We prepare to pillage for candy! No one got my costume's reference. So sad. Happy Halloween!
Halloween 2012, Nexon Style
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We prepare to pillage for candy! No one got my costume's reference. So sad. Happy Halloween!
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, there is much discussion about whether climate change was responsible for the storm. I'm not sure this is the right question we need to be asking, unless we...
The impact (so far) of the Syrian civil war on Hizballah (via Andrew Exum). UK conservatives want to export (further) austerity to the EU budget. Steve Saideman's take on the "future of Star Wars."...
Many conversations about the empirical relevance of game-theoretic models of war begin and end with Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman's War and Reason.  That's unfortunate, but it's not exactly...
Full disclosure: I am incapable of being completely, or even mainly, a detached observer or commentator when discussing either Star Wars or Disney, having grown up largely surrounded by both enterprises in equal measure. Anyone who walks into my office sees, hanging over my computer, two posters: a 50th anniversary Fantasia one-sheet, and an Episode I theatrical teaser poster. And chances are if it's the first time you've come to visit me there, I'll end up telling you why "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" and the saga are the largely same cautionary tale about hubris. And scattered around the...
The ISA-NE conference scheduled for 2-3 November in Baltimore, Maryland will take place as scheduled. Official emails are going out. Hope to see attendees there.
The ISA-NE leadership hopes to make a decision by 1200 EDT concerning the status of the conference. While the DC area looks like it should be navigable by Thursday, we don't have good information about Baltimore or about what the state of east-coast travel will be like. The Baltimore Sun is pretty useless. Any commentary from readers in Baltimore would be appreciated. If you haven't been paying attention, the situation in New York an New Jersey is simply terrible. The US wind map that's been going around Facebook is pretty neat. As of right now Sandy's imprint is unmistakable. And also: The...
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard stated last Sunday that every Australian child should learn Mandarin, Hindi, or other regional languages as part of Australia's embrace of the Asian Century.  While her new agenda set out in a 300 page report has received its share of harsh criticism and questions about funding, one  has to admire the audacity of Gillard's vision of an Australia that seeks to engage Asian states and societies through an appreciation of their languages and cultures rather than insisting on interfacing with English.  This may represent a shift, to invert Bernard S....
A cultural milestone has been passed: Political science is now science-y enough that XKCD pays attention.
What?? It was too good to resist...
Florida Governor Rick Scott is considering changing the cost of different college majors at Florida's public colleges to influence students' choices. The reasoning is standard rightist dirigisme: STEM degrees would cost less, and artsy ones would cost more, because STEM = jerbs and, presumably, English = liberals. Debate over the proposal has broken down along the usual lines. Unsurprisingly, Marginal Revolution co-blogger Alex Tabarrok offers two cheers in favor of the scheme, dissenting only on the implementation (that instead of targeting STEM in particular the subsidies for selected...
Last year Nate Silver posted numbers going back to 1972. Bottom line: for Obama and Romney to be running roughly even at this point tracks with 2004--and represents an improvement for the Democrat over most pre-2004 cycles. Obama picked up a number of normally Republican-endorsing pages in 2008, which tracks with the general revulsion against the Bush era that swept the country that year. The fact that many of those pages are switching back looks more like a "reversion to the mean" than anything else. This also tracks with an important point about the "mainstream media": owners and editorial...