by Charli Carpenter | 20 Aug 2009 |
After posting on prison reform last night, I opened the NYTimes this morning to find Nicholas Kristof agrees with me.: "At a time when we Americans may abandon health care reform because it supposedly is “too expensive,” how is it that we can afford to imprison people like Curtis Wilkerson?"Wilkerson is the man to whom I referred serving a life sentence for stealing socks. I outlined a variety of problems with our prison system including...
by Charli Carpenter | 19 Aug 2009 |
The US needs prison reform as badly as it needs affordable health care. I haven't written about this before. Because America does such an excellent job of compartmentalizing its incarcerated population from its elite, those of us living in eastern urban areas rarely need to think about our prisons. Traveling across the wastelands of Kansas and Nebraska and Utah, however, where one is as likely to see a chain gang as an elk, and where the signs...
by Charli Carpenter | 19 Aug 2009 | Featured
OK, I'm officially back from hiatus after a long summer on the road plus the requisite settling-in period. Getting off the grid for a month and grounding one's experience in the practical aspects of life in a clunker with two kids gives one some perspective. I spent the summer aloof from some of the major news stories of the season: Michael Jackson's death and the charges against his doctor, the media spectacle's supposed knock-on effects on...
by Laura Sjoberg | 19 Aug 2009 | Featured
I have been largely absent from the blogosphere over the last week or so, and will remain so for the next week or so, as my energy is split evenly between moving hassles and getting lost on campus at my new institutional home ... but I couldn't resist this one.I was just reading the Google News headlines to feel like I still had a pulse while I haul boxes and yell at builders, and I found this gem ... "Obama Optimistic About Mideast Peace"....
by Charli Carpenter | 19 Aug 2009 |
The American Political Science Association is offering a short course at this year's conference on "Coding the Blogosphere," which will introduce some new tools for capturing and annotating large text datasets such as those generated by Web 2.0 technologies.
by Charli Carpenter | 18 Aug 2009 |
Courtesy of Tom Tomorrow @ Salon.com:Surely, surely there is a middle ground strategy.
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...