by Charli Carpenter | 22 Oct 2013 | Featured
Killer Robots: Wired reports on developments in autonomous weaponry, quoting military personnel who say the idea is to think of them "not as tools but as members of the squad." Video gamers collaboratively solved a decade-old puzzle about the complex structure of an enzyme relevant to HIV-AIDS research, suggesting human spatial reasoning is superior to algorithms: a point not at all lost on those who think putting complex situational life and...
by PM | 22 Oct 2013 | Featured
How do you spell heteros*edasticity? Economist Alfredo R. Paloyo surveys the evidence and shows that the variant "heteroskedasticity" overtook its rival, "heteroscedasticity", several years ago. Oddly, "homoscedastic", "heteroscedastic", and "homoscedasticity" continue to trump their k-variants. (Clearly, I am in the copy-editing phase of revising a paper, and this blog post must be part of the revision process, since it would be...
by Robert Kelly | 22 Oct 2013 | Featured
certainly sounds like my 20s… The Duck hasn’t had a good video up in awhile, and for all of you thinking about grad school apps this fall, well, here it is…
by Megan MacKenzie | 21 Oct 2013 | Featured
According to economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, "gender smarts" were key to ending the recent congressional deadlock. She argues: "Unlocking gridlock in government, it turns out, depends on precisely the mechanism that unlocks competitive strength in the private sector: a diverse team (laden with gender smarts and cultural fluency) managed by leaders whose aggregate of experience motivates them to manage inclusively." A new "ism": motherism, or...
by Jeffrey Stacey | 19 Oct 2013 | Featured
“Breaking Bad” has achieved something akin to artistic immortality, crowned by critics near and far as the finest television show in history. Such is its outsized achievement that it has taken up its perch in that rarefied stratosphere where only giants roam and even the creative gods bow down. Once Breaking Bad reached such heights it could no longer be evaluated in mere entertainment art terms. Just as Dylan is now revered with the poets,...
by Jon Western | 19 Oct 2013 | Featured
[Note: This is a guest post by Jerel A.Rosati of the University of South Carolina and James M. Scott of Texas Christian University. It is the final installment in our forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy. You can follow more of the conversation at #TeachForPol.] Teaching US Foreign Policy with The Politics of United States Foreign Policy (6th ed, Cengage: 2014). By Jerel A. Rosati and James M. Scott Using The Politics of United States Foreign...
by Jon Western | 18 Oct 2013 | Featured
[Note: This is a guest post by James M. McCormick of Iowa State University and is the third post on the Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy] "Teaching American Foreign Policy in the 21st Century" by James M. McCormick, Iowa State University In teaching the American foreign policy making course over the past several decades, I have always had three major goals. First, I want students to become familiar with the values and beliefs that...
by Charli Carpenter | 18 Oct 2013 | Featured
Via Bad Lip Reading. Outtakes here.
by Jon Western | 17 Oct 2013 | Featured
I attended a celebration of the life of Kenneth Waltz held at Columbia University last weekend. The service was organized and hosted by Robert Jervis, Robert Art, and Richard Betts and included sixteen speakers -- family members, scholars, and former students who gave wonderful tributes based on their own personal reflections on his life, research, and teaching. It was clear that Waltz was gifted intellectually. His book Man, the State, and War...
by Laura Sjoberg | 17 Oct 2013 | Featured
(Note: This post is cross-posted at The Research Centre in International Relations at King's College, London's Blog) Feminist theorists have long made and substantiated the argument that gender "matters" in International Relations (IR) theory and practice, and that it matters in complicated and hybrid ways. Gender analysis has been used (in my view effectively) across a wide spectrum of theoretical approaches, issue areas, and contemporary...
by Brandon Valeriano | 17 Oct 2013 | Featured
How do we communicate ideas to our audience? What steps can we take to introduce advanced concepts to our students or the general public? Scholars work for decades on the content of their arguments but spend very little time thinking about how to translate their ideas for specific consumers of information. In Phil Arena’s review of Braumoeller’s new excellent book, he makes a baseball reference, later noting that he does not even like sports. ...
by Jon Western | 17 Oct 2013 | Featured
[Note: This is a guest post by Steven W. Hook from Kent State University and is the second post on the Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy] “Teaching U.S. Foreign Policy in an Age of Uncertainty,” by Steven W. Hook (Kent State University) Students of U.S. foreign policy face a unique intellectual challenge: to understand state policy making at the intersection of domestic and global governance. Their instructors, who face the same task,...