The Duck of Minerva

Bill Petti

Petti is Associate Director of Insights and Analytics at Alexion . Previously, he served as Lead Data Scientist in the Decision Sciences group at Maritz Motivation and a Global Data Strategist and Subject Matter Expert for Gallup.

Recent Posts

Reputational Rhetoric: When does it work?

by Bill Petti | 11 February, 2010 |

Over at FP.com, Stephen Walt provides a review of an interesting new book:[M]y colleague Matthew Baum and his co-author, Tim Groeling of UCLA, have recently published an excellent book entitled War Stories: The Causes and Consequences of Public Views on War (Princeton University Press). Drawing on a wide array of empirical evidence (including opinion surveys, media content, and foreign policy decisions), they argue that the interaction between elites, media, and public opinion is a three-way process in which each group’s behavior is essentially strategic. Politicians try to use media to...

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Applying Social Science Concepts to Business: E-Book Edition

by Bill Petti | 1 February, 2010 |

[Cross-posted at bill | petti]Sunday's Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon has stopped selling Kindle versions of all Macmillan titles. John Sargent, Macmillian's CEO, recently went to Amazon's headquarters to try and negotiate new terms for the sale of e-books published by his company. In general, the publishing industry has been unhappy with Amazon's insistence that most books be priced at $9.99. Apparently, the discussions resulted in Amazon pulling all Macmillan e-books from it's website.I am a firm believer that the historical knock on the social sciences is unwarranted and that...

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Politics and Infographics

by Bill Petti | 19 January, 2010 |

Cliff Kuang at Fast Company points to a short, interesting talk by Alex Lundry of TargetPoint Consulting.Lundry quickly runs down the importance of infographics and data visualizations in the political realm. Bottom line: people are hard wired to learn through visualization, and infographics can be very powerful tools in political battles over ideas and policy:It amazes me that we haven't seen a faster uptake among professional politicians of data visualization, especially considering the sheer number of political operatives, consultants, and strategic communication firms. All it takes is...

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Melowdrama, thy name is Schweller

by Bill Petti | 23 December, 2009 |

The opening of Randall Schweller's latest article for The National Interest:CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL relations is moving toward a state of entropy. Chaos and randomness abound. Now, the story of world politics unfolds without coherence, unfettered by classic balance-of-power politics, a plotless postmodern work starring a menagerie of wildly incongruent themes and protagonists, as if divinely plucked from different historical ages and placed in a time machine set for the third millennium. We live in an era in which unprecedented globalization and economic interdependence,...

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Open-ended vs. Scale Questions: A note on survey methodology

by Bill Petti | 23 December, 2009 |

Aaron Shaw had an interesting post at the Dolores Labs blog last week that examined how using different question scales in surveys can elicit very different responses:You can ask “the crowd” all kinds of questions, but if you don’t stop to think about the best way to ask your question, you’re likely to get unexpected and unreliable results. You might call it the GIGO theory of research design.To demonstrate the point, I decided to recreate some classic survey design experiments and distribute them to the workers in Crowdflower’s labor pools. For the experiments, every worker saw only one...

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A Nitpicky Critique of The Fat Tail’s Application of IR Theory

by Bill Petti | 7 December, 2009 |

A while back I started reading The Fat Tail, a book about political risk by Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer (who also pens The Call for Foreign Policy) and Preston Keat, but couldn't really get into it. I recently picked it back up and have been plowing through. I am reserving my final judgment until I've had a chance to complete it. However, one area has already irked me enough that I wanted to post a (rather long) comment: their treatment of international relations theory.In Chapter 3, Bremmer and Keat outline a number of frameworks and theories that political risk analysis can (and should)...

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Sovereign Debt: The Next Financial Contagion?

by Bill Petti | 28 November, 2009 |

This week, the government of Dubai decided to delay payment on the tens of billions of dollars that it's Dubai World holding owes to various creditors (UBS speculates as much as $80B). Dubai World is the vehicle through which the state has invested heavily in various real estate projects around the world. In order to fund the expansive projects and investments, the government sought billions in debt to fuel their initiatives.By delaying payment Dubai has not only created serious doubts about its dedication and ability to repay its loans, but also the credit worthiness and risk-level for...

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Visualizing War

by Bill Petti | 17 November, 2009 |

Two topics that are right up my alley: international conflict and data visualization. Put the two together, and you have a truly thought provoking piece of work.David McCandless is a "visual journalist" who specializes in visualizing data across numerous subjects. In his latest work for The Guardian's Data Blog, David visualize a ton of data regarding troop deaths and injuries, size of forces by country, as well as the civilian toll in Afghanistan.Like all good visualizers, David tells a story with his infographics, putting many issues in perspective (likely creating some "oh, I didn't...

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More Momentum for the Social Sciences–Nobel Edition

by Bill Petti | 14 October, 2009 |

For those that have not yet heard, the Nobel Prize for Economics (actually named the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) was awarded this year to two recipients, one of whom--Elinor Ostrom--is a Political Scientist. As Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution notes:It's a nod in the direction of social science, rather than economics per se. It's another homage to the New Institutional Economics and also to Law and Economics. It's rewarding larger rather than smaller ideas, practical economics rather than abstract theory.For those interested in a deeper...

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