This is a test

It looks as if the blog got hacked, so this is just a test to see how bad it is.

Barack Obama four years ago and today

Four years ago, Barack Obama gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. Here's what I wrote then. I'm not sure why I never published it.

-----

Let me be the next in a long line to jump, wholeheartedly, onto the Barack Obama bandwagon (for a sampling of others, see Pandagon and Daily Kos). While I'm too young to make any sweeping claims about where his speech ranks on the All-Time Greatest Speeches List, I can say without hesitation that it was, by far, the best speech I have ever seen. It's not even fair to compare it to the Kerry speech I saw earlier this evening.

Here's the best comparison I can think of: there's only one crowd I've ever seen that energized, and that was at a James Brown concert... everyone simply mesmerized by the talent up on stage. The style of the two, of course, is vastly different, but what they have in common is self-assurance. As my dad pointed out right away, Obama positively exudes poise.

All the self-assurance in the world doesn't do you any good, of course, unless you have something worthwhile to say. And did he ever. The best passage in an altogether sparkling speech:

Don't get me wrong.

The people I meet – in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks – they don't expect government to solve all their problems.

They know they have to work hard to get ahead – and they want to.

Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you they don't want their tax money wasted, by a welfare agency or the Pentagon.

Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn – they know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.

No, people don't expect government to solve all their problems.

But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all.

Yes. God yes.

It is exactly this message that the Democratic Party should be articulating. The government has a positive role to play in people's lives. It can't solve all of society's problems, but that doesn't mean it can't contribute to helping solve some of them. Americans want a chance to succeed, and at the moment, many Americans are being denied that chance.

-----

Four years ago, nearly everyone agreed that Obama would run for president some day. I didn't expect it to be so soon. After last night's speech, it's hard to imagine anyone else carrying the Democratic banner this November.

Was Austria-Hungary an empire?

Pieter Judson's answer is no. Instead, he argues that the Austrian component of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy was characterized by an "institutionalized pluralism" in which the state guaranteed the rights of its various linguistic minorities. Those minorities, far from forming nascent nations yearning for their own states, were actually quite loyal to the monarchy. That Austria had eleven distinct language-groups within its borders does mean that it ruled over eleven distinct nations. To assume so is to accept the nationalist fantasy that everyone is a member of a nation on the basis of the language that they speak. The presence of so many bilingual peasants in Austria belied nationalists' claims that nations were well-defined groups.

In short, the history of Austro-Hungary in the nineteenth century should not be seen as a struggle of a multitude of nations yearning for independence from the Viennese yoke.

(Swarthmore College has made Judson's lecture available online as part of a growing collection of faculty lectures. He's in the process of a writing a new book on Hapsburg Central Europe from 1780 to 1948.)

Bernini in LA

It's not often that I wish I lived in Los Angeles, but I would love to be able to see the Bernini portrait sculpture exhibition at the Getty (reviewed in the New York Times here). As my high school art history teacher once said, if it weren't for Michelangelo, Bernini would be the Italian artist that everyone knows. He wasn't much of a painter, but his sculptural and architectural masterpieces (often one and the same) are simply stunning. The vitality of his Apollo and Daphne and David surpass every other sculpture I've seen, with the possible exception of the Laocoon group. In Apollo and Daphne, he somehow captured the transformation from flesh to tree in marble.

Even Ottawa is a bit too far to travel for an art exhibition, but I'll be sorely tempted...

Changes

Lovely Fiancée (once Lovely Girlfriend) is now Lovely Wife.

This guy doesn't know the half of it

A complaint about medical jargon that rails against words like "toxic" and "vegetables"... written by someone who obviously doesn't spend much time around doctors. Spend five minutes with Lovely Fiancée (soon to be Lovely Wife!) and her med school classmates and you'll hear far worse... epistaxis, neoplasm, pneumothorax... that's some jargon for you.

Why aren't there more cricket statistics? Part 5: An attempt at revising batting average

As you might remember, over a year and a half ago I started a series of posts on cricket statistics (here, here, here, and here. Before the series fell dormant, I discussed the problem with batting average. It's question is pretty straightforward, really. What to do with not-outs? I don't know if anyone's ever done the statistical legwork, but I'd be willing to hazard a guess that ending up not-out is largely a function of position in the batting order. So some sort of adjustment needs to be made to accurately capture what's going on with the not-out innings. I suggested a number of possibilities, including adjusting batting average based on a batsman's typical batting position.

Ananth Narayanan of the new Cricinfo It Figures blog has recently offered up another solution. Narayanan's idea is to extend all not-out innings to their expected conclusion. He calculates this based on a batsman's recent form. So if I a batsman has averaged 30 in his last ten innings, assume that he'll add 30 runs to his not-out score and consider that to be his completed innings score.

This is an intriguing solution, since it focuses on the not-out innings, which is where the problem with batting average arises. But there are a number of problems with it. First, is it really safe to assume, as Narayanan does, that since "Kumar Sangakkara ... has scored 984 runs in his last 10 innings at an innings average of 98.4," a 32 not-out in his next innings can be extended by 98 runs to 130? Not all innings are created equal. It might turn out to be the case that, once Sangakkara reaches the 30s, he normally goes on to score 150. The toughest runs to score, of course, are the first ones. Analyzing a player's typical score after reaching a set number of runs seems a far better approach and would incorporate the fact that well-set players can be practically impossible to dislodge.

Another problem arises with the assumption that recent form is the best predictor of future performance. This is the sort of empirical question that baseball sabermetricians excel at answering. Sadly, I completely lack the statistical chops to even take a stab at it. But plenty of research into the "hot hand" in basketball has shown that recent rates of success do no better at predicting future performance than overall rates of past success. In other words, there's no such thing as the hot hand (a recent paper argued that "feeding the hot hand" is still a good idea, since a player who has made several consecutive shots is probably a good player to begin with).

There's no guarantee that batting innings follow the same pattern, of course. But budding cricket statisticians should take note. This is a key question that, as far as I know, hasn't been answered. Does recent performance accurately predict future performance? Or is "underlying talent" (represented by overall past performance) a better predictor?

So while Narayanan is on the right track, he makes a few assumptions that need further examination. The question remains unsolved: what to do with not-outs?

A brief update

It turns out that, unlike the last time around, graduate school and blogging are not compatible. At least they haven't been this semester. Some of that has been the commute, but it's also that I've just been overwhelmed by reading and writing. In an entirely good way.

I probably won't blog at all in the next month since there's still plenty of work to be done. But I should have more free time in the spring, since I should only be down in Providence two days a week. So I'll be giving blogging on a regular basis yet another try.

Fighting with the Frogs, Part 1

The British Expeditionary Force’s arrival in northern France on 14 August 1914 marked a striking development in the history of Anglo-French relations. While military co-operation between Britain and France was not wholly unprecedented, never before had the two countries fought side-by-side in a conflict of this scale. For most of their respective histories, Britain and France had viewed their neighbour across the English Channel as rivals at best and outright enemies at worst. Just sixteen years before the outbreak of the First World War the two countries had been on the verge of warfare over an obscure African outpost. Anti-French sentiment had pervaded British society for centuries. Though the Entente Cordiale of 1904 had improved Anglo-French relations, the military alliance that developed as a result of the war represented a noteworthy departure from the historical relationship between Britain and France.

For most of the second millennium, Britain and France had seen each other as enemies. The Hundred Years’ War had been a vital stage in the development of English identity. Its battles continued to be remembered in the early years of the twentieth century. In the numerous conflicts between Britain and France in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, France served as an 'Other' against which the British defined a new sense of nationhood. The Crimean War found the two old enemies fighting alongside each other, but even then, at least apocryphally, ‘the British had to be reminded […] not to refer to the French as the enemy’. According to Robert Vansittart, born in 1881, ‘the Victorian England in which I was brought up was almost entirely anti-French’. As historian P.M.H. Bell has written, ‘The antagonism between the two countries had been long and bitter’ and ‘The roots of dislike and distrust of France ran deep, nourished by centuries of warfare and an insular suspicion of foreigners, of whom the French were the nearest’.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the British of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries consistently portrayed the French in negative terms. In his study of how Victorian political thinkers perceived France, historian Georgios Varouxakis compiled a damning list of characteristics. The French were:

warlike; volatile; easily excitable; easily susceptible to being seduced by leaders promising them glory abroad; vindictive and envious vis-à-vis the English; unfair and impervious to considerations of justice; not respectful of international treaties, law and conventions; overambitious; inordinately vain, touchy and other such unpleasant things.

The French penchant for revolution frightened Victorian commentators, both Whig and Tory, who looked to stable government, not popular uprising, as the means to achieve progress.

In addition to this general distaste for the French, there were widespread British fears of war with France. Numerous novelists played to these fears. William Laird Clowe’s The Great Naval War of 1887 (1887), Louis Tracy’s The Final War (1893), William Le Queux’s England’s Peril (1899), and Max Pemberton’s Pro Patria (1901) all depicted war between Britain and France. These fictional accounts of war were not without factual basis. Numerous crises found Britain and France near war. A French move against Siam, a virtual British protectorate, in 1893 caused some in Britain to expect war. In 1898, a dispute over Fashoda, a small, mud-brick fort on the Upper Nile, led the two nations to the brink of war. Just a year later, French pro-Boer sentiment and the possibility of Franco-Russo-German intervention on behalf of the Boers further strained Anglo-French relations. In short, the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries found Britain and France mutually hostile. In hindsight, the various crises that disrupted Anglo-French relations seem minor and insignificant. Yet the fact that they were met with such grave concern and incited such negative feelings suggests that the British were predisposed to think poorly of the French; diplomatic conflicts merely triggered the expression of latent anti-French feeling.

The Entente Cordiale of 1904 represented a pivotal change in the nature of Anglo-French relations. Just six years after the two nations had been on the edge of war over Fashoda, Britain and France signed an agreement that laid the foundation for their future alliance during the First World War and a century of co-operation between the two. Historians should be wary, however, of investing the Entente with an undue significance. Though the recent centenary commemorations of the agreement suggest that the Entente Cordiale solidified a friendship between the British and the French that would last a century, the realities of the agreement itself cast doubt on the agreement’s role in developing an amicable relationship between the long-time rivals. Bell has described the Entente as ‘a mixed bag of bargains over territory in Africa and Asia and regulations about fishing for bait off Newfoundland’, hardly the stuff of an agreement between valued friends. Reactions to the Entente Cordiale further reveal that the agreement was not the manifestation of any great love between Britain and France. Paul Cambon, the French ambassador to Britain, wrote to French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé that ‘Your task is done and you may pride yourself on having carried to a successful conclusion an enterprise considered impossible’, impossible, no doubt, due to the continuing distaste that characterized cultural relations between Britain and France. The Manchester Guardian made this aversion explicit. ‘The growing friendship between England and France is the most hopeful sign that has appeared in international politics for many a long year, but we deceive ourselves if we pretend that it has its roots in popular sentiment in either country’. Fifty years after the signing of the Entente, Harold Nicolson noted the unlikely circumstances in which it developed. The ‘Entente, in its early stages, was a frail and delicate plant, not rooted in the soil of public sympathy either in France or England, but nursed in a cold greenhouse by M. Cambon, Lord Lansdowne, and his successor, Sir Edward Grey’. As was widely recognized at the time of its signing, the Entente Cordiale was a diplomatic agreement devoted to resolving outstanding colonial disputes, nothing more. The significance later attributed to the treaty by the British was a phenomenon distinct from the treaty itself. Only Britain’s entry into the war in 1914 following Germany’s invasion of Belgium ensured that the diplomatic agreement of 1904 would develop into a military alliance.

It was with this history of antagonism, hardly grounds for optimism or admiration, that Britain and France joined forces in August 1914. Still, evidence from July 1914 reveals that some in Britain had accepted and embraced the Entente Cordiale, with two banquets devoted to singing its praises in a span of two weeks. A willingness to deride France remained, however, with the British press taking considerable delight in pointing out French failings and faults observed in the Caillaux trial. Just before the war the British public had ambivalent views of France: praise in light of the Entente Cordiale and criticism whenever the opportunity presented itself. Beneath the veneer of pro-French sentiment there remained a current of Francophobia.

Once the war began, negative portrayals of France practically vanished and the British press eagerly embraced their new ally. These positive depictions of France developed without obvious pressure from the government and reflect a genuine change in British attitudes towards France. Along with later changes in British perceptions of France, the terms in which the French were described and understood, however, suggest that the improved wartime image of France was more a result of the circumstances of war than any deep-seated admiration for the French people.

On second thought...

It looks as if I might not have as much free time for blogging as I had hoped. I'll probably be commuting down to Providence four days a week. There are obviously worse commutes than Boston-Providence, but for the time being it feels like a big chunk of time.

I will, on the other hand, be reading at least 3 books a week, so I imagine I'll have lots to write about. Hopefully I'll also have the time to do so...