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And You’ll Be Helping How?

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Another piece on the China-North Korea relationship.

Just a quick thought on this and on the broader question.  There are some pretty clear reasons for wanting to do something about the current regime in North Korea.  But when people discuss what should happen, the common refrain seems to be treating China like a teenager that wants oh so badly to drive mom and dad's car, but just hasn't proven himself yet.  I'm fairly certain this article explicitly mentions the notion that the US has tried to get China to feel like it has some "responsibility" for taking care of this issue, and I think this is part of the problem. 

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700 Fresh Posts to read…

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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 … Read more

Projectors and Pollsters

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The methodologists and closeted Americanists among us (everyone is during the election season, it seems–don’t worry, we won’t tell) may be interested to know that WashingtonPost.com is hosting a live chat tomorrow at noon with Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight.com and Charles Franklin of Pollster.com.  If you are unfamiliar with these websites then first, you should … Read more

Note to self: the world loves 2×2 tables.

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It appears that one cannot go wrong with something as simple as a two-by-two table (produced in Excel) in a blog post.  The three biggest traffic generating posts that I have personally done involve the Prisoner’s Dilemma (it is about a 2×2 game!) that received link love from Freakonomics, the Dark Knight Ferry game which … Read more

A Draft is Just a Draft (as in writing, not the “Oh No, I am going to war” type)

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Writing for Social Scientists by Howard Becker is a book I would strongly recommend to any graduate student who is about to begin the prospectus and/or dissertation process. This book is not solely about “how to write” in the sense of making outlines and editing. Instead, it is about how to overcome the obstacles people … Read more

The Unbearable Lightness of Game Theory?

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OrgTheory.net has a great post today assessing the merits of game theory.  The author makes some excellent points.  In particular, he points out that some of the more interesting outcomes we see in the social sciences are off-equilibrium–inherently, then, these are the ones that we can’t explain with game theory.  Additionally, and more generally as a criticism of rational choice, individuals don’t necessarily make decisions that conform to what we typically think of as the rules that describe rational actors.

Check out the post at OrgTheory.net, and the preceding entry by the same blogger (Michael McBride) about game theory’s potentially misleading name, and meet me back here after the jump.

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New Author: Jason Steck joins the Quantitative Peace

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The Quantitative Peace welcomes Jason Steck, of Creighton University, as a new contributor to the blog.  With a background in International Relations, Civil-Military Relations, and formal modeling, we look forward to Jason’s insights, observations, and contributions to the developing community and readership of the Quantitative Peace.      Michael A. AllenMichael A. Allen is an … Read more

A Few Non-Connected Thoughts and Links

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The three of us, along with Ray Carman, traveled to New York City for the weekend to enjoy a few hours of Eddie Izzard performing at Radio City Music Hall for this current "Stripped" tour.  As such, the trip is still fresh in my mind as I return to work on a few projects involving … Read more

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 … Read more