Articles by authors with foreign-sounding names are cited far less than those written by people with “typically-American” names.
What is in a Name? Additional Sources of Bias in Citation Counts
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Recent Posts
What We Learned at the Future Strategy Forum
This post in the Bridging the Gap series come from Sara Plana and Rachel Tecott, doctoral candidates in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Sara is...
Seven Reasons We Use Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI)
This is a guest post from Paul Musgrave, Assistant Professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Sebastian Karcher, Associate Director of the Qualitative Data...
We are Groot
Today is President Putin’s inauguration day and even Avengers couldn’t stop it, as evidenced by the arrested raccoon in the center of Moscow on Saturday during the unsanctioned rally ““He's No Tsar...
More Recent Posts
New Georgetown Blog
SFS undergrad Anton Strezhnev has a new blog called Causal Loop. Highly recommended. Via Jay Ulfelder who, naturally enough, critiques Anton's "first substantive post."
Creeping Illiberal Democracy
The Washington Post had a fine op-ed this weekend by law professor Jonathan Turley asking the provocative question, Is the U.S. still the “land of the free?” He gave 10 compelling reasons that it is not. Turley’s op ed has the legal issues well-covered. He also draws telling comparisons...
Iran Attack: National Journal #Fail
UPDATE: Deazen has made significant corrections to the article. It still implies, I think, more than is warranted, but the egregious misrepresentations in his article are gone.SECOND UPDATE: In case anybody thought that this was anything other than a National Journal fail, it it turns out that...
Romney: A Charmed Life
The McCain opposition-research file circulating on the internet (if genuine) is just devastating in its picture of a man without any convictions whatsoever. It makes one thing crystal clear: Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee, and quite possibly our next President, because he faced a GOP...
Colin Kahl responds to Matt Kroenig
Foreign Affairs has gone live with Colin Kahl's explanation of why we shouldn't commence bombing in five minutes. A sample:In arguing for a six-month horizon, Kroenig also misleadingly conflates hypothetical timelines to produce weapons-grade uranium with the time actually required to construct a...
Strategic narratives: An uncertain science
Timing is everything; I'm not sure its good to be publishing a paper about strategic narratives just as the US cuts its Advisory Commission on Public Dipomacy, although RAND have begun exploring this field. National-level policymakers still try to tell stories about where their state and the...
Learning from Histories of the AIDS Crisis
What can we learn from histories of the AIDS crisis? Jacques Pépin's The Origins of AIDS and Nathan Geffen's Debunking Delusions: The Inside Story of the Treatment Action Campaign are two important contributions to our understanding of a disease that has now claimed nearly thirty million lives.In...
Visas and scholarship
Sarah Duff (who has contributed to this blog before) had a very interesting piece in the UK Guardian this week on the hurdles scholars in developing countries have to face in order to engage with scholars in the developed world. Rather than focusing on whether or not the visa system is fair, she...
“I am not a Chicken!”: Social Mobilization at Its Best
I can't resist sharing this wonderful news clip from Malawi. I challenge Duck readers to have fun with this: What might the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street movements learn from Malawi?Malawi protests scheduled for January 15, Chilembwe Day12 January 2012tags: chilembwe day, malawi, protestby...
Information wants to be free. Congress wants it to be held for ransom.
It's bad form to criticize otherdisciplines' journals based solelyon titles, but Annals of Tourism Research? This is the sort of thing libraries spend their budgets on?Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) is trying to end taxpayer access to publicly-funded research. The article is worth reading,...
Politics, Intelligence, and Academic Analysis
Writing in Foreign Policy, Paul Pillar makes the case that most so-called "intelligence failures" stem from bad leadership rather than problems with the US intelligence community. He touches upon a number of cases, but Iraq looms large:Had Bush read the intelligence community's report, he would...
Blondie
If you are running for the nomination of the Republican Party for President, there are a fewindispensables – you have to hate welfare recipients, oppose gay marriage, and have fired a gun at an animal at some point. (But apparently you no longer have to support a robust military presence overseas....