I guess most folks are on the way to APSA. Have fun in Chicago if you’re going–and if you’re a member of the APSA council, please consider moving the convention to some weekend besides the first week of school. (Also, #SeattleEveryYear. Just saying! Especially if it’s going to be in August.)

Here’s some links:

• Dani Nedal is also skeptical of Syria.
• Also BLTN: great post from Kristen Coopie Allen on how where you raise funds influences election outcomes. Plot twist: in-district support is less effective than out-district support.
• Might be a repeat, but Jay Ulfelder’s post on the G-DELT protest visualization is a great story of Popularization Gone Wild.
  

  So now we get a version that ignores both the caveat about GDELT’s coverage not being exhaustive or perfect and the related one about the apparent increase in protest volume over time being at least in part an artifact of “changes in reporting and the digital recording of news stories.” What started out as a simple proof-of-concept exercise—”The areas that are ‘bright’ are those that would generally be expected to be so,” John wrote in his initial post—had been twisted into a definitive visual record of protest activity around the world in the past 35 years.

• Have you noticed lethargy or depression among your graduate students recently? That could be because the number of job openings has fallen again, with the shortfall especially pronounced in IR.
• Dan Drezner recommends Mark Blyth’s Austerity among others. As they say on Reddit, “Can confirm.”
• BLTN: Stephen Few explains why you shouldn’t use dual axes. (Hadley Wickham took that option away in ggplot2.)

Finally, from the late-debunkings files, Kevin Drum on that McDonald’s budgeting exercise. #slatepitch: Why it was a good idea for the poor.