I realize I am putting my Twitter standings at great risk by potentially appearing to make light of an important social issue.* But when I found this treatise on the importance of tighter regulations for dragons I couldn't resist sharing. Happy Friday! Game of Thrones...
[Note: This is a guest post by Richard Price, Professor of Political Science at University of British Columbia and author of The Chemical Weapons Taboo.] Counter-intuitively, the first large-scale...
Some spoilers below re Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, but good fun for a Friday chock full of deadlines Still just as much death, perhaps even more....
The following is a re-up of a piece I wrote for the Diplomat last month as part of an informal back-and-forth series with the National Interest this summer on the US pivot to Asia and AirSea Battle....
The current issue of the International Journal of Comparative Sociology has a special issue on trade and travel. In it, sociologists apply network analysis in domains familiar to international-relations scholars. I haven't read the articles yet, but I thought the cross-disciplinary dimension was interesting enough to ask SAGE to make the contents available. You can download them through July. I'm about halfway through Aliette de Bodard's Obsidian and Blood trilogy, and am enjoying it immensely. If the concept of Tenochtitlan Noir Fantasy isn't enough to interest you, then I'm not sure why...
The American retailer response to Bangladesh worker safety -- American firms will monitor and report, but not much else. For those who want to become more socially informed consumers -- missed this last month when Forbes tested the Buycott app. The Oil Drum shuts down: It seems peak oil peaked before oil did. But, did the rise in fracking contribute to its death? Joshua Goldstein looks at the new Uppsala data on Syria and global battle deaths. Eric Reeves warns that "Darfur teeters on the edge of a complete humanitarian collapse and uncontrollable violence." and... Can an organization...
Lawfare T2000 from Adama on Vimeo. The video you see is not just an intriguing and entertaining way to express one position in legal arguments around the debate over autonomous weapons. It represents a fascinating foreign policy artifact, a data point in the policy discourse over the value of a pre-emptive ban on autonomous weapons, one in which science fiction metaphors are given a prime place. This raises intriguing questions about the relationship between science fiction and foreign policy and how we might study it. The creator of this video is Tom Malinowski, who has just...
As Comic Con approaches and the Course for the Force begins, we, of course, want to sing:
I spent most of the past week in Kansas City, MO while my daughter competed at the Tumbling and Trampoline National Championships. If you must know, she did fine. I'm most proud of how she handled herself. She was expected to do very well in one of her events, but she made some mistakes and underperformed. She didn't let it get to her, however, and we had a great time. This was the first time I'd set foot in Kansas City. In fact, I've never been in Missouri before. I had no idea how cool the architecture is. Kansas City has a number of pre-war landmarks, including Municipal Auditorium, which...
Dear LaTeX, You look so pretty. In grad school, all the cool kids were using you. You know, the kids that had backgrounds in differential calculus and ran R even when they didn’t have to? Those kids. I wanted to be like them and have groundbreaking papers. So, instead of working on my arguments and methods, I downloaded you and set out to write my dissertation with your wonderful program. I mean, if the paper looks like it was written by someone who has their stuff together, it must be a well-done paper, right? Now, 4 years later, I realize the error of my ways. You didn’t make my...
“Of course this is risky,” Mr. Logulov said, “but risk is everywhere in life. A brick could fall on your head in the street, for example. And this is just a small risk.” - on the practice of having Russian children take their pictures with circus animals (WTF!?) Here is your morning linkage with a return to form, conservation concerns and pollution in Asia loom large: Worries about China's resumption of the trade in tiger parts Yao Ming urges Chinese to give up on shark fin soup And good news, big drop in demand for shark fin soup record 4,000 missing in recent India floods Massive flooding...
In a new piece up at Foreign Affairs on the killer robot debate, I attempt to distinguish between what we know and what we can only speculate about around the ethics / legality of autonomous weapons. The gist: Both camps have more speculation than facts on their side... [But] the bigger problem isn’t that some claims in this debate are open to question on empirical grounds, rather that so many of them simply cannot be evaluated empirically, since there is no data or precedent with which to weigh discrimination and proportionality against military necessity. So, instead of resting on...