While it's still Groundhog Day, I wanted to sneak in a couple of groundhog links. First, Jonah Goldberg's enjoyable story about the movie Groundhog Day for National Review.

Second, the lyrics to the fun bluegrass tune by the legendary Doc Watson, "Ground Hog." The folks in the song don't treat the animal as well as they do in Punxsutawney. (Hear a clip here or here.)

Shoulder up your gun and whistle up your dog (repeat)
Off to the woods for to catch a groundhog.
Oh groundhog.

Run here Sally with a ten foot pole (repeat)
To twist this whistle pig out of his hole.

Here comes Sally with a snicker and a grin (repeat)
The groundhog gravy all over her chin.

Look at them fellers, they're a-goin' wild (repeat)
Eat that hog before he's cooked or biled.

I dug down, but I didn't dig deep (repeat)
There laid a whistle pig fast asleep.

Now the meat's in the cupboard and the butter's in the churn (repeat)
If that ain't groundhog I'll be durned.

Well you eat the meat and save the hide (repeat)
Make the best shoestring that ever was tied.

Look at them fellers, they're about to fall (repeat)
Eat till their britches won't button at all.

Little piece of cornbread a-layin' on the shelf (repeat)
If you want any more you can sing it yourself.
Oh Groundhog.

I'll linger briefly on Duke, so I can keep all the visitors I'm getting from "Duke lacrosse" searches. I wanted to write about admissions at the alma mater because I'd heard in several quarters (especially the comments at Prof. KC Johnson's blog) that applications to Duke have declined since the lacrosse story broke. However, I hadn't seen any statistics on this, and all the admissions commentary I'd seen was little more than gossip or rumor. Today I finally saw some numbers.

According to this press release from the Duke Admissions Department, Duke received the second-highest number of applicants in its history, surpassed only by last year's total. (Last year's application deadline fell before the lacrosse story broke.) The raw numbers are 19,387 last year and 19,009 for the class to enter this fall. That's a drop of about 2%, but it's over 10% higher than the number of applicants just three years ago. Given how ephemeral and fleeting college application trends can be, I think it's impossible to say that the lacrosse mess ("Nifong's Folly"?) is directly and solely responsible for a 2% drop-off. More likely, it was one factor among many, some leading to more applications and some leading to fewer, and the aggregate impact is a 2% fall. But I think the talk of applications plummeting as a direct result of the lacrosse fiasco is, at a minimum, overblown. Duke will still have plenty of qualified students to choose its 1665-member freshman class from.

I wondered what the effect of Nifong's Folly would be on three groups in particular: local (i.e., North Carolina) applicants, who would have heard a lot more coverage of the story than students from around the country; African American applicants, because the lacrosse case highlighted (and impacted) the state of race relations at Duke and in Durham; and children of alumni, because the parents might, like me, be especially concerned about the current campus atmosphere and the attitude of the faculty, versus their own experiences.

I was able to track down last year's version of the admissions press release. It notes that 2085 African Americans applied last year, and 2037 did this year. So the drop-off in that category was 48, or 2%. Again, it's tricky to assume from raw numbers whether that change is due to the lacrosse case or other factors, but the 2006 number was 12% higher than 2005, so this year's pool is still larger than it was just a few years ago. Black applicants made up about 11% of the total applicants both years, and according to this graphic, made up 9.4% of the current freshman class. Assuming the academic qualifications of the groups are roughly equal, and assuming Duke remains committed to producing a diverse student body, I would expect this fall's entering class to have virtually the same percentage of black students as last fall's.

Update: This page, dealing with last year's admitted students, says that 2122 African Americans applied, not 2085. Assuming this year's number (2037) stays constant (apparently, all these numbers change a little bit as the numbers get finalized, like election recounts), the decline in black applicants could be as high as 4% from last year, although still higher than two years ago.

The press release doesn't mention separately the categories of students from North Carolina or children of alumni. (It did state that a record number of students applied from both Carolinas combined.) So I did some research by making some phone calls to the relevant departments. And what I discovered was very interesting.

According to the Admissions Department, Duke received a record number of applications from North Carolina students (1490) and from children of alumni (730). Note, of course, that there could be significant overlap there -- the Alumni Office informs me that 20% of Duke alumni live in North Carolina. But I think we can definitively put to rest the notion that the lacrosse story has had an immediate and negative effect on applications for admission, either generally or among the groups I perceived to be particularly "at risk," so to speak. (I suppose athletes would be another group especially sensitive to this story, but that's a more amorphous group and probably harder to measure, especially recruited athletes who go through a whole different process than regular students.)

Granted, the number of overall applications and the numbers of African American applicants are slightly down, but the general trend in both is upwards, and the decline, in terms of absolute numbers, is pretty small. So, while that's perhaps a mixed message, it's not decidedly negative one (although it would be if applications started dropping 2-4% every year). And, the record showing from legacy applicants is heartening evidence that alums aren't abandoning Duke when it comes time to sign tuition checks.

Now, it's tempting, but I'll be careful to remember not to draw too many sweeping conclusions from a few raw numbers. After all, maybe this year's applicants approve of the way the faculty is behaving, or are planning to attend Duke in order to protest at lacrosse games. The numbers themselves don't tell us otherwise. But what we can see is that there is no substantial evidence that the Duke lacrosse case has led to a severe reduction in applications this year.

After I published this post, I thought about it for a bit and wanted to clarify something. I think there are many conclusions one could attempt to draw from these numbers, and some are more likely to be true than others. I don't want to go too far. And it may well be the case that so many factors go in to deciding where to apply to college that it's foolish to try to track the impact of one factor without surveying every applicant. But what had been nagging me, and what led to this post, was the quite common statement I heard, along the lines of, "I know tons of alumni who won't send their kids to Duke after this fiasco!" So the impetus was really children of alumni, although my curiosity led to other groups as well. It may turn out that these angry alums do exist, but their kids are in the ninth or tenth grade, and not the twelfth. We may not get the full picture for years. All I really wanted to say in this post is that, especially among legacy applicants, Year One Post-Nifong applications have not conformed to the dire predictions I'd been seeing. And it's up to you to draw the conclusion whether that's good or bad.

Norm at Crime & Federalism mocks and scorns and ridicules a law school course called "Therapeutic Jurisprudence." I'll agree that the course description is a little verbose and jargony, and the class is certainly not the kind of course that is necessary for "basic legal literacy." But the concept of restorative justice isn't new, and while there may not be many law school classes devoted to it, I don't see a problem with a school offering the course if there's sufficient interest. I'm not prepared to say it's the coming trend in the law, but it can't be dismissed as easily as Norm tries. I've mentioned it here a couple of times, once noting the Little Book of Restorative Justice and once noting a Yale Law Journal article called "Integrating Remorse and Apology Into Criminal Procedure." One of the co-authors was the well-regarded law prof Stephanos Bibas, so it's not like this area is solely the province of some loony wing of the Connecticut Law School faculty.

The interweb continues to amaze me. I noticed this neat device at Evan's Legal Underground and Concurring Opinions called Snap. Basically, you install this feature that allows readers to mouse over a link and get a preview of the linked page. (Evan has since disabled his, but I predict a return.)

I'm sure this tool is especially helpful if you're searching for an image, or if the linked text doesn't give you much of a clue of what to expect if you click. Prof. Pasquale at the Co-Op discusses some potential copyright issues (i.e., Does Snap create a derivative work of copyrighted material?). Consider also whether this could affect the ongoing debate over liability for deep linking. In my musing, I thought of a couple other legal issues.

Snap would seem quite beneficial if you're worried that the images on a linked site might be not safe for work. I don't know enough about the tech specs at play, but if the Snap Preview pane doesn't show up as a visited web site, and if the image in the pane isn't stored to your computer, it could be used to avoid some embarrassing questions from your employer's I.T. people.

Of course, some folks would take advantage of that loophole to view illicit images without actually clicking on an illicit link. I doubt it would prove efficient for the ne'er-do-wells to use Snap to traffic in such images, but I suppose desperate people could make do with a mere peek. (That might be especially true if one is using a very large monitor, which would make the preview pane larger as well.) All the trafficker would need is a plain-looking page running Snap and full of links to be moused over.

Also, it's not unusual to see allegations in sexual harassment lawsuits that the harasser subjected the plaintiff to sexually graphic images on a computer screen. So be careful using Snap around potential plaintiffs or prosecutors if you think the preview pane might lead to painful punitives or penal punishment. (Yes, I'm perfectly punchy enough to use lots of legal alliteration and plenty of pathetic puns.)

I recently found the blog From the Archives, and Megan over there had an interesting post the other day. Basically, there was a guy who used to play ultimate frisbee with her who was a train wreck on the field and was annoying and smarmy off it. (Actually, he reminded me of a rugby player I knew in law school, except that guy had a houseboat instead of a motorcycle.) So Megan didn't like being around the guy and avoided him as much as possible, even though she acknowledges he probably meant well and was just clueless.

The other character in this story is a woman who used to play with them and who was much more sociable. The woman, though, was "sneaky, self-centered," and "without empathy." Megan felt conflicted for avoiding a guy who was "nice but profoundly annoying" and not (at first) avoiding a "woman I thought could be evil."

I don't like being around annoying people, either, including the rugby player from law school. We called him "the hurricane" because he would just turn every situation he entered upside down and annihilate everything in his path. So I don't think Megan needs to feel bad about avoiding the guy. The woman, though, sounds like a classic sociopath. I'm not a psychologist, so all my knowledge comes from the very good book The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. I don't think I ever reviewed it here, but I do recommend it.

Thanks to pop culture, we tend to associate sociopathy with serial killers, but the primary characteristics of sociopaths are the lack of a conscience, the lack of empathy, and the absence of guilt or shame. Stout goes into a lot more detail, but the take-away nugget is "sociopath = no conscience." And while a lot of sociopaths are psychopathic criminals, the best part of Stout's book is the case studies showing that a lot of sociopaths are successful in many fields, or on the other hand, a moocher who uses deceit and manipulation to sponge off others and avoid hard work.

Therefore, it's not surprising that the woman Megan knew was charming and sociable; that's a common trait among sociopaths. But, as Megan eventually decided, the woman "was without empathy or a belief that rules apply to her." This line of Megan's could have come right from Stout's book: "I thought she was empty where she should have felt for other people, or felt shame. I thought that if she were inclined to do evil -- and I never heard that she did -- she had nothing inside to stop her."

Stout offers strategies for dealing with sociopaths, and Megan eventually did the best thing by choosing to avoid this woman. But sometimes that's not possible. Let's just say that some of Stout's descriptions made it sound like she was writing a biography of one of my closest relatives. But once you understand that the sociopath is acting wholly, completely, totally out of self-interest and has absolutely no regard for your feelings or needs, you can successfully parry the sociopath's manipulations. So I don't think Megan should feel too bad about, say, going to a party where the woman was in attendance, but if she's ever in that situation again, she should keep an eye on her drink.

Way back in September, I did an ALL-REQUEST post in which I promised to answer all the requests, after having skipped a few in previous iterations of the all-request tradition. Well, naturally, I skipped one. Although, in my defense, I always intended to get around to it, but never did. Until now.

Sebastian asked, "Are there any current celebrities (not counting politicians/soldiers, we're talking pop culture here) whose books you would read assuming they had one? For this exercise, you are cleared to use obvious examples like anything by Coach K, as well as Jenna Jameson's How To Make Love Like A Porn Star."

I had to stare at my bookshelf for a while to make sure, but I don't really have any celebrity books. I bought Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Vol. 1 and Bruce Campbell's If Chins Could Kill (how often are those two books mentioned in the same sentence?), but never finished either. I never read one of Coach Krzyzewski's books, but I did buy one of Dick Vitale's for a book signing once. And I never read Ms. Jameson's book, although I'm not saying I couldn't use a lesson.

I guess one reason I don't read many celeb books is that the highlights have already been thoroughly aired in places like "Entertainment Weekly." After all, the person wouldn't be a celebrity otherwise. So many celebooks have value only for the seamy behind-the-scenes tidbits or self-serving spin. It's hard to find a celebrity-written book that's objective (to the extent possible), perceptive, and tells me something I don't know. I guess that's why I don't read any. Suggestions?