Science

CRACK

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I found this link via Andrew Gelman's blog the other day: CRACK Mapmaking software for Mac I haven't had much of a chance to play with it, but it looks like it could be useful.  I've had a few instances in class this semester where I've wanted to make some maps of the US to … Read more

Lessons From the Past? Or Justifying an Idiosyncratic Research Agenda?

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I remember reading Michael Tomz's book Reputation and International Cooperation: Sovereign Debt Across Three Centuries for a seminar a couple of years ago, and someone having made a remark about how Tomz was probably just really interested in the time period or the subject matter, but had to frame the research in such a way as to justify its relevance beyond what might be the author's more narrow interests.  Since then I've had a few discussions with some of my advisers on the topic of how we frame our research–essentially how we sell a line of research as relevant to our field.  Overall though, I've found that this is a topic that seems to have stayed out of in-class discussions for the most part.

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Best Practice in Political Science (or Any Field)

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Over the past year or so I've been getting more and more into network analysis–Both for its theoretical and methodological components.  For the most part, this methodological approach has not seen widespread use in political science, although network approaches are steadily growing.  Emilie Hafner-Burton, Miles Kahler, and Alexander Montgomery have a relatively recent article about … Read more

Bayesian Approaches to Political Science

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I ordered Carlin and Louis 2009 “Bayesian Methods for Data Analysis” yesterday and have been left with some questions by the first chapter that I want to raise here, because it reinforces my belief that there’s an unfortunate lacuna in this and many similar books. Specifically, is there a specific Bayesian approach to political science beyond what we think of as the Bayesian approach to statistical inference? I believe that our discipline conducts empirical testing primarily for the basis of making a convincing attempt at falsifying ourselves. If a tool is confusing to the median political scientist, can it ever be convincing? And for Bayesian statistics in particular, is an effort to fit the best model really an effort to falsify the theory?


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Is our children eating margarine?

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A recent medical study has gained some media attention by finding and arguing that, among other factors, consumption of margarine by infants leads to lower IQ scores.  The study, based on  590 New Zealand European children claims many other factors can contribute to the IQ of children such as consuming fish weekly and grains 4 … Read more

Einstein’s 23 Biggest Mistakes

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Einstein is probably the first image conjured in popular culture when asked to think of famous scientists, especially those that transformed the way in which we understand the world.  It has been popularly acknowledged that he failed math as a child, though this is not true: In 1935, a rabbi in Princeton showed him a … Read more

Where’s OUR Particle Accelerator?

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Yesterday, the first particle beam was guided through the $8 billion Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva.  In mid-October, the first particle beam collisions will be made, thus inaugurating the biggest, most expensive playground for particle physicists ever imagined.  I’ve been trying to figure out what political science equivalent would match the LHC in scale.  … Read more

World of Warcraft makes people better scientists

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A News Lite article reporting on academic research indicates that WoW makes the world more scientific: They looked at a random sample of nearly 2,000 discussion posts to see what types of conversations took place, such as social bantering versus problem-solving, that classified as scientific reasoning. It was concluded that the forum and game-based learning could supplement textbooks and … Read more

Do Deployed US Troops foster Economic Growth?

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While browsing newly posted articles at the Social Science Research Network, I came across this paper by Garett Jones and Tim Kane.  The abstract: In the midst of a major U.S. military effort in Iraq and the Middle East, economists should be able to assess the relationship between U.S. troops and growth.   The necessity of … Read more

Did Data Kill Theory?

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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.

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