The Duck of Minerva

PM

Recent Posts

Models, Maps, and Simplifying Assumptions

by PM | 14 December, 2012 |

I don't want to say too much about the Rathbun-Arena smackdown (smackduck?) taking place but I will say this: We often rely on maps that are not "true." The Mercator projection is "wrong" if our criterion is "showing countries according to their relative size" but "useful" if our criterion is "helping to plot sea voyages." Moreover, we sometimes explicitly distort maps to make them more useful: As Wikipedia notes, the Tube map is considered a huge advance on earlier maps despite being flatly wrong about distance, train routes, and everything else. When we consider theories, it may be that...

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Silicon wafers: Why we need to move religion online

by PM | 12 December, 2012 |

As one of the two great still-extant medieval institutions, the church confronts the digital age with a mixture of trepidation and hope. Hope, because congregations and ministers with online presence can build up new types of community and remain in contact through a variety of media; trepidation, because the church, like any incumbent industry, looks with fear at the fate of travel agents, small retailers, and print newspapers. Having seen each industry fall to the likes of Expedia, Amazon, and the Huffington Post, the leaders of churches throughout the United States and beyond worry that...

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Tuesday Morning Links

Tuesday Morning Links

by PM | 11 December, 2012 |

Let's make like a blacksmith and forge some linkage: A detailed examination of how China's military-industrial complex is making surprising advances. (The Diplomat) Chris Blattman reviews James C. Scott's new Two Cheers For Anarchism. With 30 pages left to go, I can say that it should have been on my "best books read in 2012" list. Why do academic job searches take so long? One would expect that given the surfeit of applicants it would take less time now to fill positions, but the reverse seems to be true. (Inside Higher Ed) Via many people: Your favorite econometrics textbook is wrong. I...

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Black Pete’s Breakout Year

Black Pete’s Breakout Year

by PM | 8 December, 2012 |

It's that time of year that Dutch people living outside of Dutchland are beginning to hate: the time of Zwarte Piet. To be fair, the feast of Sinterklaas, a holiday that displays none of America's advanced marketing techniques, was a couple of days ago, but that actually just means that Americans and others have been recently primed to make conversations awkward for their Dutch friends at holiday parties. (This is distinctly different from making awkward conversations at holiday parties, which is a cosmopolitan phenomenon.) The Dutch may have David Sedaris's classic monologue Six to Eight...

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Tuesday Morning Linkage

Tuesday Morning Linkage

by PM | 4 December, 2012 |

Dan's still ill so you're stuck with me for Day Two. Here's some links: Via The Monkey Cage (I'm not stealing, I'm curating) comes this link to an Inside Higher Ed article about the five-year humanities Ph.D.. Identity, legacy, institutions, and Indiana basketball One of the things that grabs me about IR scholarship is that (to my knowledge) churches are not among the IOs or NGOs that we study on their own terms. But consider the Anglican communion. (Please correct me, don't flame me, in the comments--and remember that Dan isn't writing this.) Or, of course: habemus twitter. Despite what...

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Monday Morning Linkage

by PM | 3 December, 2012 |

Dan's sick, so he's asked me to put together three to five links ... of doom! Unfortunately, I've been writing a lot recently and so I've missed out on great posts. So here's what I found in a burst of searching; please suggest additional links in the comments.   At Foreign Policy, Jack Carlson argues China is building replica European cities to prove its cultural superiority. Also at Foreign Policy, this Boeing advertising Web site was linked. I'm posting it because, especially for folks who live in DC, the advertising aspect of the imperium/military-industrial-congressional...

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What do we talk about when we talk about world wars?

by PM | 12 November, 2012 |

My Facebook feed filled up this weekend with salutes to veterans. My friends were mostly Americans, and so most of these (indeed, I'd bet all of them) were tributes to U.S. soldiers. For Americans, of course, Sunday was Veterans Day, but for the British and others it was Remembrance Day. Remembrance Day--Armistice Day, as I think of it--is a more fitting holiday than Veterans Day. It asks us to remember something particularly awful and shattering, the war that the United States has largely forgotten: the war that an American president promised would end all wars. Every year at this time, I...

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Textbooks, Ethics, and Choice

by PM | 8 November, 2012 |

In preparing for my spring semester course, a seminar for honors undergraduates on research methodologies, I've been paring down readings and reviewing potential books to add to my syllabus. My needs are pretty specific, since I need something that bright undergrads can read and is quantitatively informed but that doesn't tread on the actual statistics text I'll be using. What I'd like, in other words, is something comparatively well-written, inexpensive (in the $20 range), short (ideally well under 200 pages), and reassuring (possibly with the words "don't panic" printed on the cover). My...

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Politics in Everything: Michelle Obama’s Face Makes Kids Choose Healthy Treats

by PM | 2 November, 2012 |

Via reader JW, an exceptional experiment from Yale: In a field experiment conducted during trick-or-treating at Halloween, we find that a visual cue of Michelle Obama prompts almost twice as many children age 9 and over to choose fruit over candy, compared to a visual cue of Ann Romney. This provides evidence that Michelle Obama’s campaign to promote healthy eating has succeeded in influencing behavior. No such evidence was found for children age 8 and below.

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A New Era

by PM | 29 October, 2012 |

A cultural milestone has been passed: Political science is now science-y enough that XKCD pays attention.

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