by Charli Carpenter | 26 Dec 2009 |
I have now seen Avatar twice, (one in each 'D'), and I can say without spoiling anything that critics like Armand White and Annalee Newitz* are way off base in describing the film as "the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt." Corny, maybe a little. OK, maybe a lot. But imperialist?According to White:Avatar’s going-native F/X fantasy infantilizes...
by Charli Carpenter | 25 Dec 2009 | Featured
From ICanHasCheezburger.com.
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 24 Dec 2009 | Featured
I first posted this two years ago; since it's that time of year again, and since I still stand by what I wrote then, I am re-posting. 'Tis the season, and all.Ever since the invention of the InterNet, not a December goes by without some version of this making the rounds of listservs and e-mail chains and the like. I must have received it a dozen times from various sources. It's cute and funny and all, but I must say that I've never been...
by Bill Petti | 23 Dec 2009 |
The opening of Randall Schweller's latest article for The National Interest:CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL relations is moving toward a state of entropy. Chaos and randomness abound. Now, the story of world politics unfolds without coherence, unfettered by classic balance-of-power politics, a plotless postmodern work starring a menagerie of wildly incongruent themes and protagonists, as if divinely plucked from different historical ages and placed...
by Jon Western | 23 Dec 2009 |
Uruguayan producer Fede Alveraz uploads a short 4-and-a-half minute film of giant robots destroying Montevideo to YouTube and now has a $30million dollar contract to develop a feature length film of it. Alveraz says it cost him $300 to produce -- call me a skeptic on that point -- but it is cool how quickly information technologies open space for new voices....
by Bill Petti | 23 Dec 2009 |
Aaron Shaw had an interesting post at the Dolores Labs blog last week that examined how using different question scales in surveys can elicit very different responses:You can ask “the crowd” all kinds of questions, but if you don’t stop to think about the best way to ask your question, you’re likely to get unexpected and unreliable results. You might call it the GIGO theory of research design.To demonstrate the point, I decided to recreate some...
by Charli Carpenter | 22 Dec 2009 |
The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10cScary Plotterwww.thedailyshow.comDaily Show Full EpisodesPolitical HumorHealth Care CrisisI just saw this clip from last Thursday and I think the inversion of US/South Asian security ethics is just brilliant.
by Mlada Bukovansky | 21 Dec 2009 |
In a scathing analysis of the Copenhagen summit, The Financial Times published the following side-bar vignette:Barack Obama’s meeting on Friday evening with the leaders of the major developing economies was perhaps the most farcical event in two weeks of mayhem. At 7pm, the leader of the world’s biggest economy was due at a meeting with Wen Jiabao, Chinese premier, in a backroom barred off from the rest of the conference with heavy security.Mr...
by Drew Conway | 20 Dec 2009 |
Charli highlighted the recently published work of Sean Gourley in Nature on the patter of frequency and magnitude of attacks in insurgencies, so I wanted to cross-post my critique of this work to initiate a discussion here at Duck.The cover story of this month's Nature features the work of a team of researchers examining the mathematical properties of insurgency. One of the authors is Sean Gourley, a physicist by training and TED Fellow, and...
by Charli Carpenter | 20 Dec 2009 | Featured
I am happy to announce that the Duck of Minerva will be kicking off the Pagan New Year with the arrival of three new guest bloggers. Stephanie Carvin joins us from Royal Holloway University of London to write about international law and foreign policy. Virginia Haufler is an Associate Professor at University of Maryland's Department of Government and Politics specializing in international political economy and particularly the influence of...
by Charli Carpenter | 20 Dec 2009 |
A physicist named Sean Gourley has created a model that he claims explains the power law distribution of deaths in insurgencies across a range of country contexts. Just published in Nature. The abstract is here. Check out his presentation on his original correlational findings from last May: Q&A about his new model here. I'm not sure I understand it well enough to comment, but I figured Duck readers would find it interesting, and I'm asking...
by Charli Carpenter | 18 Dec 2009 |
Researchers associated with the Human Security Report Project have a new article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution contradicting a recent critique of corpse-counting techniques prevalent in the battle-deaths community. The original critique, authored by Obermayer, Murray and Gakidou (humorously referred to as OMG by the authors of this new rebuttal) compared war death reports from the World Health Organization's sibling survey data with...