As a reviewer and recipient of reviews, I've noted a recent trend among IR papers. A study uses cross-national data with regression analysis, and runs multiple models with different variables or sub-sets of the data. Sometimes the results are consistent, sometimes...
I realize this is a weird thing for me to ask, since the vast majority of my publications--as well as a few of my works in progress--have relied on regression. But I was wondering this recently...
It's happened to all of us (or least those of us who do quantitative work). You get back a manuscript from a journal and it's an R&R. Your excitement quickly fades when you start reading the...
Having recently attended a workshop and conference on beneficial artificial intelligence (AI), one of the overriding concerns is how to design beneficial AI. To do this, the AI needs to be aligned...
If you have been living under a rock as I apparently have, then like me you may be unaware of the DA-RT controversy that is brewing in the American Political Science Association.* Turns out that some of our colleagues have been pushing for some time to write a new set of rules for qualitative scholarship that, among other things will require “cited data [be] available at the time of publication through a trusted digital repository” [This is from the Journal Editor's Transparency Statement, which is what is being implemented Jan. 15]. The goal I gather is to enhance transparency and...
I am not known for being a statistics whiz. I have published quantitative work, but I am seen, rightly so, as more comfortable with qualitative work, comparing apples and oranges. Still, I had the gumption to offer advice on twitter about data today. What and why? GDELT was a new dataset that seemed to promise heaps of utility to those who wanted to study event data--which are counts of particular events of interest and handy for analyzing events over time. It came under fire recently for a variety of reasons. I did not use the dataset nor do I work with event data, so I am not in any...
The twentieth Duck of Minerva podcast features Phil Schrodt of Pennsylvania State University. The interview includes Professor Schrodt's views on a number of interesting topics, including the history of quantitative and computational conflict studies, his "seven deadly sins" project, advice for graduate students in political science, and an explanation of his decision to take up blogging. This is the third podcast to only feature an mp3 version. I don't get the sense that anyone is missing the m4a ("enhanced") enhanced podcasts, but please correct me if I am mistaken...
This post would be much more interesting if it concerned the nexus of its three subjects. Sadly, it does not. I'm working on a forum piece with Vincent Pouliot on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) -- one written from the explicit perspective of outsiders. We've been puzzled by the apparent lack of theorization of "the body" in Latour. For example, if social relations must be 'fixed' by physical objects, why isn't the human body one such object? If any of our readers are able to weigh in, I'd appreciate it. I've been considering discontinuing the m4a versions of the Duck of Minerva podcast. They...
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 amounts to a reiteration of my points: (over)professionalization is a rational response to market pressure, learning advanced methods that use lots of mathematical symbols is a good thing, and so forth. On the one hand, I hope that one day Kindred will sit on a hiring committee (because I'd like to see him land a job). On the other hand, I'm a bit saddened by the prospect because his view of the...
Yesterday, long-time Duck of Minerva contributor Bill Petti taped an on-field segment for "Clubhouse Confidential" on the MLB Network! For the non-baseball nerds, MLB = major league baseball.Your browser does not support iframes.It's great to see Bill using his methodological and analytical skills in this way. This is not his first appearance on the program to provide sabermetrical analysis.Most of the time, Bill uses his talents in his "work with senior executives at various pharmaceutical, financial, and consumer packaged goods companies to help them align their human capital and processes...
Technically, "because I didn't have observational data."Working with experimental data requires onlycalculating means and reading a table. Also, thismay be the most condescending comic stripabout statistics ever produced.The excellent Silbey at the Edge of the American West is stunned by the torrents of data that future historians will be able to deal with. He predicts that the petabytes of data being captured by government organizations such as the Air Force will be a major boon for historians of the future --(and I can't be the only person who says "Of the future!" in a sort of breathless...