by Charli Carpenter | 18 Aug 2009 |
One of my tasks since getting back from hiatus has been to wade through political science journals that piled up over the summer. In the April issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, I discovered this little gem: a one-page "article" entitled "Picturing Political Science" which consisted of the following: "What do political scientists study? As part of a larger project, we coded every article in 25 leading journals between 2000 and 2007....
by Charli Carpenter | 17 Aug 2009 |
"If the U.S. merely doubled its annual aid [to Pakistan] from $700 million to $1.5 billion, America’s influence in the country would significantly jump, while the militants’ would drop drastically. Why? Because with that sort of financial flow, corrupt rural officials would suddenly profit more from helping the U.S. than from helping the Taliban."So says the computer model that predicted Khamenei's rise to power and the timing of Pervez...
by Rodger Payne | 17 Aug 2009 |
Periodically, scholars of international relations point out that the "domestic analogy" fails to explain IR. As Hidemi Suganami explains:The term ‘domestic analogy’ refers to the idea that inter-state relations are amenable to the same type of institutional control as the relations of individuals and groups within states. Because of anarchy, realists like John Mearsheimer explain, state behavior cannot be managed by external institutions...
by Rodger Payne | 12 Aug 2009 |
Starting this week, I'll be blogging until at least the end of the year on the e-IR website. The blog is narrowly focused on Climate Politics: IR and the Environment, so I'll still be blogging about other international relations topics here at the Duck. The idea is to focus on the run up to the UN Climate Change Conference at Copenhagen this December.Hopefully, I'll have something to say as I'm currently writing a chapter on the politics of...
by Drew Conway | 11 Aug 2009 |
While I am in the throes of designing and implementing an agent-based modeling approach to study how democracies react to extreme external shocks, I wanted to take a brief break from coding and writing to highlight two very interesting pieces in the current issue of Nature that address ABM directly. The first, "Economics: Meltdown modelling," discusses how advanced agent-based models might be able to help predict future economic...
by Bill Petti | 9 Aug 2009 |
Sandeep Baliga of Cheap Talk channels Schelling to point out how skewed John Bolton's understanding of foreign affairs is:...John Bolton thinks every international interaction is the game of Chicken, not just the recent episode with North Korea. Schelling thought a lot about Chicken and here is what he said in Arms and Influence in 1966: Is a Berlin Crisis…..mainly bilateral competition in which each side should be motivated mainly towards...
by Bill Petti | 8 Aug 2009 |
Click here for larger viewCross-posted at bill | petti
by Charli Carpenter | 7 Aug 2009 |
Twitter was down for two hours yesterday, assumed to have been the target of a cyberattack. BBC now reports that the target of the attack, which also affected Facebook and Google, was a single individual, Georgian blogger Cyxymu.""[The] attack appears to be directed at an individual who has a presence on a number of sites, rather than the sites themselves," a Facebook spokesman told BBC News. "Specifically, the person is an activist blogger and...
by Charli Carpenter | 6 Aug 2009 |
More bric-a-brac in lieu of genuine posts of a quasi-analytical nature. This shall continue until the NSF Political Science Division's target date for research proposals passes. At least now I'm posting bric-a-brac. (Don't worry, before long I'll be back with an onslaught of political insights from my wild roadtrip west, and by the start of the semester, back to blogging as usual.)Today's throwaway post is inspired by my current immersion in...
by Rodger Payne | 4 Aug 2009 | Featured
The Bush era is officially ancient history. I saw this commercial today:
by Charli Carpenter | 4 Aug 2009 |
Ah, August 15 NSF target dates! This time of year makes the image above ring truer than ever. Hat Tip to Stu Shulman.
by Peter | 4 Aug 2009 |
I just purchased a 16gig I-Pod touch. Its a fun new toy, and a more than ample replacement for my overflowing 2gig nano. I also added the new operating system. The benefits of a blog being the ability to crowd-source stuff like this, I ask loyal duck readers with a touch or iphone if they have any suggestions on how to get the most out of my new device. Any favorite uses, applications that are must-gets, or other cool things that can be done...