Over on the other side of the methods divide, Andrew Gelman shares a tip: Caffeine, a lightweight and free app for Macs that keeps them awake even when you haven't clicked on them for a while. But let me double down on Gelman with a tip that, if used improperly, could...
Political scientists hate, hate, hate faculty meetings. They are yet another drain on the time they need to do their Original Research. Before political scientists assemble for a faculty meeting,...
Photo: Protester at Zucotti Park, 9/28/11; Credit: David Shankbone/Wikimedia CommonsI support the on-going Occupy Wall Street protests. Â I do not share the common complaint that the protesters need...
In an effort to change the conversation from the Duck's current all-Jobs all the time format, let me simply commend Jorge Cham, the creator of Ph.D. Comics, and the rest of his crew for the Ph.D. Comics movie, which manages to be everything that a satisfying break from writing code should be: Funny, heartwarming, and short. Graduate students, see it soon. Faculty members can see it too, but not at the same screening as your grad students; after all, do you really want to know how hard they laugh at the jokes about clueless professors?
This is a really, really pretty chair. It was designed by Adolf Loos, a turn-of-the-century architect and interior designer. There is a famous building in Vienna once known as the "house with no eyebrows" that is also his. Did you know that? Probably not. Only aficionados of fin-de-siecle modernism really pay much attention. Very few designers are remembered. The same will be true of Steve Jobs in fifty years, maybe twenty. What?! Too soon?Patrick and PM's posts are hardly unique today. There has been an incredible outpouring of adulation about Steve Jobs as a visionary. I don't get it. It...
Steve Jobs occupied a unique place in American business and culture; no other billionaire in my life has commanded genuine affection from the general public, and nobody deserved it more. The Financial Times reports that Jobs's passing has elicited similar responses in P.R. China. One Chinese academic wrote of Jobs:It is said Chinese people hate the rich. But all the Chinese are mourning for Jobs after he died. They don’t hate the rich. They respect the rich who accumulate their fortune via talents and innovation as well. What Chinese people hate are those get rich by monopoly, corruption and...
Forget protest movements and populist politics, to say nothing of academic blogging and scholarship -- if you want to change the world in your lifetime, this is the guy you ought to emulate. RIP Steve Jobs, one of the greatest practical visionaries of our time. PS note that Jobs' inspiration for the typography on the Mac was a college course ... a perfect testimony to the indirect but important influence that we academics can have on the world. Our students, not our research, are our near-term legacy -- even, perhaps, our "failed" students who end up doing insanely great things with our...
As the Occupy Wall Street New York movement enters its second week of activity and the movement spreads to LA, Boston, Chicago, Denver and other cities across the country, the silence on the part of the Obama administration becomes more and more noticeable (we can't count Biden's weird and incoherent references to the movement in an interview yesterday). Few expected Obama to come out with any statement last week, when the media was still painting the movement largely as a band of hippies who don't know enough to shower, let alone drive a political movement. Dan Gainor at Fox news pointed...
James Vreeland imagines the possibilities.
 Earlier today, I tweeted and blogged and even (dare I say it) facebooked to get some help. The challenge: to come up with a good analogy to capture the incredibly strange idea that cutting foreign aid might be a way to address the US fiscal crisis.My starting point: Cutting foreign aid to address the budget crisis is like an alcoholic cutting back on apertifs.The responses thus far: Cutting foreign aid to address the budget crisis is like an alcoholic cutting back on chocolate liquor candies. Nominated by The Duck's own Dan Nexon. A big improvement on mine.Cutting foreign aid to address...