A distinctly unoriginal take on the pathologies of overvaluing academic “novelty.”
Get off my lawn! Are journal demands for “novelty” creating a culture of low-level academic dishonesty?
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Recent Posts
Doing PhD Research While Staying in Place
Last night, I taught another session of our Dissertation Proposal Workshop class, and the topic was the methodology section of one's proposal. That is, how am I going to research this question...
Deploying targeted digital health conversations to fight the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and misinformation
This is a guest post from Ben Bellows, PhD (UC Berkeley, epidemiology), currently a researcher at the Population Council in Washington DC and a co-founder and the Chief Business Officer at Nivi...
Public Health Research in Mainstream International Relations Outlets
Steve Saideman’s recent Duck piece on international relations scholars’ relative silence on issues of pandemics, and public health more generally, has ruffled feathers[1]and generated a lot of...
More Recent Posts
The Relational Sociology of Rational-Choice Theory
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Eric Grynaviski, who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. There has been a debate on the Duck lately about the meaning of rational choice theory and game theory, and how it’s different from varied alternative...
Moving Beyond Tilly
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Michael Martoccio, who is a PhD candidate of Early Modern History with a minor specialization in IR Theory at Northwestern University. His research broadly examines the role of cooperation in shaping political change in Europe, c. 1300-1700. His projects...
The “Fear” Factor in “Killer Robot” Campaigning
One of the more specious criticisms of the "stopkillerrobots" campaign is that it is using sensationalist language and imagery to whip up a climate of fear around autonomous weapons. So the argument goes, by referring to autonomous weapons as "killer robots" and treating them as a threat to...
War Law, the “Public Conscience” and Autonomous Weapons
In the Guardian this morning, Christof Heyns very neatly articulates some of the legal arguments with allowing machines the ability to target human beings autonomously - whether they can distinguish civilians and combatants, make qualitative judgments, be held responsible for war crimes. But...
Thursday Morning Linkage
Above, I've posted another photo of the crack Duck blogging team (that's me upper left, my dissertation advisor is lower right). Right now, I'm en route to a conference in Norway so my 22 month old son has prepared the following post of Thursday Morning Linkage. (Well, if he had, there would be...
The Three Commandments for Editing a Journal
This brief post started life as a comment on a Facebook discussion thread about peer reviewing practices but I thought it might deserve a wider readership. The question was raised: is it kosher for a journal editor to request information about good reviewers from the author of the manuscript? The...
Rational Choice and Selfishness
In his latest post, PTJ moves us past the worst critiques of "rational choice theory" and focuses on a few more nuanced concerns.1 I'm glad to see the conversation progressing, and this type of exchange is one of the things I love most about academic blogging. However, I find some of PTJ's...
Measuring Journal (and Scholarly) Outcomes
Another day, another piece chronicling problems with the metrics scholars use to assess quality. Colin Wight sends George Lozano's "The Demise of the Impact Factor": Using a huge dataset of over 29 million papers and 800 million citations, we showed that from 1902 to 1990 the relationship between...
How Do Americans Feel About Fully Autonomous Weapons?
According to a new survey I've just completed, not great. As part of my ongoing research into human security norms, I embedded questions on YouGov's Omnibus survey asking how people feel about the potential for outsourcing lethal targeting decisions to machines. 1000 Americans were surveyed,...
So Should Policy Schools Have PhD Programs?
So, I teach at a policy school, and though our core pedagogical enterprise is the MA program, we have a small PhD program that is a mix of political science, economics, and maybe a dash of public administration. Though I have not worked closely with that many PhD students, the ones I have worked...
Globalizing Human Rights
My colleague and friend James Ron has a new article up at Open Democracy (with Shannon Golden and David Crow) on asymmetric access of global populations to human rights machinery. The article is one in a new Open Democracy series "Open Global Rights," which aims to " relocate the [human rights]...
Ken Macleod on Iain Banks
We missed Ken Macleod's public eulogies for Iain Banks: he did an interview for As it Happens, wrote an article in The Guardian, and has some brief personal words on his blog. From the conclusion of his Guardian piece: The reputation and reception of Iain Banks as a mainstream author may fluctuate...