As the summer movie season ends, it makes sense to bring back Friday Nerd Blogging after spending most Fridays at the theatre. This week's invokes all kinds of IR, including resource conflicts, gender dynamics, and Tom Hardy:
As the summer movie season ends, it makes sense to bring back Friday Nerd Blogging after spending most Fridays at the theatre. This week's invokes all kinds of IR, including resource conflicts, gender dynamics, and Tom Hardy:
My first post on the Duck focused on the emergence of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag and campaign, pointing also to the ease with which hashtags can get appropriated and campaigns derailed....
So, in another installment on the job market front, I thought I'd weigh in with some thoughts on possible differences of job postings and hiring  processes at policy schools. Admittedly, this is an...
A long, long time ago, before I became a professor and even before I went to graduate school for my doctorate, I worked for a few years in the defense community. I was a Defense Analyst for the...
Gamification is "is the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to non-game problems, such as business and social impact challenges", to borrow the course description from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania's Gamification MOOC. The approach has been used to try and improve employee productivity, facilitate risk prevention education (and indeed many other forms of education) , resolve social conflict, and, perhaps less surprisingly, in marketing. And just in case you thought there were any contexts in which gamification couldn't be used, militaries...
This is a guest post from Daniel Mügge who is an associate professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam and the lead editor of the Review of International Political Economy. In two recent posts, Cullen Hendrix, and Daniel Nexon and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, have tabled important pros and cons of Google Scholar (GS) as a base for measuring of academic performance. And the flurry of reactions to their blogs reveal just how central and touchy and important an issue this is. The debate so far concentrates on gauging the "quality" of an individual scholar, and how different...
This is a guest post by both Nexon and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. Standard disclaimers apply. Cullen Hendrix's guest post is a must read for anyone interested in citation metrics and international-relations scholarship. Among other things, Hendrix provides critical benchmark data for those interested in assessing performance using Google Scholar. We love the post, but we worry about an issue that it raises. Hendrix opens with a powerful analogy: sabermetrics is to baseball as the h-index is to academia.  We can build better international-relations departments. With science! The main argument...
One reason that Patrick I stepped down as a permanent contributors to the Duck of Minerva was to develop ISQ Online as a forum for intellectual exchange surrounding International Studies Quarterly pieces. I think readers of the Duck will find the exchanges there interesting, and so I'll be using (abusing?) my 'standing guest' privileges to call attention to them. ISQ recently published—on early view—a piece by Michael Poznansky entitled "Stasis or Decay? Reconciling Covert War and the Democratic Peace." In the final round of review, two of the referees proved very enthusiastic but one still...
Policy schools prepare students to work in the public policy realm, most often training students for positions in government. But policymaking is an increasingly diverse field, policy issues span the globe and multiple--state and non-state--actors take part in decision-making and policy implementation. How should we teach global policy-making in policy schools? In a recent article co-authored with Cristina M. Balboa, Policymaking in the Global Context: Training Students to Build Effective Strategic Partnerships with Nongovernmental Organizations [ungated access here], we use a case study of...
So, with the conclusion of last night's first GOP debate, it's worth a look back at the foreign policy claims made by the candidates for the Republican nomination for president. The focus was, as much of the election race will be, focused on domestic policy, but there's still some stuff worth analyzing. I'll be working off of the debate transcript posted by Time. The first foreign policy question was directed at Senator Rand Paul: BAIER: Senator Paul, you recently blamed the rise of ISIS on Republican hawks. You later said that that statement, you could have said it better. But, the...
The following is a guest post by Cullen Hendrix of the University of Denver.  If you’ve read or seen Moneyball, the following anecdote will be familiar to you: Baseball is a complex sport requiring a diverse, often hard-to-quantify[1] skillset. Before the 2000s, baseball talent scouts relied heavily on a variety of heuristics marked by varying degrees of sanity: whether the player had a toned physique, whether the player had an attractive girlfriend, and whether or not the player seemed arrogant (this was seen as a good thing). Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics changed things with a...
I will be live-tweeting the foreign policy dimensions of the GOP debate tonight here. Readers may want to chime in here on this open thread with the pre-, during, and post-debate reactions. It may be the silly season in the GOP primary, but with the Iran deal pending before Congress, these are consequential times. Yesterday, I live tweeted President Obama's address on Iran and will be synthesizing my observations on the deal and the politics surrounding it in coming days. Get your popcorn and laptop out tonight and stay tuned for the main attraction on your TV. BTW, as ever, I encourage...