by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 27 Dec 2010 | Featured
Courtesy of our friends at The Economist:PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one...
by Vikash Yadav | 26 Dec 2010 | Featured
Continuing the Duck series on highly improbable dystopian scenarios, here is an advertisement for the not yet released video game, "Homefront." The story is set in 2027 when a united Korea under the rule of North Korea's Kim Jong Un invades a severely weakened United States.Cold War buffs will note that the video game's narrative is from the writer of the awful 1984 film, "Red Dawn." Personally, I would have preferred a scenario in line...
by Dan Nexon | 25 Dec 2010 |
by Dan Nexon | 25 Dec 2010 |
Whatever your relevant holiday is, if it happens tonight and tomorrow, then very merry.And remember -- put Mithras back in Christmas!
by Dan Nexon | 24 Dec 2010 |
Rob Farley notes the existence of long-standing conservative opposition to arms control. While the hacks at the Heritage Foundation lost this battle, Rob argues, their influence on Republican international thought is waxing rather than waning. Thus, more of opposition to New START was principled than many observers recognize, and this bodes ill for future arms control.The New START debate over the last month has been held largely under the...
by Laura Sjoberg | 24 Dec 2010 |
The repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is official now, signed by the President and a celebration of what is, by most accounts, an incredibly productive lame-duck Congressional session. It is certainly, in my mind, high time that this both on-face ridiculous and insidiously discriminatory policy make its way out of United States law and military practice. It is also, in my mind, just plain stupid the ways in which the United States does not...
by Charli Carpenter | 23 Dec 2010 |
I finally finished the final book in The Hunger Games trilogy. (I was not expecting that ending, though in hindsight I'm not sure why.) For those of you unfamiliar with the dystopian premise: the United States is gone. Its successor nation, Panem, consists of an opulent, entertainment-obsessed capital somewhere in the Rockies and thirteen impoverished districts in which inhabitants farm, mine and manufacture. The Districts are kept in line...
by Jon Western | 21 Dec 2010 |
...when ideology reigned over science in arms control debates. With the new START about to pass through the Senate, here's a classic from San Fransisco's KRON Channel 4 back in 1986:
by Bill Petti | 21 Dec 2010 |
This post originally appeared at Beyond the Box Score. If you are a baseball analysis fan and don't already read BTBS I highly recommend it.2010 marks the end of the "ought" decade for Major League Baseball. I thought I would take the opportunity to analyze the last 10 years by visualizing team data. I used Tableau Public to create the visualization and pulled team data from ESPN.com (on-field statistics) and USA Today (team payroll).The...
by Charli Carpenter | 18 Dec 2010 |
An ideologue of information freedom? A capitalist? Something else? Now that he's been named Time Person of the Year (Time readers' poll and the preferences of the Fuhrer notwithstanding), these are questions worth discussing.A number of commentators, myself included, have positioned Zuckerberg within the wider hacktivist subculture in which Julian Assange is rooted - not because the two share a common objective (they don't: Assange targets...
by Vikash Yadav | 17 Dec 2010 | Featured
If you're a nerdy professor trying to avoid grading, like I am, you might want to play around with Google Lab's new Ngram feature. The feature allows you to see how often a particular word or phrase has appeared within a large number of books over time. For examples, here is a chart comparing the use of the term "failed states" to "rogue states" from 1960 to 2010 in English language books scanned by Google Books:Or, here is a comparison of...
by Dan Nexon | 17 Dec 2010 |
Dear Duck Readers:I've been contemplating a post on the current state (or lack thereof) of public discussion on matters of US grand strategy. It occurs to me however, that I don't really know of any touchstone pieces on the subject published in 2010 -- except for the rather lackluster NSS, QDR, and QDDR. Am I missing something?