The Duck of Minerva

Bill Petti

Petti is Associate Director of Insights and Analytics at Alexion . Previously, he served as Lead Data Scientist in the Decision Sciences group at Maritz Motivation and a Global Data Strategist and Subject Matter Expert for Gallup.

Bill Petti

Recent Posts

U.S. Midterm Election Prediction Fest 2010

by | 1 November, 2010 |

At Gallup, we are officially predicting--regardless of turnout level--at least 40 seats for Republicans.  Based on the numbers and our historical model, Republicans should land about 60+ House seats, easily gaining the majority.Personally, I'll say 65 just to be (arbitrarily) specific.  I'll also predict that Republicans pick up 7 seats in the Senate, 3 short of a majority in that body.What do you think? Feel free to leave your own predictions in the comments section.

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Social Science: Apparently Too ‘Sciencey’ for the Iranian Government…

by | 26 October, 2010 |

...so says a senior Education Ministry official:"Expansion of 12 disciplines in the social sciences like law, women's studies, human rights, management, sociology, philosophy....psychology and political sciences will be reviewed," Abolfazl Hassani was quoted as saying in the Arman newspaper."These sciences' contents are based on Western culture. The review will be the intention of making them compatible with Islamic teachings."The Ayatollah added:"Many disciplines in the humanities are based on principles founded on materialism disbelieving the divine Islamic teachings," Khamenei said in a...

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IR makes it to TED

by | 26 October, 2010 |

Joseph Nye gives a TED talk:To my knowledge, this is only the third political scientist and IR specialist to give a TED talk (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Samantha Power being the other two).  Hopefully we'll see more as I think the TED series is a great way for polisci and IR scholars to make their knowledge relevant and understandable outside of the discipline.

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