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I previously blogged about an analysis of emails from Enron that linked the type of words used with the rank of the sender and recipient. For example:

Hierarchy fundamentally shapes how we act at work. In this paper, we explore the relationship between the words people write in workplace email and the rank of the email’s recipient. Using the Enron corpus as a dataset, we perform a close study of the words and phrases people send to those above them in the corporate hierarchy versus those at the same level or lower. We find that certain words and phrases are strong predictors. For example, “thought you would” strongly suggests that the recipient outranks the sender, while “let’s discuss” implies the opposite. We also find that the phrases people write to their bosses do not demonstrate cognitive processes as often as the ones they write to others. We conclude this paper by interpreting our results and announcing the release of the predictive phrases as a public dataset, perhaps enabling a new class of status-aware applications.

It seems such an analysis of language can be used to predict the success of dating!

See, one of the things that Pennebaker did was record and transcribe conversations that took place between people on speed dates. He fed these conversations into his program along with information about how the people themselves were perceiving the dates. What he found surprised him.

“We can predict by analyzing their language, who will go on a date — who will match — at rates better than the people themselves,” he says.

Specifically, what Pennabaker found was that when the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date.

“The more similar [they were] across all of these function words, the higher the probability that [they] would go on a date in a speed dating context,” Pennebaker says. “And this is even cooler: We can even look at … a young dating couple… [and] the more similar [they] are … using this language style matching metric, the more likely [they] will still be dating three months from now.”

This is not because similar people are attracted to each other, Pennebaker says; people can be very different. It’s that when we are around people that we have a genuine interest in, our language subtly shifts.

“When two people are paying close attention, they use language in the same way,” he says. “And it’s one of these things that humans do automatically.”

They aren’t aware of it, but if you look closely at their language, count up their use of “I,” and “the,” and “and”, you can see it. It’s right there.

The study also looks at power dynamics:

But some of his most interesting work has to do with power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status.

“It’s amazingly simple,” Pennebaker says, “Listen to the relative use of the word “I.”

What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word “I” less. . . .

But in retrospect he says it makes sense. We use “I” more when we talk to someone with power because we’re more self-conscious. We are focused on ourselves – how we’re coming across – and our language reflects that.

So can we modify our language in order to change how we appear?

So could we use these insights to change ourselves? Like Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady, could we bend our personalities by bending the words we use? Could we become stronger? More powerful? Healthier?

After 20 years of looking at this stuff, Pennebaker doubts it.

“The words reflect who we are more than drive who we are,” he says.

You can’t, he believes, change who you are by changing your language; you can only change your language by changing who you are. He says that’s what his research indicates.

H/T MM. It’s from NPR. Where the hell else would I get it from???

New York is the city that never sleeps. It can’t sleep, lest people exercise their inherent liberty to be left the hell alone at night. The statists can’t let that happen, now can they.

Almost two years ago I blogged about a proposed law in New York that would ban residential homes from renting rooms on a short-term basis.

New York will not let this happen.

NYC & Company, the city’s “official tourism arm” (I’m not quite sure what that means, other than the fact that they are quite good at rent-seeking) said of renting apartments: “This isn’t a business practice we support, and we strongly discourage people. It’s a real case of buyer beware.”

From the Times, I learn that this law was enacted back in 2010.  And now New York City is cracking down!

Armed with a new state law, the city has spent the past year cracking down on the growing industry of short-term rentals; since the law took effect last May, nearly 1,900 notices of violation have been issued at hundreds of residential buildings.

“The issue of illegal hotels is one that’s been a mounting problem in the city over the last several years,” said John Feinblatt, chief policy adviser to the mayor, pointing to a tenfold increase in complaints about them since 2006, to about 1,000 last year.

The new law made it illegal to rent out apartments in residential buildings for under 30 days. Owners of an apartment or a town house may still rent out one or two rooms, provided that they live in the home and everyone has access to common areas like the kitchen. Illegal hotels found by the city included small rental buildings, condos and town houses, and many of them were hiding in plain sight.

I’m glad this is so high on New York’s priority list.

Some small proprietors said they were trying to stay afloat by looking for longer-term guests, who need a room for at least 30 days — one woman who went that route estimated her business was off by 80 percent — but many were just trying to keep their heads down.

“Inspect us for safety; tax us; we welcome it — just don’t shut us down,” said the owner of a town house who offers short-term rentals in three apartments in the building, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid attracting inspectors’ attention. He said he had gone into debt renovating the town house, in which he lives, to accommodate guests, and so could not afford to stop renting the units.

If the problem is safety, inspect them. Fine them. Require certain safety steps. But banning them? Absurd.

I’m sure the hotel industry is laughing all the way to the bank. Why compete when you can put your competitiors out fo business.

The administration changed a policy such that undocumented immigrants arrested for minor traffic offenses (not DUI) will not be slotted for deportation. This change seems to be in response to Arizona’s policy in Arizona v. United States–I suppose now a suspect will be detained much less if pulled over for a minor traffic offense. Rule 28(j) letter (or whatever the equivalent is for SCOTUS) perhaps?

The emergency was 9/11, and the agency was our favorite gropers at the Transportation Security Agency:

 If we were going to do anything other than just implement ATSA’s particulars-good, bad, and ugly-there was no possibility of making the big deadlines later in the year. For instance, a credible case could be made that rushing to hire 50,000 new employees into an agency that didn’t previously exist might result in excessive cost and uncertain hiring quality. Also, since the physical act of buying and installing brand new screening equipment across the country would use up virtually all of the time allotted, there was precious little time to consider the full range of technology options. Meeting the ATSA deadlines would require skipping over any independent review of the staff recommendations for more than a billion dollars of spending. If the DOT was going to push back on the fine print contained in ATSA, it would have do so now and take the public flak for not being able to achieve the urgently needed security improvements. “The choice is to debate the best way to move forward or simply implement, one or the other,” I said. Secretary Mineta did not hesitate, fiddle, or flinch when he told me, “You are going to make every one of those deadlines.”

Hot off the presses in Volume 90 of the Texas Law Review, The Supreme Court’s New Battlefield.

In Originalism and Sex Discrimination, Steven Calabresi and Julia Rickert make an unconventional claim—that the Fourteenth Amendment, as it was originally understood, prevents the government from enforcing laws that discriminate on the basis of sex. The authors fault Justices Ginsburg and Scalia, and everyone else for that matter, for failing to recognize two demonstrable things: first, that Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment was from its inception a ban on all systems of caste; and second, that the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 affected how we should read the Fourteenth Amendment‘s equality guarantee.

In this Response, I focus on the second, and in my estimation, more controversial claim: that the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920—fifty-two years after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment—should affect the way the Fourteenth Amendment‘s equality guarantee was originally understood. It is incontrovertible that subsequent amendments to the Constitution affect earlier provisions. However, to contend as Calabresi and Rickert do, that the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment should impact the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment—as an originalist, rather than as a popular constitutionalist argument—strikes me as somewhat anachronistic. Is this originalism at the right time?

To ascertain the original public meaning of a text, one should consider how the provision was understood at the time of its enactment. This task requires the selection of the proper time in which to seek the text‘s semantic content. Though there seems to be one important chronological limitation, both logically and jurisprudentially: any such inquiry would have to be temporally constrained, at the latest, by the date of the enactment of the law.

In many respects Calabresi and Rickert’s methodologies bear many similarities to Jack Balkin’s Living Originalism, in that both focus on the original meaning of a law but look to events that postdate the law’s enactment to give the text legal effect. This approach echoes a broader trend in originalism discerned by then-Solicitor General Kagan, who said today “we are all originalists.” Though we may all be originalists, we all do not do it the same way—in fact, some of us don’t even do it at the right time. I close by analyzing what is originalism when everyone is an originalist in his or her own way—especially when some of the originalism is unmoored from things that are original and rely on occurrences that postdate the enactment of the law.