Physics, dating, and the elusive house-husband

To continue the vein of yesterday, where we explored the social dynamics of academia and the nearly unique social role of physicists outside of academia (a role they don't exactly seek, usually), today I'd like to write a little about another side of the "science ladder."

Dating. One of my female physics professors once told our class that the quickest way to get rid of a guy in a bar was to mention that she was a physics student. That wouldn't work on other physics people, of course, and I don't think it works on women, either. I didn't notice the same phenomenon as a man; while many male physics majors are socially awkward, the fact that they are interested in physics doesn't cast aspersions on their manliness, or make them less appealing.

I really don't think this strange aversion applies to anything other than the traditional heterosexual dating field in that one particular direction: When a woman is highly educated, and especially in a mathematically intensive field, men find it intimidating. A couple decades of sitcoms and movies starring dumb-as-rocks male lead roles paired with more educated female lead roles may have eroded this a little, which make me wonder just how strong a phenonemon this used to be.

The growing educational gender gap between men and women (women are becoming more educated than men) may bury it completely, eventually; it's only a few fields, and mainly the doctoral level, that we still see a gender imbalance favoring males, but in the mean time, I can't help but wonder if this is one of the factors that helps drive women away from physics and mathematics.

I'm studying the shapes of voting systems

Writing this out loud makes it a little more real. Yes, this is what I'm doing. Methods of putting together larger numbers of ballots and coming out with a winner have a shape, and this, somehow, is useful. I'm working on finding shapes. Right now, one of them is looking somewhat hexagonal for some numbers, although it can compress into a line or, when we allow more deviant behavior, morph into a triangle. Then, it also can be unfolded into a solid.

When I put it like that, it sounds like I've gone off the deep end. What will I do next, find the scent of an ethical code? The sound of ideological distributions? Maybe I should turn my problem around - design shapes, and find voting systems that produce them. I wonder what degree of complexity I would need to make a voting d20.

Median voter theorem

Why politicians talk in code

The median voter theorem is an interesting result in the study of elections. Suppose you have some political spectrum, and two candidates. Doesn't matter how many dimensions there are to that spectrum, even, with two candidates; the politician who is closer to the center (median) of voter positions will be closer to more voters. Voters - if acting rationally - will vote for the closest candidate to them.

Voila, so suddenly we have centrist candidates - or do we? There's another problem: Turnout. The further away a voter is from a candidate, the less likely a voter is to turn out. In fact, if they feel far away on the fringe, they may feel the difference between the two centrist candidates is negligible. Perhaps a third party candidate will look attractive - it's time to make a statement!

But what if you can occupy more than one position at once? Suddenly, you can secure much more of the political spectrum. This is why politicians talk in code, and try to position their opponents as extremists; why we see different messages sent through different media. Coded language is understood differently by different segments of the political spectrum, and by segmenting your audience into different groups, it allows you to try to position yourself near the median of each group rather than the whole population.

And this is how a politician masters the median voter theorem; not by moving carefully to the center of the population, but by seeming to be in different places when looked at from different perspectives.

Gripes about the housing process so far...

The most talked-about part of the offer my graduate school sent me was the graduate housing guarantee. Having read it, and gone on to read the most recent internal committee report on the housing guarantee, and then read the rates quoted on the website, I thought that this meant that I would have some variety of affordable housing. Barely affordable, but affordable.

What I didn't read was the noise-filled, flash-intensive website of a private subcontractor, who runs the other graduate housing units, the ones that the university doesn't actually own. The rent is much higher in these privately-run "luxury apartments."

Seriously? You're going to use the word "luxury" in describing graduate student housing? Someone's priorities are messed up. If I had gone on to read those rates, and realized that my school was going to put me in one of the expensive apartments, and that they would be asking for two rent payements prior to even moving in... well, the  offer would have looked a lot less attractive.

The margin for housing to be considered "affordable" is 30-35% of income. By that standard, in order for the cheapest rent in the housing run by the private subcontractor to be considered even marginally affordable by Federal terms (35% of income spent on rent), you need an income of $26,000. Which is more than they pay graduate students. And to afford a single? Over $40K. This is enormously different from the units the university actually runs themselves.

And may I go back to the front-loading, and the silly fees? Application fee of $20. Security deposit of $150. $12.95 extra for them to process a credit card payment through a fourth party (how many middlemen are taking a cut?) and the first two months' rent due August 1st and September 1st when the move-in date is September 19th. Graduate student orientation? Guess. It's the 17th, and if you want to move in early, you get charged extra.

If I had known all of this earlier, I might have decided that thal school's financial support was simply unworkable. As is, now, I will find a way to manage to make ends meet, but you can bet I'm not happy about it. The fees are the most ridiculous part. I'm paying an 8.6% fee to reduce your paperwork? Even Paypal does not charge so much - and taking it out on the payee?

Perhaps in California, students are accustomed to going neck-deep in debt to afford housing, and it's considered essential to have a "resort-style" swimming pool at your apartment complex, etc. But where I come from, graduate students aren't interested in paying an extra $300-$500 per month to live in more luxurious digs. They're interested in having enough left over for groceries and just maybe putting something aside to work on those student loans they accumulated as an undergrad.

I know, I know, this is how the subcontractors make a mint and get their boat payments. But you'd think if the university was aware that problems affording housing both drive away prospective graduate students and prevent existing graduate students from making it through the program in a timely fashion (or at all, in some cases), they'd try to make sure the housing they were offering was affordable. And they are aware. I read the survey results cited in that report.

Metrics by which we might define the closeness of an election

There's always a great deal of talk about how close an election is. To myself, this can mean several different things, as I touched upon in my earlier discussion of the 2000 US presidential election.

An election can be considered close in several senses. First, that the final tallies are close. Second, that a small number of voters could have changed the result. Third, that alternative methods of tallying the election would have altered the election result.

The 2000 example is a good one because the final tally was close (271 to 266), the number of voters needed to change the election result was small (a few hundred out of a hundred million), and a change in election procedure would have likely resulted in a change in the result, e.g., going by popular margin instead of electoral votes, counting one or more states via a non-plurality method, et cetera.

Even very small alterations in the electoral vote mechanics, such as proportional allocation in some states that do not currently split electors, or the number of electors allocated, i.e., the size of the US House, could have altered the 2000 election.

The 2004 election was also a close election - but only in the sense that had a little over 50,000 votes been changed from Bush to Kerry in that state. Given that Bush enjoyed majority support, his position in 2004 was much more secure against alterations in the electoral mechanics, such as shifting to a national popular vote.

While some have charged the 2004 election was stolen, the amount of alteration that such charges must allege in order to secure Kerry's victory against, say, a national plurality vote - is truly staggering. It would take a total of around 1.5 million ballots altered or 3 million added (or subtracted) ballots to account for such a change.

And it is in discussing such metrics that the weakness of the electoral college comes out. The electoral college has most of the pros and cons of the plurality system it is based on - except that it is much more strongly vulnerable to local shifts, whether how easy it is for a third party candidate to make it onto the ballot, voter suppression or fraud, or - in the case of the 2000 election - simple counting error to shift the overall result. Electoral votes are necessarily going to be closer than national popular votes by the metric of how many voters need to change their mind to change the election.

For example, the 2008 election was not considered a particularly close one. Barack Obama's total plurality vote margin was 7.2%, and the electoral vote margin 365-173. Yet to change the result of the total election, it suffices to barely flip North Carolina, Indiana, Florida, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Iowa - which he won by a total of 987,000 votes, 0.75%. The 2004 election could have been changed with 0.097% of the votes, in spite of a 1.5% popular margin.

I'm of the opinion a comprehensive listing (e.g., Bush/Dukakis would have required 1.23% of votes to be added/subtracted, or 0.62% changed) would give a good idea as to the typical quantitative relationship between how sensitive a national plurality vote is, as opposed to an electoral college ballot.