Traveling for Thanksgiving gave me the opportunity to abandon my daily reading schedule and come back to a stockpile of new posts to read. The highlights thus far from the last 5 days:
– Flowing Data has a chart contest. The winner receives two Tufte books. Entries are due on Friday.
– Andrew Gelman has a interesting stroy of his undergraduate academic years that lead to his publishing a paper from those days over two decades later. If only my undergraduate work was methodologically related to my background now.
– Rodger at The Duck of Minerva watches the History Channel; finds reference to Bruce Bueno De Mesquita as the next Nostradamus. Obviously I will have to catch this when it comes on again.
-Josep Colmer at the Monkey Cage provides a Larry Summer's quote that posits Political Scientists to be less smart than Economists, but smarter than Sociologists. The comments are active.
– Finally, I have started keeping track of The WoW Economist; those who do not play Massive Multiplayer Online Games or do not have an interest in virtual economies will want to avoid this site. Otherwise, the discussion of on-going markets such as the volatility of particular goods or predicting inflation in the World of Warcraft makes for an interesting read (well, I am sure some of the 11 million active players may enjoy a more mathematical and theory based approach to the markets).
Michael A. Allen is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boise State University. His research focuses on international conflict, military alliances, and quantitative methods in international relations and comparative politics.