Professor Timothy Longman of Boston University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. He speaks about his decision, eventually, to focus on Rwanda as the basis for his dissertation.
Episode 19 – Tim Longman
read more
Featured
Drones, Mansour and Policy Problems
This is a guest post by Tobias T. Gibson, Associate Professor of Political Science and Security Studies at Westminster College, in Fulton, MO. Late last month, a U.S. military “drone” killed Mullah...
Brexit Epiphany
As I was chatting with my dissertation adviser yesterday while in DC (yes, my dissertation was completed in 1993 but the relationship goes on), I had an epiphany that had been on the edges of my...
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...
More Featured Posts
Friday Nerd Blogging: Indiana Jones and the Plot Hole of Power
Two CBS sitcoms have references Indiana Jones in the past couple of weeks: How I Met Your Mother invoked Last Crusade as Barney imagined that Ted and he entered the room where the grail and the fake grails were stored at the end of Last Crusade. The ghostly knight kept playing a role, telling Ted in "reality" that he was choosing poorly. Not a bad bit. Big Bang Theory had the Amy Farrah Fowler character bust a big plot hole in Raiders, arguing that Indiana Jones was unnecessary for the outcome. Whether he tried to stop the Nazis or not, they would have been killed by the power of the ark...
Thursday Morning Linkage
Here is your morning linkage with stories on energy and the environment, conservation, conflict in Africa, and health. Energy and Environment Alex Wang on the really bad air in the Chinese city of Harbin, buses getting lost, school canceled, video here 4.5% drop in GHG emissions in the U.S. between 2011 and 2012, but methane rising in shale gas producing states? Questions about whether China is last best hope for carbon capture and storage Newish IEA report on what is needed for redrawing the climate and energy map Conservation EU Parliament rejects additional subsidies for fishing fleets...
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...