The world would be a better place if more academic papers included this caption--in bright neon letters and all caps. (via Dani K Nedal, as XCKD long ceased to be on my regular reading list)
LATE UPDATE: PTJ blogs about undergrad education
This graph comes to you from a newly published article on the politics of the drone campaign published this week in International Studies Perspectives. I haven't yet read the full piece so...
Recording Casualties and the Protection of Civilians from Oxford Research Group (ORG) on Vimeo. As the lone social scientist in a room of lawyers, philosophers and technicians last week, I was...
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...
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...
One of the few items recently that has caused me to emerge from my nothing-but-Friday-nerd-blogging temporary hiatus was this article on civilian war deaths by Michael Spagat and his collaborators. I wrote a post with some praise and some questions, and recently received a thoughtful response by email from Michael and his crew in which they further detail the coding methods used in the project. Since the original thread generated some interest, I've decided to post their response here.Civilian Targeting Index Clarificationby Madelyn Hicks, Uih Ran Lee, Ralph Sundberg and Michael SpagatSince...
In a new paper, Michael Spagat and a number of collaborators explore the determinants of intentional civilian killing in war. Using sophisticated regression analysis they claim to have found "four significant behavioral patterns":"First, the majority (61%) of all formally organized actors in armed conflict during 2002-2007 refrained from killing civilians in deliberate, direct targeting.Second, actors were more likely to have carried out some degree of civilian targeted, as opposed to none, if they participated in armed conflict for three or more years rather than for one year.Third, among...
Joshua Goldstein's book on peacekeeping is now out, and in this promotional video he shows us what the future of conference presentations could look like. ;)
PTJ has one of the most sophisticated ways of thinking about different positions in the field of International Relations (and, by extension, the social sciences), but his approach may be too abstract for some. I therefore submit for comments the "Political Science Methodology Flowchart" (version 1.3b).Note that any individual can take multiple treks down the flowchart.
Frank Pasquale at Balkinization:The Dodd-Frank Act also promises to shed some sunlight on ever-rising CEO pay levels. As Sam Pizzigatti explains, "corporations must now also report their overall wage 'median' and the ratio between this median and their top pay." Seizing on some laughable comments on how "unduly burdensome" the law is, "the House Financial Services Committee’s Capital Markets Subcommittee [recently] approved, by a vote of 20 to 12 . . . legislation (H.R. 1062) to repeal the Dodd-Frank pay ratio mandate."Here's the argument for why this requirement is "unduly burdensome":The...
I have not yet read the new report on rape in the Congo, but judging from the news coverage of its reported findings, I have three thoughts:1) I am not as concerned as some critics about the methods used (a population sample of household interviews) or the staggering results: 400,000 women assaulted in a single year. I am concerned about the comparisons to the US (or other countries) since unless the same methods are replicated in the US (or other countries) there is no way to compare rape rates or to accurately call Congo the "rape capital of the world." 2) Though the emphasis is on the...