certainly sounds like my 20s… The Duck hasn’t had a good video up in awhile, and for all of you thinking about grad school apps this fall, well, here it is…
Great Video on Getting a PhD in Political Science – Very Funny
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certainly sounds like my 20s… The Duck hasn’t had a good video up in awhile, and for all of you thinking about grad school apps this fall, well, here it is…
PM's latest post, "Nobody cares about foreign policy" (note to self: we need a style manual to resolve whether, for example, post titles should be capitalized), was prompted by a proseminar we both...
It was sort of sad watching conservatives play the same game that we did in 2004. Poll aggregation + 1; bubblethought -15.
Even the Evil League of Evil has peer review.One of the laziest sneers directed at us social scientists who use math and statistics in our research is that we suffer from "physics envy."Ha! It...
Dan Drezner links to a recent article by Philip Tetlock on the difficult business of political forecasting. His evaluation of this troubled pastime is accomplished through the review of three recent books that all claim to provide a better way to see the future of politics. His own research (Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, a fantastic book that you really should read) offers solid reasons to be skeptical of any pronouncements by 'experts' that they have some kind of proprietary knowledge about the future.While I think his critique of the three books and of...
Today much of the world will be focused on Afghanistan, as that country embarks on its second attempt at a democratic election. With a constant threat of violence from the Taliban, the level of participation has been limited. Also, early reports state that police have been cracking down on journalists so information coming out of Afghanistan has been limited. There are, however, several good sources still operations, and I have put together a short list of useful links for following the election below:Foreign Policy's new AfPak BlogNew York Times At War BlogThe Global PostFor those on...
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.
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. We then created a word cloud of the 6,005 titles using https://www.wordle.net. The 150 most-used words appear in the word cloud. The size of each word...
"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 Musharraf's fall.This from yesterday's NYTimes expose on political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who helped popularize the application of game theory to...
Robert McNamara was complex giant in the field. Since his passing on Monday, several prominent IR scholars and practitioners have eulogized his life in a variety of ways. Most authors, however, note the disjointed nature of his legacy—great achievement in modernizing the Department of Defense, but also enormous failure in Vietnam. As someone often consumed by the power of numbers, for me McNamara's most compelling accomplishment was his dogged persistence in applying the quantitative approaches to management that garnered him great success at Ford Motor Company to the Department of Defense....
Jon Stewart's guest last night, Bill Bishop, makes an argument about US political culture in his book The Big Sort: both about our tendency to "cluster" with those who think as we do, and its detrimental effects. I concur with Bishop, hence I am writing to express my displeasure with this year's Preliminary Program for the American Political Science Association Annual Conference. (At least, with the paper version.) The program used to be organized chronologically. Panels of whatever topic were clustered by time block. If you had an open time block in your schedule, you could browse the...