I've just started reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist. So far, it is an excellent, through-provoking read. A key to Ridley's argument is that the innovation of exchange--the trading between two parties of separate items or services that both parties value--that led to mankind's dominance of the planet and the explosion of knowledge and technology.Ridley explains how exchange--or barter--is qualitatively different from reciprocity (an...
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Cyber warfare and legal responsibility: drifting further apart?
Two cyber warfare trends are catching the eye, but both raise the same major question. First, cyber attacks have been democratised in recent years because of social media and easy to use denial of service attack (DDoS) tools. Popular armies have returned, made up not of a mass of bodies charging, a Clausewitzian centre of gravity on a field, but constituted by curious and enthusiastic citizens on the internet. As William Merrin argued at a...
Moral Movements and IR Theory
Joshua Busby has a new book out on transnational campaigns that might be the best new contribution to the advocacy networks literature since Keck and Sikkink's original Activists Beyond Borders. In Moral Movements and Foreign Policy, Busby proposes a theory of the conditions under which such movements succeed at securing commitments from states: Whether states accept commitments made by principled advocacy movements depends primarily on how...
“We should not see moving out of academia as a failure”
Via Drew Conway, a great quote this morning from Stephen Curry, a professor at Imperial College London:Students should think more broadly about what a PhD could prepare them for. We should start selling a PhD as higher level education but not one that necessarily points you down a tunnel...We should not see moving out of academia as a failure. We need to see it as a stepping stone, a way of moving forward to something else.Curry was commenting...
Pennsylvania’s Perverted “War on Terror”
How does America's bloated anti-terror bureaucracy spend its time and our money? A story out of Pennsylvania last week throws light on the earth-shakingly important work these saviors of our soil perform, defending us all from the scary monsters who pose such a dire menace to America.Or rather it illustrates, yet again, the myriad ways in which our homeland security hogs work to rationalize their existence and perpetuate their wallow in the...
Predicting flu outbreaks, fashion trends, and political unrest with social networks
[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have released a new paper that looks at the potential predictive power of social networks. They claim that current methods of contagion detection are, at best, contemporaneous with the actual epidemic. What is needed is a true early detection method, one that would actually provide an accurate prediction of a coming epidemic.Christakis and Fowler claim that social networks can...
Creeping Reasonableness
I've been wondering when the Locke/Demosthenes effect would manifest itself through the faux political rivalry of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Could this be their moment? Stewart on the need to return to a deliberative ethic in American democracy - best if viewed starting @ 2:10 below:The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10cRally to Restore Sanitywww.thedailyshow.comDaily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorTea PartyColbert's...
Irrelevance of the third kind
Lots of noise of late about the "relevance" question in political science, some of it thoughtful, so of it not so much. While this is obviously an old question -- indeed, in some ways, it's the oldest question in the discipline, dating back to the original efforts to place the study of politics on some kind of scientific footing in the early part of the 20th century -- I find myself thinking about it a lot these days, both in the context of...
Fresh (and Re-Freshed) Duck
In addition to being blown away by the recent Duck facelift (ht to Dan), you may have also noticed a slight shuffling in the roster. Congratulations to Stephanie Carvin, Laura Sjoberg, Vikash Yadav, all of whom are now officially (to quote Stephanie) "perma-ducks." Some of our other guest bloggers have stepped aside for now. We are grateful to Tony Lang, Mlada Bukovansky, Drew Conway, Daniel McIntosh and Craig Hayden for their contributions to...
Book Blegging
Loyal Duck readers, I was hoping you might be able to help me out. Do you have any recommendations for books about the inventive ways that people (scientists, designers, business folk, etc) have evaluated hard to test subjects? I am looking for something that is less about methodology, per se, and more about testing ideas in a practical way where either the environment or subject matter makes testing difficult (thinking here of astrophysics,...
Toward a Post-Zombie IR
While I was on my working leave, Foreign Policy asked me to write a response to Dan Drezner's "Night of the Living Wonks. They published it, in abridged form, about a month ago under the title of "America's Triumph over the Zombie Horde". Predictably, they misspelled my name. What few people know, however, is that my typically skewed sense of priorities drove me to write not one, but two responses. For our readers' edification, and to mark my...
Driving Parents Crazy: Why are some violent radicals fathers?
My blogging has been light lately as I have been on the road travelling a lot. This recent period has had me travelling like something of a crazy person with trips all over the Centre/East Coast of North America.Part of this trip included some time in Ottawa, where it was some interesting times. The week before I arrived there was a series of dramatic arrests here against individuals suspected of plotting to carry out terrorist attacks against...