Sadly, many people do not realize that even if the majority of those who engage in behavior X belong to category Y, that does not mean that the majority of people in category Y engage in X. This point is often made, rightly, with respect to race and violent crime and religion and terror. But most treatments I've seen either imply that anyone who doesn't understand is a moron, or manage to scare away the target audience by throwing in a pile...
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Thursday Morning Linkage
Here is your mid-morning linkage for this Thursday. Three strands this week: one on higher education and social science, another on conservation, and a third on global health. Oh, and CFR's International Affairs Fellowship is taking applications. Higher Education and Social Science You all saw the story by the Harvard prof (now tenured I might add!) who mused on treating her tenure-track position as a 7-year postdoc (and Steve's commentary)....
Cyber Events Data and Foreign Policy Reactions
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Ryan C. Maness of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Brandon Valeriano of the University of Glasgow. In the rush to note the changing face of the battlefield, few scholars have actually examined the impact of cyber conflict on foreign policy dynamics. Instead most studies are of a hyperbolic nature that suggests the wide ranging impact of cyber conflict on daily social and military life. Here we...
New Subnational African Education and Infrastructure Dataset
Todd Smith, Anustubh Agnihotri, and I have put together a new resource of subnational education and infrastructure access indicators for Africa, released as part of the Climate Change and Africa Political Stability (CCAPS) program at the University of Texas. This dataset provides data on literacy rates, primary and secondary school attendance rates, access to improved water and sanitation, household access to electricity, and household...
What are the “Big Issues” of International Politics, and How Should Journals Address Them?
A common complaint among international-relations scholars is that our journals don't sufficiently engage with big, new, and pressing issues of world politics. Those that do, on the other hand, often get criticized for a lack of rigor. I've made this complaint before, in the context of the financial crisis, and Kate Weaver offered some thoughts about "what's wrong" with IPE. But the problem extends far beyond the financial crisis and IPE....
Tiwesdæg: the Left-hand of Linkage
Just a handful of things today.... Michael Krepon: "inferred vs. demonstrable deterrence." Election fraud, the 1862 election, and the outcome of the Civil War. Matt Fay likes the new Lieber and Press article on nuclear terrorism. "Prisoner's Dilemma" is a metaphor, but I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone tried it on actual prisoners. Via lots of academics. Robin Hanson riffs on metrics for scholars.... and elaborates a notion...
About Those Israel Academic Study Trips…
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Kavita Khory, Professor of Political Science at Mount Holyoke College. Last spring the Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) of Boston invited me to participate in a weeklong study tour to Israel. Designed for scholars of international relations, political science, and public policy, the purpose of the educational tour was to provide an “in-depth firsthand exposure” to Israel and promote a “deeper...
Mechanical Turk and Experiments in the Social Sciences
Amazon created a platform called Mechanical Turk that allows Requesters to create small tasks (Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs) that Workers can perform for an extremely modest fee such as 25 or 50 cents per task.* Because the site can be used to collect survey data, it has become a boon for social scientists interested in an experimental design to test causal mechanisms of interest (see Adam Berinsky's short description here). The advantage...
Thinking About the Seven Year Post-Doc
This piece is really interesting. It is written by Radhika Nagpal who was on the tenure track at Harvard but treated the experience like a seven year post-doc. That is, she didn't focus on what it took to get tenure there, because, well, most folks don't get tenure. Instead, Nagpal focused on pursuing the most fulfilling seven years so that she would be in a good position at the end of the "post-doc." This led her to some conclusions, which...
The Interdisciplinarity Shibboleth: Christakis Edition
Andrew Gelman provides a nice rejoinder to Nicholas Christakis' New York Times op-ed, "Let's Shake up the Social Sciences." Fabio Rojas scores the exchange for Christakis, but his commentators provide convincing rebuttals to Rojas. Once again, I suspect reactions to the column are driven by homophily rather than network effects. But all this aside, Christakis makes an interesting claim about the evidence for stagnation: In contrast, the...
Tobias Gibson Reviews The Thistle and the Drone
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Tobias Gibson of Westminster College. In recent days, there have been reports of U.S. drone strikes in North Waziristan, Pakistan. According to the New York Times article, these strikes killed at least two people. This remote area of Pakistan has long been subject to U.S. drone strikes. The Times also reports that U.S. anti-terrorism efforts are shifting theaters from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Africa....
How Would Al Gore Have Fought the Iraq War?
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Elizabeth Saunders who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. In this year of Iraq-related anniversaries, this summer marks the 10-year anniversary of the emergence of the insurgency, when many Americans realized the Iraq War would not be over any time soon. Would things have been different had Al Gore been president? The latest issue of Perspectives on Politics has...