I've been traveling in the southwest and reading different newspapers than I usually do. As a result, I learned that Phoenix is America's "kidnapping capital." The LA Times published the AP story I saw on December 27:The latest figures show Phoenix had 302 kidnappings in the first 11 months of 2009, when the city recorded an average of 27 abductions each month. The city had reached a 10-year high in 2008 with 359 kidnappings. The expected...
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Pakistan’s Supreme Court Recognizes Third Gender
Wow. If the use of non-binary-gender-codes on census forms is an indicator of progressive human rights law, Pakistan has now left the US in the dust: Late on Wednesday, the Supreme Court in Pakistan ordered that the government officially recognize a separate gender for Pakistan's hijra community, which includes transgendered people, transvestites, and eunuchs. The court told the federal government to begin allowing people to identify as hijras...
Donuts and Diplomacy
For my first blog post here at Duck of Minerva, I thought I should stick to one of my areas of experience (if not expertise): Alcohol.The Canadian Press has picked up on the fact that although there are many Canadian wines available at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, there are only three Canadian beers (– and hardly the finest that the landmass north of the 49th has to offer: Molson Canadian, Alexander Keith's Ale or Blue Light.)...
Pandora’s Balks
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...
Happy Festivus
From ICanHasCheezburger.com.
Is there a Santa Claus?
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...
Melowdrama, thy name is Schweller
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...
Coming Soon…..Ataque de Panico
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....
Open-ended vs. Scale Questions: A note on survey methodology
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...
Aasif Mandvi, Our Future Overlord
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.
A Seat at the Table
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...
On The Ecology of Human Insurgency
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...