Quantitative and formal analysis of international relations, comparative politics, and American politics.
Blogging has been lite lately, but in response to Phil's subtle nudges, I've decided to offer up my own list of war songs. I'm approaching this from a more general angle of "war songs" as opposed to songs that are strictly anti-war. These songs are not necessarily supposed to reflect any particular personal views of … Read more
This sort of reminds me of this. Really one passage in particular, I suppose: We tend to marvel at the Darwinian perfection of organisms now, saying 'this must have been highly selected for, it's a tuned and sophisticated machine'. In fact, it's a mess – there's so much unnecessary complexity. Bear with me. The preceding … Read more
A significant event in an ongoing story that has been a driving force in defining my generation. Michael FlynnMichael Flynn is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Kansas State University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Binghamton University in 2013. His research focuses on the political economy of foreign policy … Read more
I received an email this afternoon from Wikistrat inviting political scientist graduate students to participate in a competition for $10,000. Before this email, I have heard nothing about this program/website and I am still relatively ignorant about their presence and history, but it seems, at the very least, worth getting a bit more information about. … Read more
I posted a few days ago about openheatmap.com, a website that will convert your csv files into fancy thermal maps. One problem with our initial attempts to map out the presence of American military forces abroad was that the data are highly skewed. Some countries host upwards of 50,000–60,000 American military personnel in the year … Read more
courtesy: www.smbc-comics.com Michael FlynnMichael Flynn is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Kansas State University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Binghamton University in 2013. His research focuses on the political economy of foreign policy with a specific focus on security cooperation and military deployments. www.m-flynn.com
Back in December I had a brief post about CRACK, a mapmaking software package for Macs. The downside was that CRACK only worked for making maps of the United States. As the need has arisen, Michael Allen and I began looking for something similar that could handle world maps. This brings me to OpenHeatMap, an … Read more
Clearly I'm trying to make up for a post drought from the past couple of months. I'll leave the more in-depth commentary to someone who has been following this situation more closely, but it looks like the Wisconsin State Government is experiencing a wheeeeee-bit of a principal-agent problem (via Boing Boing). Wisconsin Police Have Joined … Read more
By now I'm sure most people have come across Amy Chua's recent Wall Street Journal article. After reading David Brooks' response to Chau's article, I've begun to think of some of some of the international relations implications of Chua's Chinese parenting style. Specifically, I'm curious to see what her revelations imply for China's ascendency in … Read more
I got my Amazon Kindle about a year ago and I really enjoy it, but I am finding myself become increasingly frustrated by the apparent lack of standards when it comes to citing eBooks. On some occassions this isn't really a problem—if you need a particular page number you can often times type a phrase … Read more