Cynthia Van Maanen

Cynthia Van Maanen is a contributor to the Quantitative Peace blog and researcher in political science.

Economists’ Logic of Spending, Saving, and Borrowing

by

The guys at the Freakonomics blog can always be counted on for some interesting conversation starters.  Today, Steven Levitt pits conventional wisdom about saving money against advice on the topic from Milton Friedman (via Jose Scheinkman).  Conventional wisdom (taking the form of Levitt’s wife) holds that one should prudently save money from all income, no … Read more

Did Data Kill Theory?

by

Thanks to Geoff McGovern for pointing us toward a fascinating essay in Wired.  Chris Anderson posits that the accessibility of information has vaulted us into what he calls the Petrabyte Age, in which

information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional
taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls
for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the
tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It
forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for
it later.

Given how much data is readily available, Anderson continues, "[w]e can
analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show."  The
scientific method encourages us to explain what we know about the world
and make greater generalizations about the rest of it that we have not
observed; but if we can observe everything, essentially, it seems that
generalizations are no longer necessary.  We don’t need to guess about
what the world might look like, because an hour in front of the
computer can tell us. 

More after the jump.

Read more

The Poor Tyrant!

by

Why
do dictators win elections?  The answer to this is relatively
straightforward–they hold fixed elections.  Everyone knows they’re fixed
and everyone knows who will win before the balloting even begins.  If the actual
numerical results aren’t fixed, then the rules regarding who may contest the
elections and who may vote in them certainly are.  Dictatorial regimes
hold elections to demonstrate to the world that, not only are they giving their
citizens a choice in their leadership, but also that their citizens
resoundingly love them and wouldn’t prefer a more representative, and perhaps
less repressive, government.

If all of that is true, then what went wrong in
Zimbabwe?  Discussion comes after the jump.

Read more

The APSA and AAAS Take Action to Free Jailed Political Scientist

by

The American Political Science Association is taking official action on behalf of Dr. Matrouk al-Faleh, a political scientist detained by the Saudi government.  You may have heard about this, especially if you’re a member of the Human Rights section of APSA; if you haven’t, here are some basic facts about Faleh and the consequences of … Read more

Heroin Chic, the Second Wave

by

NPR reported a very interesting story this morning on the attempt to steer Afghanistan’s thriving poppy crops away from the opium industry and toward the cosmetic industry. 

For the past several years, a group of Afghan and foreign businessmen
has been trying to offer an alternative, by urging farmers to grow
flowers for perfume instead of for drugs. But it has been a frustrating
and costly project.

See you after the jump.

Read more

When War and Academia Collide

by

Academics in all subfields of political science often lament that policy and military failures arise from the lack of communication between policy-makers and the academic community.  The recent tragic death of Michael Bhatia highlights some of the issues involved with the tenuous collaboration between those who analyze data and those who generate them, and the sometimes unfortunate consequences.  Bhatia was killed on May 7 in an explosion that targeted the American soldiers with whom he had been embedded in Afghanistan.

Bhatia had been teaching at Brown University’s Watson Institute for
International Studies as well as working on a doctoral degree from
Oxford University when he decided to enroll with the military’s Human
Terrain System. The program, run by the U.S. Army’s Training and
Doctrine Command, hires social scientists to collect and share
information abut Afghani culture with U.S. troops. Bhatia is the first
civilian in the program to die.

More after the jump. . .

Read more

Online Shopping, with a Stochastic Element

by

What’s a way to make online shopping more appealing to game theorists?  Make it a lottery, of course!  For 10 USD, SomethingStore.com will send you . . . something.  According to their website, the company will send you something randomly chosen from their inventory.  They make no guarantee of suitability or value, or even that … Read more