Featured
Should the United States Arm Ukraine?
With Russia's incursions into Ukraine becoming more aggressive, there has been a lot of chatter about whether or not the U.S. government should arm Ukraine with lethal weapons. Defense Secretary...
Friday Nerd Blogging: Everything is Awesome Edition
I am a huge fan of the Lego Movie, which is almost an IR movie, given that Will Moore is related to one of the movie's creators. But this somewhat critical take on the film is still delightful:
The “Right” to Be Forgotten & Digital Leviathans
We hear every day that technology is changing rapidly, and that we are at risk of others violating our rights through digital means. We hear about cyber attacks that steal data, such as credit...
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About Those Israel Academic Study Trips…
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Kavita Khory, Professor of Political Science at Mount Holyoke College. Last spring the Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) of Boston invited me to participate in a weeklong study tour to Israel. Designed for scholars of international relations, political science, and public policy, the purpose of the educational tour was to provide an “in-depth firsthand exposure” to Israel and promote a “deeper understanding” of its politics and society. The faculty study tour, now in its fourth or fifth iteration, is billed as the cornerstone of the organization’s...
Mechanical Turk and Experiments in the Social Sciences
Amazon created a platform called Mechanical Turk that allows Requesters to create small tasks (Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs) that Workers can perform for an extremely modest fee such as 25 or 50 cents per task.* Because the site can be used to collect survey data, it has become a boon for social scientists interested in an experimental design to test causal mechanisms of interest (see Adam Berinsky's short description here). The advantage of Mechanical Turk is the cost. For a fraction of the expense it costs to field a survey with Knowledge Networks/GfK, Qualtrics, or other survey...
Thinking About the Seven Year Post-Doc
This piece is really interesting. It is written by Radhika Nagpal who was on the tenure track at Harvard but treated the experience like a seven year post-doc. That is, she didn't focus on what it took to get tenure there, because, well, most folks don't get tenure. Instead, Nagpal focused on pursuing the most fulfilling seven years so that she would be in a good position at the end of the "post-doc." This led her to some conclusions, which I consider below. But before I do so, it is important to note that this advice of hers applies everywhere but to greater or lesser degrees. There...
The Interdisciplinarity Shibboleth: Christakis Edition
Andrew Gelman provides a nice rejoinder to Nicholas Christakis' New York Times op-ed, "Let's Shake up the Social Sciences." Fabio Rojas scores the exchange for Christakis, but his commentators provide convincing rebuttals to Rojas. Once again, I suspect reactions to the column are driven by homophily rather than network effects. But all this aside, Christakis makes an interesting claim about the evidence for stagnation: In contrast, the social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology,...
Tobias Gibson Reviews The Thistle and the Drone
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Tobias Gibson of Westminster College. In recent days, there have been reports of U.S. drone strikes in North Waziristan, Pakistan. According to the New York Times article, these strikes killed at least two people. This remote area of Pakistan has long been subject to U.S. drone strikes. The Times also reports that U.S. anti-terrorism efforts are shifting theaters from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Africa. This shift includes the expansion of the use of surveillance drones in Mali, flown from a new drone base in Niger. According to the story, the U.S. is...
How Would Al Gore Have Fought the Iraq War?
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Elizabeth Saunders who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. In this year of Iraq-related anniversaries, this summer marks the 10-year anniversary of the emergence of the insurgency, when many Americans realized the Iraq War would not be over any time soon. Would things have been different had Al Gore been president? The latest issue of Perspectives on Politics has a symposium that considers this question in light of Frank P. Harvey’s book Explaining the Iraq War: Counterfactual Theory, Logic and...
Monday Morning Linkage
Good morning... Salman Adil Hussain reviews Deepa Kumar's Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Hussain writes, "Kumar shines a bright light on liberal Islamophobia, and shows how the Obama administration’s emphasis on homegrown terrorism generated a lot of talk about ‘terrorists in our midst’ in the mainstream American media and presented right-wing Islamophobes with the opportunity they needed to (re-)popularise the old ‘Islamic peril’." David J. Morris asks: "How much does culture matter for P.T.S.D.?" The following quote from the article is powerful and worth contemplating: "The...
First-World Nerd Problems: A Nintendo 3DS Bleg
Last week I purchased a Nintendo handheld (on steep discount) for the express purpose of playing Okamiden. Okami is one of my most favoritist games evah; even though Okamiden is basically more of the same, I'm cool with that. Yesterday we had to buy off the wee one--we did, in fact, have a pretty terrible day from her perspective--so we offered to purchase her a game to play. That led to Animal Crossing: A New Leaf and a complete loss of custody over the Nintendo. So complete, in fact, that she basically bought it from me. So here's the question: beyond the aforementioned piece of crack in a...