Yeah, I don’t really know either. I always hear the expression ‘SSCI’ thrown around as the gold standard for social science work. Administrators seem to love it, but where it comes from and how it gets compiled I don’t really understand. Given that we all seem to use...
Or, how do we compare the not so nearly like? There is an obvious temptation to compare Libya to Syria and ponder why the US has not jumped into the fray now that Syria has started killing lots of...
 Congressional hand-wringing over America’s inability to forecast the Egyptian and Tunisian revolts is unsurprising given the foreign policy hubris that dominates in Washington today. How can it...
Noah Schachtmann at Wired:In the last three years, America’s military and intelligence agencies have spent more than $125 million on computer models that are supposed to forecast political unrest....
Daniel Little has a wonderful project instantiated in his website "UnderstandingSociety ChangingSociety" aimed at providing resources for those interested in social processes and social change. He's collected a number of interviews with prominent figures. I've watched the one with Charles Tilly, which is really a remarkable interview with a remarkable scholar and intellectual. I highly recommend that readers of the Duck take a look, particularly those of you in academia or thinking of going that route. The first part of what turns out to be a very long discussion is below. Although I've...
For the past several years, Adriana Lins de Albuquerque and Alicia Cheng have been publishing "Op-Charts" in the January NY Times with a visual representation of deaths in Iraq, with the deaths neatly broken down according to civilian, police, coalition troop, US troop, etc. This year's installment came out earlier this month.Two interesting things about this year's chart.[I always look for it because their use of symbols is a helpful tool in my Spring "Rules of War" class when I discuss civilian immunity. I want to get my students to recognize that adult men can be civilians too, and that...