Tag Archives: Weblogs

The Quantitative Peace has been “Freaked”

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Since it is possible for a low-traffic website to be Slashdotted, and Farked (that is, sent a  large amount of traffic from a highly visited site), I think the term "freaked" or "Freak(onomics)ed out" may be apt here: Graph generated and borrowed from statcounter.com. The unique visitors are still climbing! The spike in traffic resulted from the Freakonomic’s winner list for the Prisoner’s Dilemma contest including a gracious link to a previous discussion of their contest found here.  Our former visitor numbers were not overly flattering, but we were content with our current reader base given that a) we attempt Continue reading The Quantitative Peace has been “Freaked”→

Prisoner’s Dilemma Answers

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I posted previously that Freakonomics was hosting a Prisoner’s Dilemma contest.  About a week ago they selected the top five answers and had a quick voting contest (comment democracy with 48 hours to decide the winner).  Since I am both currently attending one of the EITM summer programs and exercising my current mathematical knowledge by attempting to run a maximum likelihood estimation of a generalized Prisoner’s Dilemma model with a normally distributed cost function to the players for cooperation; it seemed like a good time to return to the post and evaluate the answers provided. Adding a pre-game to the Continue reading Prisoner’s Dilemma Answers→

Daniel Drezner on the Role of Public Intellectuals

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Daniel W. Drezner has posted a forthcoming conference paper on the role of public intellectuals 2.0.  The basic argument: the internet effectively increases access to academic work by lowering the transaction costs of fnding it and breaking through the jargon of field specialization.  Moving beyond a few criticisms of how today’s intellectuals pale in comparison to their past counterparts (such as a few laundry lists of past intellectuals in comparison to their current peers as justification that the perceived decline of "great intellectuals" stems more from romanticism of the past then any real decline), Drezner addresses critiques levied against the Continue reading Daniel Drezner on the Role of Public Intellectuals→