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...
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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...
Monday Morning Linkage
Good morning... Salman Adil Hussain reviews Deepa Kumar's Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Hussain writes, "Kumar shines a bright light on liberal Islamophobia, and shows how the Obama administration’s emphasis on homegrown terrorism generated a lot of talk about ‘terrorists in our midst’ in the mainstream American media and presented right-wing Islamophobes with the opportunity they needed to (re-)popularise the old ‘Islamic peril’."...
First-World Nerd Problems: A Nintendo 3DS Bleg
Last week I purchased a Nintendo handheld (on steep discount) for the express purpose of playing Okamiden. Okami is one of my most favoritist games evah; even though Okamiden is basically more of the same, I'm cool with that. Yesterday we had to buy off the wee one--we did, in fact, have a pretty terrible day from her perspective--so we offered to purchase her a game to play. That led to Animal Crossing: A New Leaf and a complete loss of...
Posthumous Justice
My initial reaction is that this is a spot of good news: Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker who took his own life after being convicted of gross indecency under anti-homosexuality legislation, is to be given a posthumous pardon. The government signalled on Friday that it is prepared to support a backbench bill that would pardon Turing, who died from cyanide poisoning at the age of 41 in 1954 after he was subjected to "chemical castration"....
Storm-Delayed Friday Nerd Blogging
Friday nerd blogging was delayed due to a powerful thunderstorm that disrupted power in the SW part of Ottawa. Anyhow, most of us nerdish folks would prefer to be at Comic-Con this week. Alas, most of us have day jobs. So, here is a video presented at Comic-Con that marks the death toll of the past three seasons:
Friday Morning Linkage
Is it 1953 or 2013? 2013 Aspen Security Forum is currently meeting in Aspen Meadows, CO. Here's the list of speakers -- scroll through and see if anything strikes you. HT: Tamara Cofman Wittes. An excellent piece by Naunihal Singh that concludes for all the talk of a unique people's revolution, the Egyptian coup (yes, it was a coup) was a pretty common variant of coups. Spoiler alert: It's the economy stupid. The Obama administration had...
Guest Post – Dave Kang: "International Relations Theory and East Asian History"
It’s always a pleasure to guest-post my good friend Dave Kang. Dave teaches at the University of Southern California and runs their Korean Studies Institute (the pic). Here are some previous guest posts he’s written (one, two, three). Here is his encouragement to actually apply international relations theory to East Asia. I can’t agree more. There is far too much superficial, think-tank wonkery about East Asia (how many nukes does China have?...
Summer Teaching – Why Teach and What Makes It Different
Recently, I finished teaching a month long summer course on International Relations to mainly first and second year undergrads at the University of Missouri. Although I’ve taught summer courses before, this was actually one of my first experiences with having to –for the love of all things holy! – do what my public school teaching spouse does and ACTIVELY TEACH IN A CLASSROOM WITH THE SAME STUDENTS EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK. This summer class got...
How the Media is Mis-Reporting the DOD’s Drone Casualty Study
Earlier this week I posted about the classified DOD study showing a high rate of civilian harm from drone attacks. Not much else can be said about this finding by analysts until the study is de-classified, so instead let me discuss at some length the one other thing we do know: that the media has badly misreported this story. The headline should not be "New Study: Drones Kill Ten Times More Civilians" as so many articles are claiming. It should...
Thursday Afternoon Linkage
Before posting some mid-Thursday afternoon linkage, here is a little musing on not overstating the influence of social media on entertainment and politics. For a moment this week, the horribleness that was the SyFy Channel's Sharknado set off a mini-Twitter storm that resulted in: a bunch of tweets but still dismal ratings for the made for TV movie. This reminded me of the fleeting victory in Texas for supporters of abortion rights: while State...