season does excite you, then you’ll probably see these changes as unnecessary.  But for the rest of us, I would like to broach the “College Football Premier League”.  Before I explain in detail, here is a quick overview of what would change and what would stay the same.

What my proposal retains from the existing system:

-       Preserve the traditional conferences

-       Preserve the 5 top-tier “BCS” bowl games and 14 lower-tier bowl games

-       Regular season games would remain of utmost importance, with only a few losses knocking a team out of playoff contention.

Advantageous changes:

-       Crown a real national champion every year through a playoff

-       Bowl games finally become meaningful

-       During regular season, several top-20 teams play each other every week

-       Teams have something to play for throughout the season, even if they have lost a couple games

-       Teams from minor conference could compete for national championship on equal footing with teams from major conferences

Disadvantageous changes:

-       Some conference rivalries would be intermittently disrupted

-       “Rivalry games” may lose some importance compared to other games against top teams

-       Top college teams would perhaps spend more time traveling during regular season

-       Less freedom for teams to schedule their own opponents, and less freedom for bowls to choose teams that “travel well” (is this really a disadvantage for the public?)

-       Might become easier for team to create recruiting dynasties

-       “Best” team in college football might not be eligible for national championship

How would it accomplish these things?  By creating a “Premier League” of the top 20 college football teams for each year.  Like European soccer leagues, the composition of the Premier League would change from year to year, with poorly performing teams from the Premier League being relegated back to their traditional conferences, and winning teams from the traditional conferences being promoted.   There are about 120 teams in the top division of college football, so about 1/6 of these teams each year would be Premier, and the remaining 5/6 would remain in their regular conferences.

I will explain how a team makes to the Premier League a little further below.  But once in the Premier League, each team would play a 10-game regular season against other Premier teams.  Perhaps there would be four divisions of five teams each, or just two conferences of ten…this isn’t that important.  The 10 game league schedule would allow each Premier team to schedule two or three other games that would not count in the Premier League standings.  These would either be early-season warm-up games, or traditional rivalry games as the teams choose.  All teams not in the Premier League would play their regular/conference season as before, except that each conference would have two or three fewer teams in it each year.

At the end of the Premier regular season, the League would be divided into three tiers:

-       The bottom six teams with the worst records would not be bowl eligible, and would be relegated back to their conference 

-       The top six teams would automatically be retained in the Premier League the next season, and would advance to the playoff for the national championship

-       The middle eight teams would be invited to a play-in bowl game and have a chance to play themselves back into the premier league.

National Championship Playoff

The playoffs for the national championship would consist of six teams, with the top two receiving byes into the semifinals.  Thus there would be five playoff bowl games, with the locations of these games being the current “BCS” bowls.  As is currently done, the location of the national championship would rotate among these bowls each year.  The bowls could also retain some regional character; e.g. the Rose Bowl could agree to host the playoff game involving the Western division champion each year.

Play-In Bowl Games

In addition to the five playoff bowls, there would 14 additional bowl games involving both teams from the Premier League and teams from the traditional conferences.  But these bowl games would no longer be played only for pride.  Instead, the winner of each bowl game would be promoted to the Premier League the following season, while the loser would be relegated to the conferences.  I think this would add a lot of national interest to bowl games that are now only exciting to alums and true college football junkies.

Four of these bowl games would match-up the middle eight teams from the Premier League.  The other ten games would match-up the top 20 teams from the conferences.  Many of these bowl games could retain traditional conference rivalries; e.g. the Cotton bowl could match the champion of the Big 12 with the 2^nd place team in the SEC.  But most of these games now have dumb corporate names that change every few years, so this tradition is pretty much irrelevant anyway.  There would probably need to be some rules about automatic qualifiers to make the system fair….e.g the top 2 teams in each major conference and the champion of each minor conference automatically qualify for bowl; or, at least one bowl matches up minor conference champions, to assure minor conference representation in the Premier League every year.

Under this system, exactly half of the premier league would turnover each year, with ten new teams eligible to fight for the national championship against the defending champion and nine other holdovers.

One final question would be how the initial teams would be chosen for the Premier League’s first season.  I have no strong opinion on this….perhaps all ten teams invited to BCS bowls in the last season of the BCS system plus winners of ten other bowl games.  Or the league could just automatically include the top 20 teams in the BCS standings from the previous year.

I suppose one possible argument against this proposal might be that, because the quality of teams varies dramatically from one year to the next, it is possible that the best team in college football might be one that did not even qualify for the Premier League the previous year.  In the case of 2010, it is likely that Oregon would have qualified, since they easily won the PAC 10 and played in a BCS bowl, and possible Auburn would have qualified, they had a mediocre record in a very strong SEC division, but won a New Year’s Day bowl game. 

As I have very little knowledge about the financial particulars involved in college football, I really have no idea whether this plan would be beneficial to the bowls and the individual programs.  But I would certainly be more likely to tune in, especially around this time of year.  Wouldn’t you?

Poker: Don't antagonize losing players!

I took another trip to the new Parx casino poker room this weekend, where I had a bit of a roller coaster ride, losing a couple two buy-ins early before making most of it back quickly after dinner.  I am pleased that over the past month or two I am finally no longer getting visibly frustrated or emotional over bad beats or losses in big pots.  Nevertheless, I still have a tendency to go off on people over what I perceive as bad poker etiquette (on this occasion, a slowroller).  Why do people do this crap?   

As I do not really feel qualified to go into deep strategy discussion on this blog, I thought I would use my first poker post to discuss my feeling about etiquette at the table.  Overwhelmingly, all of these specific recommendations can be summarized under one general rule: Don’t antagonize losing players.  I generally believe in giving a pass to whatever behavior people exhibit immediately after losing a big pot; poker can be an incredible frustrating and stressful game.  But being a sore winner is just disgusting.  So, when you beat a player in a pot, here are some examples of what not to do:

-       Don’t slowroll! (This means deliberately waiting to table a winning hand so as to let your opponent think he has won.)

-       Along the same lines, if you think you have a winning hand, “fastroll” it, whether or not you were one who made or called the bet…if you don’t know what I mean by this, I will discuss it in a later post.

-       Never ask to see a losing or mucked hand, whether or not you are in the hand!

-       Don’t celebrate your win by high-fiving your friends or yelling “Ship It!”

-       Don’t cheer when another player is eliminated from a tournament

-       Don’t ask your opponent asinine hypothetical strategy questions trying to figure out if you could have bled more money out of them (e.g. “Would you have called if I bet $x/went all in?”)

-       Along the same lines, don’t give advice to your opponent on how they could have played the hand better.

I also get pretty annoyed when players quickly call the clock on another player.  I believe you should never call the clock on someone in a cash game unless they have been repeated acting slowly in situations that don’t warrant it.   I have called the clock on another player twice in my life, and both times, it wasn’t because they were pondering a big decision, but because they clearly weren’t paying attention to the game (e.g. one was a woman who would start chatting with a friend sitting behind her in a foreign language every hand while we were all waiting for her to fold preflop).   But if the player has been respecting the game throughout the session, please give the respect of allowing them the time they need to make a decision.

I engaged in a lot of heated political debates during my high school and college days, but as far as I can recall, poker etiquette is the only topic of argument over which (multiple!) people have threatened to physically assault me.  I honestly wish it didn’t get under my skin so much, but it does, so please just follow the recommendations above and will remain a happy poker camper while I am at your table.

"The Sing Off" starts tonight

The a cappella competition The Sing Off starts its second season right now on NBC, and continues on Dec. 8th, 13th, and 15th from from 8-10 pm ET, with the finale on Dec. 20th.  A cappella was a very important part of my life from ages 14 through 21, so it's great to see it on TV from time to time.

I was a founding member and musical director of my high school group, InToneNation, which still exists!  It looks like they even have a high school group competing this year, although that nice touch is offset by the shameful inclusion of the Yale Whiffenpoofs!

I thought the show was a nicely done last year, and a very worthy team won.  I probably won't be able to watch much of it live, but I will definitely be recording it, and I'll post more of my thoughts a little later in the competition.

Just let them expire

Chart taken from  Ezra Klein's post today at the Washington Post.

Note that even under the Democratic plan, people with incomes over $200,000 would gain nearly ten times the benefit as those actually among the middle class.  Given the relatively small benefit these tax cuts have on those who are truly struggling in this economy, and the fact that they apparently cost the government as much as adopting every recommendation of the "Bipartisan" Debt Commission would save, how can there not be more voices in Congress arguing that we just let all the tax cuts expire?   Apparently, at least there is one.  Too bad he is a Republican....and leaving next month, to be replaced by the guy who oversaw George W. Bush's own disasterous budget policy.

Introduction

Welcome to The Valence of Ignorance, the personal blog of Nick Goedert.  I’m not sure why you would be reading this if you don’t already know me, but I guess you never know on the internet.  I am a graduate student in American Politics at Princeton University, where I hope to receive my PhD at some point within the next two years and pursue an academic job…but there are of course no guarantees at this point.  My main interests lie in legislative elections, and I am working on a dissertation on congressional gerrymandering. 

Before coming to grad school, I worked in political polling for the Democratic Party, and legislative analysis for the state of Maryland.  I am originally from Silver Spring, Maryland, and still consider it my home despite living the last three years in New Jersey and being unlikely to return in my foreseeable professional future;  I have remained a loyal Baltimore Orioles fan through thirteen consecutive losing seasons.  As for my personal politics, I would describe myself as Fabian socialist, although you can decide for yourself as you read my blog.  I generally just vote for whichever candidate favors more progressive taxation (hint: this is almost never the Republican).

Outside of my academic work, I am a serious amateur poker player, mostly in live cash games in Atlantic City.  I entered (and cashed!) in my first World Series of Poker event last summer, and I plan to be entering several more in 2011.  I also have deep interests in music (singing, playing guitar, and listening to Britpop), TV, and board games (especially of German origin). 

I do not intend for this to be a blog about my daily life.  I intend to post whenever I feel I have something interesting to write about, that will be of interest to people other than myself and the people I talk to in my daily life.  So you won’t hear about how much I won or lost in a poker session, or which of my football teams won over the weekend, or how frustrated I am in my dissertation progress.  As my interests tend toward politics and poker, most of my posts will be on these topics, but certainly not confined to them.  I will try to keep them timely, but I make no guarantees, and I don’t intend to be posting every day.  I hope that being realistic and selective in what I choose to post will prevent me from burning out and completely abandoning the blog after a couple weeks, but we’ll see…

Wire/Sopranos and 2+2

2+2 (forumserver.twoplustwo.com) is of course mostly known as a poker forum, but they have subforums for just about every topic imaginable.  I have over 4,000 post on the various boards, mostly in the Brick & Mortar section, but spring up now and then in the other forums as well, often as a lonely "statist" in the politics section, where belief in any form of government gets routinely shouted down.  In order to prime this new blog, I am reprinting probably my favorite post that I ever wrote on the forums, within a debate over the relative merits of two modern classics of television in 2008:
 
The Wire is the greatest story ever told on television.
The Sopranos is the best ever use of the television medium to tell a story.

The Wire is an amazing show, but the story is so good that it would have been an amazing series of novels, or comic books, or radio plays, or live performances. I think the scripts and the acting and the direction are all great, but that is mostly because they perfectly realize the vision of the storyteller, and not because they add to it.

The Sopranos only works exactly as it should as a television show. It is enhanced by the constraints of a series of hour-long blocks of video. The story stakes its success (and occasional failure) much more on the acting, the cinematography, and the individual episode director's vision.

The brilliance of the final scene of the Sopranos could not have happened in any other medium. You see scenes that are similarly suspenseful in The Wire, but that is because the story in The Wire is at an inherently suspenseful point. By contrast, the suspense in that scene in the Sopranos had much more to do with how people dealt with the constraint of the TV medium than anything in the story.