Podcast No. 16 will be available by midweek. I left the power cable for the external hard drive on which all of my podcasting files are stored in my office.... Doh!
Another Brief Podcast Note
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Year: 2012
Podcast No. 12 – ISA-NE2012 SF and Pedagogy Panel (m4a)
This is the audio (in m4a format) from the Speculative Fiction and Pedagogy panel at the International Studies Association-Northeast 2012 convention. The panel featured Henry Farrell, Dan Nexon,...
Wednesday Morning Election Reaction
One nice thing about a status-quo election: it doesn't leave international-affairs experts with a great deal to prognosticate on. It will be interesting to see if the administration does, indeed,...
Hey! Poll Adjusters: Unskew This!
It was sort of sad watching conservatives play the same game that we did in 2004. Poll aggregation + 1; bubblethought -15.
More Year: 2012 Posts
Is Anybody Out There?
One of the questions heard around the mid-tier blogsphere "why doesn't anybody comment anymore?" Answers usually invoke 'big think' claims about the changing ecology and norms of blogging, the topics addressed at particular blogs, and so on. Here at the Duck, I tend not to worry about this kind of thing. After all, I know we have a decent number of regulars. Certain posts generate good discussions. Disqus is kind of a pain. Some months, such as August, are slow.But occasionally one of our bloggers sends me an email noting that we have posts that generate significant numbers when it comes...
Tuesday Morning Linkage
It is Difficult to Produce "Morning Linkage" While Occupied by a Large Cat Mona El-Ghobashy on the emerging relationship between President Mursi and SCAF in Egypt (via Laleh Khlelili) Covering the Syrian civil war (via Marc Lynch).Joshua Foust and Ashley S. Boyle have a report (PDF) on the "strategic context" of drone warfare (via Chris Fair).Phil Arena weighs in on the great "terrorism experts" debate.Ken MacLeod takes Neal Stephanson to task: "Stephenson, in my view, has got the problem exactly backwards. There's no shortage of grand visions of technically practicable and/or boldly...
A warning to parents
Just say no to theory.Parents: Are you worried that your college students aren't interested in the real world anymore? Are they growing distant from conversations about foreign policy at the dinner table? Are your college students getting involved with international relations theory? Could it lead to a destructive path toward an M.A.--or even a Ph.D.?If you're worried that your child could become a graduate student, you need to know the warning signs:Abstracting too much. Real foreign policy professionals resist the urge to generalize, unless they're doing so as part of a doctrine named for...
Call for Papers: Popular Culture and World Politics
Flyer below. Posting does not indicate endorsement. But it does look cool.
Against Journal Impact Factors
There's a fascinating post making the rounds. In it, Stephen Curry discusses the history and abuse of journal impact-factor data. Curry links alternatives to the rise of open-access publications and new-media discussion of research findings. Twenty years on from Seglen’s analysis a new paper by Jerome Vanclay from Southern Cross University in Australia has reiterated the statistical ineptitude of using arithmetic means to rank journals and highlighted other problems with the impact factor calculation. Vanclay points out that it fails to take proper account of data entry errors in the titles...
Monday Morning Linkage
Jonathan Rue discusses the continuing wave of "green-on-blue" attacks in Afghanistan.Sertaç Sehlikoglu-Karakas on the Olympics, "sporting bodies," and Islam. Dan Trombly argues that the Colombian counter-insurgency effort contradicts COIN conventional wisdom. Jamestown China Brief: "Taiwan Rebalances in the Near Seas."Jay doesn't think much of the role of "legitimacy" in causal explanations: "In statistical terms, legitimacy is the label we attach to the residual, the portion of the variance our mental models cannot explain. It is a tautology masquerading as a causal force." Sounds like good...
Saturday Afternoon Video
Note: I'm on the road, so no Morning Linkage (at least from me) today -- and likely tomorrow.Â
Friday Nerd(ish) Blegging: Is Soledad Obrien Taking Cues From HBO?
The Internets have exploded around Soledad O'Brien's witty yet friendly push-back against numerous interviewees who refuse to be fazed by facts.I don't know about your interpretation of this. But watching her politely yet firmly refuse to look her viewers in the eye and lie about the facts reminds me of nothing less than the fictional newsroom of Aaron Sworkin's new HBO series "Newsroom."Indeed, one might interpret this scene from early in the first season of Newsroom as a political manifesto rather than a form of entertainment:Now, as an out-and-proud nerd, I'm much likelier to want to...