Perhaps the problem isn’t that theories leak from the lab, but efforts to seal the lab in the first place. If political scientists spent more time observing the policy world, me might get both better and more careful theories in the first place.
We knew it was coming and here it is. An open source spreadsheet designed by The Professor Is In blog's Karen L. Kelsky for the purpose of collecting up stories of sexual harassment, abuse, and...
For Russia watchers Christmas always comes early (or Hanukkah comes right on time!) when Putin gives his annual presser in mid-December to the journalists from Russia and around the world. This year...
A guest post by Thomas Pepinsky, is Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University and Stefanie Walter, Full Professor for International Relations and Political Economy at the Department...
This will be nothing like a comprehensive overview on the topic (for one thing I have been in and out of plenary, for another I am filtering this event through the lens of my specific research agenda on framing and norm development). That said, here are a few notes and observations about the nature of the debate and the process here since I arrived yesterday - angles I am not likely to blog about in depth but which are worth noting in passing. Hope others will take them up and link to whatever others are writing - I am mostly following events here rather than online, with the exception of...
Dear Kansas Board of Regents, Greetings. I don’t know if you received my first open-letter to you in December. My parents have pretty slow Internet in central Kansas so maybe the page is still loading. Hopefully, you’ll read the letter once you get it. In December, I wrote about your proposed social media policy and how it really would scare me if I was still faculty at Kansas State University or any of your other Kansas institutions. Of course, I know not to post things that would go against existing federal laws (FERPA) and know not to incite violence in my social media posts. ...
Cyber security has been on the general security agenda for some time now, but it is only recently that Political Scientists have really engaged the topic in a serious manner befitting of the theoretical and empirical advances in the field. In general, we have ceded this ground to those who either have a vested interest in the question (the cyber security industry) or to those who seek to inflate the threat based on imagined fears. This blog will review some recent work in the field and evaluate the state of knowledge plus future directions. Many pundits comment and pontificate on cyber...
The following is a guest-post by my good friend Dave Kang of USC. Below he complements his recent TNI essay with the full flow of charts and graphics they screened out. This post is an important rejoinder to the constant assertion (think Robert Kaplan) that East Asia is on the brink of war and that everyone is freaked out by China. The thing is, East Asian military spending doesn’t actually suggest that at all… “In a recent National Interest essay I argued that military expenditures in East Asia do not appear to be excessively high. In this post I’d like to post the figures that informed the...
I'm so glad the semester is over so I can leave Friday to head to Brazil for a three week short course with my colleague Eugene Gholz. The topic is the World Cup "Rising Powers and Global Governance." We have reprised our 2010 edition of our South Africa short course (notice the pattern). I'm hopeful I'll be able to provide some flavor from our trip as we have an exciting series of meetings with government officials, scientists, academics, practitioners, diplomats, activists, and members of the business community. We're focused on three main themes, the environment, public health, and the...
[Please note: this is a guest post by Alison Howell, Rutgers University- Newark] The recent WHO designation of polio as a ‘global public health emergency’ has reignited debate as to whether the spread of polio is the result of reduced vaccine trust due to the CIA vaccination ruse in Pakistan. The vaccination ruse in Pakistan was part of the CIA's apparent aim to get Osama bin Laden’s family DNA. In 2011 the Guardian first reported on the ruse and global health experts began to express concern that this would lead to vaccine refusals in Pakistan. There, major efforts were underway as part of...
One of the more depressing elements in the narrative at the CCWUN Experts' Meeting this week has been the argument, repeated by a number of autonomous weapons proponents both in plenary and discussion, that an advantage of such weapons is the following: unlike human soldiers, they would never commit rape. This is but a new twist on a broader argument most prominently made by Georgia Tech Professor Ronald Arkin in his book Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots, but shared by many AWS proponents. The argument is that autonomous weapons might not just be good for national security,...
A common refrain from critics of the campaign to ban autonomous weapons is that these weapons are "inevitable." If that's true, then efforts to mitigate or pre-empt their use are not just a waste of time but a dangerous distraction from the real issue: staying ahead in an impending robot arms race or, at least, making sure that the weapons (which will definitely be built and deployed) have the best "humanitarian" programming possible. My colleague Michael Horowitz made the former argument recently in Foreign Policy. Kenneth Anderson and Matthew Waxman (Waxman is slated to speak tomorrow at...