Academia

New Year’s Resolutions for Academics

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In six days, 2014 commences and people across the globe will make resolutions to change their habits in areas concerning health, wealth, family, and work.  I do not make such resolutions, but that minor detail will not stop me from providing some boilerplate resolutions for academics.  Here are a few ideas to kick off the … Read more

Gift List for Political Scientists, 2010

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Mind Your Decisions has done an annual gift list for economists for the last few years, and Presh just put together his 2010 list.  Using his list as inspiration, I have compiled my own list of possible gifts for Political Scientists. Given my proclivity for strategic leisure, I believe I can construct this with some … Read more

Faculty Salary, Compensation, and the Cost of Living.

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Voir Dire posted a working paper yesterday that is worthy of reposting given its broad implications. The paper "University Rankings by Cost of Living Adjusted Faculty Compensation" by Terrance Jalbert, Mercedes Jalbert, and Karla Hayashi in the International Journal of Management and Marketing Research can be found at SSRN. The abstract can be viewed at either Voir Dire or SSRN, so I will save the space and not repost it here, but a bit more information can be found after the jump.  It is perhaps sufficient to say that the aggregated and averaged data can be tremendously interesting to any of us that influenced by the academic job market.

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An Additional Benefit of Rapid Delivery

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My teaching style, as well as my presentation style, is marked by a relatively rapid delivery.  I had favored such a style quite awhile ago for many public speaking formats as the general perception of the speaker by the audience is favorable (generally heighten perceptions of intelligence and mastery of the material).  However, now I … Read more

Who would an economist vote for?

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Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has commissioned and released the results of a survey of economists on a range of issues and candidates choice for the 2008 election.  This was partly prompted by earlier statements by Clinton and McCain that neither candidate would not throw their lot in with economists and Adams decided to … Read more

Over 100 Places that May Fund Your Research

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Academic Productivity has recently posted a great find from the Online Education Database: 100 places to find funding for your research: Whether you’re researching the habits of marine life, ancient texts or just a new way to market products, you’ll likely need some funding to get your studies underway. The Internet is a great place to start looking … 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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When War and Academia Collide

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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. . .

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