A discussion with Nina Kollars and Mark Raymond about the SolarWinds hack, recorded in March, 2021
Episode 7: Duckcalls Events Series 1, Solarwinds discussion with Nina Kollars and Mark Raymond
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Featured
The Most Important Corpses: Eastern Front Edition
I was on twitter talking with some folks about what Canada might promise at the Warsaw Summit, with the focus on who is going to provide the troops for the four battalions that will be based in the...
Selling Out to the Enemy of Open Access
Yesterday, news quickly spread that the Social Science Research Network was bought by Elsevier. This quickly caused an uproar on twitter. Why? The SSRN was established to provide a place for...
Whose Academy Is It Anyway?
Recently there has been a lot of talk about one of those issues academics (at least in the U.S.) obsess about: how to get tenure and the job security as well as license to (supposedly) speak truth...
More Featured Posts
So you want to move to the United Kingdom…
Its 2013, the U.S. government was recently shut down for almost two weeks. The National Science Foundation will only fund grants if you can help the U.S. build operational transformers or drones that can make targeted killing choices. The movement to replace full time faculty with part time adjuncts has sapped the open jobs on the market leading to the common Facebook refrain - "worst job market ever."  Political theory is openly despised in most departments. Without significant skills in R, there is little hope to make an impact in quantitative research. Welcome to the Political Science...
The Duck of Minerva is blocked in China
I was just in China for a work thing, when I checked the Duck for something. Turns out the Duck is screened out by the Great Firewall. Even if you go to Google Search Hong Kong, it’s still blocked. Wow. Who knew even nerdy IR theory and pop culture references posed a threat to CCP rule? Lame. Even more lame - my own website, which gets way less traffic, is blocked too. For sites as small as mine, that’s almost a complement – hah. If only I had readers similarly interested enough to even bother…
Do Cyborgs Dream of Electric Femme-Bots?
[Note: This is a guest post by Lauren Wilcox, Lecturer in Gender Studies at University of Cambridge, and author of "Machines that Matter: The Politics and Ethics of ‘Unnatural’ Bodies" in Iver Neumann and Nicholas Kiersey eds, Battlestar Galactica and International Relations, Routledge 2012] In a recent blog post on the Monkey Cage, Heather Roff-Perkins is concerned that military robots are being built with masculine characteristics. She is correct that gender is one of many pertinent issues surrounding contemporary military technologies but in my opinion she doesn’t go far enough in...
Advancing Global Environmental Governance
[Note: This is a guest post by Peter M. Haas of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst] Transboundary and global environmental threats require collection action. Concretely, this means developing forms of governance that apply common rules, norms and decision making procedures.  Ideally, such governance should be resilient in the sense that it is able to persist over time and respond quickly and accurately to new threats. Yet the record of international environmental governance is mixed, at best. According to a recent UNEP overview of global environmental governance, some regimes have...
Another Great Video – Why You Should NEVER Lecture from the Book’s Slides
My first semester teaching as a PhD'd professor was tough - I was constantly struggling to stay on top of my research responsibilities and my family responsibilities.  Add in teaching 2 new preps - something had to give!  Well, I thought I found a solution - the textbook I was using for Intro to IR had already-made Powerpoint presentations!  All I needed to do was change the name and date on the slides and - Voilà ! - teaching duties done! Unfortunately, every time I tried that, I ended up looking exactly like this guy: Powered by MediaTram
Tuesday Linkage
Killer Robots: Wired reports on developments in autonomous weaponry, quoting military personnel who say the idea is to think of them "not as tools but as members of the squad." Video gamers collaboratively solved a decade-old puzzle about the complex structure of an enzyme relevant to HIV-AIDS research, suggesting human spatial reasoning is superior to algorithms: a point not at all lost on those who think putting complex situational life and death judgments into machine hands is a bad idea. 270 engineers, roboticists a computer science experts have signed a statement demanding a...
The Greeks Had a Word For It
How do you spell heteros*edasticity? Economist Alfredo R. Paloyo surveys the evidence and shows that the variant "heteroskedasticity" overtook its rival, "heteroscedasticity", several years ago. Oddly, "homoscedastic", "heteroscedastic", and "homoscedasticity" continue to trump their k-variants. (Clearly, I am in the copy-editing phase of revising a paper, and this blog post must be part of the revision process, since it would be procrastination otherwise.) Orthographic purists will insist on heteroskedastic because it is closer to the Greek root. Seizing on yet another opportunity to be...
Great Video on Getting a PhD in Political Science – Very Funny
certainly sounds like my 20s… The Duck hasn’t had a good video up in awhile, and for all of you thinking about grad school apps this fall, well, here it is…