Grades are in, reviews submitted, and I'm headed out for the holiday season. I hope you are wrapping up the semester and/or enjoying a well-deserved break. Please remember to submit your nominations for the 2017 Duckies before the end of the year. And, please...
Following on my round of links on Thursday, this is a guest post from Jennifer Hadden from the University of Maryland who is in Warsaw at the global climate negotiations (follow her on Twitter...
The annual climate negotiations are going on at the moment in Warsaw, Poland. For long-time observers of the process, they have a Groundhog Day-esque quality to them. Every year the same issues seem...
As has been widely reported in the Western media, on Friday, China’s state media finally officially announced two changes in human rights policies: (a) an end of the “Laojiao” policy of...
I will freely admit to being a FiveThirtyEight junkie over the past few months. The excellent analysis and projection that they do over there is more than a little reminiscent of my favorite baseball site, Baseball Prospectus, in that we have a very self-conscious quantitative methodology in which numbers are used to produce good insights, and not simply crunched for the sake of crunching numbers. Marvelous stuff, and basically updated in real time -- hats off to Al Gore for inventing the InterNet that makes this all possible.That said, I worry just a bit about this obsessive poll-watching,...
[Updated: Thanks to commentator Aldous for pointing out an error in my original predictions--I had Montana for Obama and neglected to include Nevada]I am not, by any stretch, and expert at polling--presidential or otherwise. By that doesn't stop most of the talking heads from bloviating and spewing silliness.Therefore, I thought I'd have some fun and post my predictions for Tuesday's Presidential election.Final: Obama over McCain 349-189I think Obama ends up winning a significant electoral victory--swing states such as Virginia, Ohio, and Florida will break for Obama. He also picks up New...
Given the way the campaign has gone lately, this seems to offer a preview of tonight's presidential debate: I never really previously noticed the parallels between Senator McCain and the Penguin.
Hello loyal Duck readers. I wanted to briefly introduce myself as the newest member of the Duck. I am a longtime friend of the site that has decided to start posting rather than just commenting on the great insights of colleagues.A little truth in advertising: my real name is not Randy Waterhouse. For fans of a certain author you will immediately notice that it is a pseudonym. Unfortunately, my current employer does not allow for employees to blog, so I've decided to assume this online identity so that I can contribute to the broader conversation on, well, whatever is bugging me in the world...
After rejections from two other policy journals and ten days of wrangling with the editors, my first policy-article on the rules of war has just appeared in The National Interest. In a nutshell: "The arguments of the Bush administration when it comes to torture, prisoner-of-war status and extraordinary rendition have been met with outrage by the international community, constitutional scholars and human-rights organizations like Amnesty International, which has referred to Guantánamo Bay as the 'gulag of our times.' But the polarization of these two camps obscures the broad middle ground...
Recent days have seen a number of articles like this one from the New York Times, in which it is claimed that people are changing their commuting patterns because of the high price of gas. The equation is pretty simple: higher gas prices = more expensive to drive to and from work = more use of mass transit. Although the article also cites increased urban congestion and the availability of wireless connections (and hence to ability to do online work while traveling) on mass transit trains as reasons for this change in commuter behavior, the main logic claimed involves cost-benefit...
Never knew the word "bleg" before today, when Dan asked me to put up the following request from Russell B:"How can I send a bleg to the readers of the Duck? Being the Ultimate Part-timer, I've finally secured myself some rather stable work but have to concoct a course on Globalization and Security (like a globalization version of a traditional Security Studies course). So I'm looking for input, as I have no priors."Any thoughts?
I've been following the steroids controversy in baseball for some time. In 2005, major league baseball implemented a restrictive policy that was meant to be taken seriously. Since then, Congress has held hearings, many players have been outed as users, and even more draconian policies have now been adopted.Has the policy been working? Yesterday, a (relatively obscure) major league player was suspended for 50 days. That's interesting, but not very revealing in light of the amnesty recently granted to players named last winter in the Mitchell Report.Take a look at the numbers in this...