Amazon created a platform called Mechanical Turk that allows Requesters to create small tasks (Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs) that Workers can perform for an extremely modest fee such as 25 or 50 cents per task.* Because the site can be used to collect survey data,...
Kindred Winecoff has a pretty sweet rebuttal to my ill-tempered rant of late March. A lot of it makes sense, and I appreciate reading graduate student's perspective on things. Some of his post...
In the Matrix, it's trivial to specify the underlyingdata-generating process. It involves kung fu. Given PTJ's post, I wanted to clarify two points from my original post on Big Data and the ensuing...
[This post was written by PTJ]One of the slightly disconcerting experiences from my week in Vienna teaching an intensive philosophy of science course for the European Consortium on Political...
So Charli -- who did, in fact, attend our ISA Battlestar Galactica panel in costume -- has posted elsewhere about the panel. Though she calls it the "best event [she] attended at ISA this year," she does express some disappointment about the content of the panel when compared with the panel's title:Unfortunately the panel turned out to be misnamed however, for none of the papers really spoke to the question of whether BSG has an impact on actual world politics. ... Admittedly, the papers weren't really trying to do that kind of explanatory work - the panel really was misnamed - so this isn't...
A new study (summarized here; full text available here if you're lucky enough to be at an institution with a medical school and an institutional subscription to the relevant journal) released yesterday purports to have some implications for sex education policy. By conducting what the authors -- or the publicists at the University of Pennsylvania, at any rate -- refer to as the first randomized controlled study of the effectiveness of various kinds of interventions, and finding that the abstinence-only intervention was more effective at encouraging teens to delay sexual activity than safe...
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 classic survey design experiments and distribute them to the workers in Crowdflower’s labor pools. For the experiments, every worker saw only one...
During any Presidential Administration, there are heated debates, accusations of horrible mismanagement, and political intrigue, but they are actively papered over and downplayed by a powerful White House communications operation dedicated to protecting the image of the President. Once everyone leaves office, however.....It seems the floodgates of insider accounts that "make news" and tell heretofore unknown details about the good old days of the Bush Administration are opening, and the stream of details might be more interesting than most.Tom Ridge, the first secretary of Homeland Security,...
From a recent article on social-science methodology:For example, gravity is a trivial necessary cause of revolution, because gravity is simply always present regardless of whether or not a revolution happens.Clearly, not everyone in my field is a science-fiction fan.nb: someone has suggested to me that the authors mean "revolution" as in "Venus revolves around the Sun." But gravity is certainly not a non-trivial cause of such revolution; given the context of the article, I'm pretty sure the authors use the term in the "grab the pitchfork and storm the castle" sense....
Perusing Drew Conway's excellent blog Zero Intelligence Agents in response to his comment on a previous post, I came across this post of his, reacting to Joseph Nye and Daniel Drezner's recent bloggingheads diavlog on the theory/policy debate.You can watch the relevant portion above, though Conway has summarized a key point: Drezner notes that quantitative scholars tend to have a 'imperialistic attitude' about their work, brushing off the work of more traditional qualitative research. To be exact, by "quantitative scholars" Drezner was referring to those who use "statistical methods and...
In the latest incarnation of the Iraq war issue in the general election, John McCain is criticizing Barak Obama because Obama hasn’t been to Iraq in some time, and therefore, he’s not qualified to comment on Iraq policy because he hasn’t “been there” to “see it for himself.”Rhetorically, it’s a slick move by McCain. Take a widely perceived negative, his support of the war, and turn it into a positive by emphasizing experience and criticizing Obama’s capacity for sound judgment. There was some press speculation that Obama might now need to visit Iraq as a candidate to blunt this line of...
A conference was recently held at the University of Maastricht on Human Rights and Methodology, which explored the following questions:By which criteria can a product of human rights research be qualified as a methodologically sound piece of work? What are examples of such good practices and what are examples of practices that are unsatisfactory from a methodological point of view? And are there aspects and considerations that are typical for the methods of research applied in the field of human rights?In his keynote, David Forsythe lamented the paucity of methodological rigor in human...