The UN Security Council was set to vote this morning on new sanctions/strengthening existing sanctions targeting Iran. The US administration seems to be keen on building up just how tough these new sanctions are. I have to wonder how much of this is simply rhetorical and how much reflects an actual belief in the efficacy of sanctions within the Obama administration.
Violent Crime on the US-Mexican Border
I am always perplexed at all the hype in the news about how dangerous the US-Mexican border is. I have visited US border cities several times in the last 7 years and while there are definitely things about visiting border cities that are eventful, crime and violence are definitely are not normal parts of the … Read more
My Backwoods Upbringing Serves Me Well
I found this article while glancing at Thomas Ricks' blog at FP–It's about the issues that US troops have been facing in Afghanistan with the weapons they're assigned. I've commented on similar micro-level issues before and I think this AP article is pretty closely related, although it focuses more on the US side. I really think framing the issue in the way that the AP does undercuts our ability to
understand what the problem is.
We Can’t Be Friends Anymore
With all of the recent bluster about North Korea, I’ve started thinking more about how far the NK regime can push its luck before it finally starts to become a burden to China, rather than an asset. They seem to pop up every couple of years with some sort of wild antics, so I wonder … Read more
More More or Less
This episode of the radio show 'More or Less', available in podcast, has a nice discussion of Arrow's impossibility theorem. It's a consistently good show for anyone interested in quantitative social science, especially how to teach it. http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/moreorless/
The War We Don’t See
This is a topic that I’ll probably expand on later, but I was just reading an article discussing the role of Hamid Karzai’s brother in the present Afghan conflict. This article gets at an issue that I’ve thought about before. From the FP article cited above: But he could not exist without the support of coalition … Read more
Scribtex: online collaboration for LaTeX
Michael Flynn and I have been discussing a new project based on recent data we have discovered and our mutual academic interests. Given that we both have become LaTeX savvy, I was hoping to find a convenient way for us to collaborate without using the archaic system of emailing each other back and forth. My … Read more
Lessons From the Past? Or Justifying an Idiosyncratic Research Agenda?
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.
The Development of Geocentric versus Heliocentric Models of the Solar System: The Predictive versus Explanatory Powers of Models
The predictive power of a model does not always mean that it is accurately represents the true nature of what it is trying to explain. The geocentric model of the solar system is an example of such a case. Geocentric models dominated astrology and astronomy for almost 2000 years before scientists realized that these models, despite their predictive power, did not correctly describe the nature of the stars, the planets, and their movement. And even when the proper model, the heliocentric model, was discovered, it was not fully accepted until it produced better predictions. This case calls into question whether predictive capability alone should allow a certain model to dominate the discourse of a certain research program. It also suggests that scientists in general should be more open to non-conventional models in their discipline, even if these models do not immediately provide better predictions than the conventional models.
More after the jump…