Saturday Afternoon Linkage

15 December 2012, 1417 EST

  • Via Twitter, Elke Larsen explains that France is “The Other Pacific Power.”
  • CSIS report on the Sino-Vietnamese maritime dispute: “Trouble Outside the Gulf of Tonkin” (via Taylor Fravel).
  • Phil Davis provides a guide for gaming google scholar. Perhaps one day the counting citations game will collapse under its own weight?
  • William M. Briggs unpacks what regression equations actually mean, and why so many textbooks get them wrong. Via Chris Blattman.
  • Chris Blatmman also passes along Marcella Alsen’s cool paper on the TseTse fly and African development. She gave a terrific talk on this at Georgetown recently. My major gripes are  (1) that it doesn’t actually explain Africa’s differential development path and (2) one shouldn’t use continental meta-geography as the fixed-effect units when looking at human historical trajectories.
  • Andrew Bacevich argues that the US-Israel relationship has become total capture of a patron by a client (via 3QD).
  • The Grading Game looks uncomfortably close to home, but I wonder how one earns points for correcting analytic and logical problems?
  • Adam Gopnik blames the firearms-industrial-lobbying complex for that massacre (also via 3QD). If you want to argue about gun control, you can do so over at LGM or some-such. 
  • The Onion really is twenty-first century America’s newspaper of record: exhibit XXVI: its editorial on the Connecticut elementary-school massacre.
  • Attempted Alabama hospital massacre suggests “epidemic” might be the right term for the at least seven eight successful or would-be firearms-facilitated massacres in the US this year. 
  • The US remains a much safer place than much of the world, including Pakistan
  • Kim Jong-Un Looking at Things seems to still be going strong.