by Dan Nexon | 20 Feb 2013 | Featured
• Belusconi offers tax rebates. Opponents accuse him of seeking to "buy votes." The letter came in an official-looking envelope, headed: "Important notice: reimbursement of IMU 2012." "The refund will be available either through a transfer into your bank account, or to you personally at the counter of the post office," the letter said, according to Reuters. It was sent to millions of households in Sicily, Veneto, Campania and Lombardy - key...
by Rodger Payne | 19 Feb 2013 | Featured
Earlier today, I received an email alerting me to the fact that the University of the West of England’s Academic Board supported a recommendation from the Vice Chancellor’s Executive Group to close all international relations and politics programs. Apparently, the plan is to refocus the university (one of the ten largest in England) on skills-based learning and vocational courses, which essentially means that arts and social sciences have no...
by Dan Nexon | 19 Feb 2013 | Featured
Because "53 reasons" is just plain stupid, and increments of five are basically listicles, I provide three. 1. We are heading straight for maximum Star Wars saturation. Despite its ham-handed didacticism, Star Trek's values are far preferable to those of Star Wars. We cannot allow aristocratic fantasy to bury republican virtue. 2. JJ Abrams is a pretty good action director, but he doesn't seem to understand the intellectual possibilities of...
by PM | 19 Feb 2013 | Featured
Only a handful of links this morning: Seth Masket investigates what happens when you raise the cost of voting. Unsurprising: minority and poor voters suffer more. Tim Burke pushes back against MOOCs and the failure of managerial class models of higher education. Nina Zumel provides a public service by transforming William Cleveland's plots into ggplot2. Gopnik on Galileo [The New Yorker] Xavier Marquez traces the spread of liberal norms:[I]t...
by Dan Nexon | 18 Feb 2013 | Featured
Okay, I don't have one. But I'd like to call attention to some excellent discussion of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Adam Kotsko asks "what is the business model for online education." Nigel Thrift analyzes the recent "media obsession" with MOOCs. Louis Betty makes unfortunate swipes at Apple in pursuit of a larger point about techno-faddishism, pedagogy, and higher education. Betty's piece recalls a great satirical post that Paul...
by PM | 18 Feb 2013 | Featured
Here's the ten eleven best West Wing episodes you should watch today: Noel Posse Comitatus A Proportional Response kludge
by Brian Rathbun | 18 Feb 2013 | Featured
The Canard “All the Fake News that is Fit to Print” Cat Fancy, Inc. is the target of an aggressive takeover bid by Battlestar Galacitcum, an upstart nerd pornography site. The Duck of Minerva, purchased by Cat Fancy earlier in the year, would be the prize in the acquisition. A mainstay among international relations blogs, it has increasingly veered into the academic analysis of science fiction and fantasy and seen its readership soar. “We...
by Vikash Yadav | 18 Feb 2013 | Featured
Good Morning! Let's start the week in the Asia-Pacific... North Korea It looks like US officials met secretly with North Korea three times in 2011 and 2012 without telling Japan or South Korea. Why the US loaded heavy equipment, including a bulldozer, on their plane during a stopover in Tokyo remains a complete mystery. Not surprisingly, the Japan-US relationship appears strained on the issue of sharing intelligence about nuclear...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 17 Feb 2013 | Featured
I thought, mistakenly, that the Hoth symposium had run its course: Ackerman point, a bunch of us counterpoint both at Danger Room and elsewhere (here at Duck, and, if it's not up yet it will be soon, over at Grand Blog Tarkin), and my tossing a little more fuel on the fire by arguing what I generally take to be a pretty obvious and I thought uncontroversial point: that Star Wars is a story about the struggle between Jedi and Sith about the...
by Dan Nexon | 16 Feb 2013 | Featured
Belated Valentine's from the Duck of Minerva. Brad DeLong wants Cosma Shalzi to figure out what the Chelyabinsk meteorite strike means for policy: "What should this piece of information do, decision-theoretically, to change our view of the situation we find ourselves in?" I'm not a statistics whiz, but I'd say: probably nothing. There's no indication (yet) that the strike is inconsistent with current risk assessments of such events. What it...
by Steve Saideman | 15 Feb 2013 | Featured
We have fallen short of our Friday responsibilities, but given the theme of the week, this video seems most appropriate. Of course, this raises all kinds of possibilities and re-definitions of "bad" PR. My guess is that the best episode of this series of six web-isodes will be the next one. The third will be ok, and then then next three will be profoundly disappointing.
by PM | 15 Feb 2013 | Featured
In a nifty contribution to our understanding of LGBT politics, Gallup has surveyed more than 200,000 Americans to ask if they identify as LGBT or not. This gives us what Gallup claims and I'll accept as the first state-level estimate of this dataset. But Gallup mistakenly interprets their own findings (or, rather, do not fully extract as much information as they could). Gallup writes While the variation in LGBT identification across states is...