• Via Marginal Revolution, the always-interesting Xavier Marquez writes about Randall Collins’ sociology. [Abandoned Footnotes]
• Obama staffers find jobs in white-shoe Washington. It turns out that the new boss is much the same as the old boss [The New Republic]
• Phil Schrodt talks about GDELT: Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone, a global events database that Jay Ulfelder has called the future of political science. Rolf Friedheim gives a detailed case-study of using the data in R to map some Russian protests.
• Good news for (consumers of) higher education: Marginal Revolution argues that the cost and time savings of online education trump Baumol’s cost disease. As one commenter asks: “As the saying goes ‘science progresses one funeral at a time’ – today less so. But what if one day science progress were slowed by zombie lectures on the ‘net?” [Marginal Revolution]

And also:

• Twitter habitue Martin Edwards asks: What should faculty tell students who want a Ph.D.? [Inside Higher Ed]
• Thanks to an in-person talk by Senior Duck (Mallard Extraordinaire?) PTJ, I was inspired to read abduction in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It sounds like the best description of working social science I’ve ever seen. [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]