- 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.Â
- 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 leastÂ
seveneight 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.Â
- Kim Jong-Un Looking at Things seems to still be going strong.Â
The Briggs piece on regression should be required reading for anyone interested in the ‘assumptions issue’
Er, you did see that I made exactly that point in my ‘maps’ post, right?
No haven’t had a chance to catch up yet. But good. Although I suspect we might be taking very different things from it; maybe not.
uh, her name is Elke, not Erik…? And interesting that ANZ-Fr relations warming up — not as high-profile as Panetta’s trip, but, though it’s hard for me to believe, like the US-NZ flap, Rainbow Warrior was nearly 3 decades ago.
Fixed. Thanks!