Category: Uncategorized
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NASA Banned from Working in China
From an email forwarded me from my NASA grant PI: The Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act of 2011 (P.L. 112-10), Section 1340(a), states, “None of the funds made available by this [Act] may be used for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or the Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop, design, plan, promulgate, implement,…
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Juking the Stats
Epigraph to my APSA 2011 paper. Prezbo: I don’t get it. All this so we score higher on the state tests? If we’re teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them? Grace Sampson: Nothing. It assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores…
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Where Power Lies
Urban riots in London over the past few days have led to wondering about their context and the fundamental nature of government and the governed. Paul Campos from the excellent Lawyers, Guns, & Money blog I think isn’t explicit enough about the implications of the quotation of the 18th Century William Paley: And although, when…
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Dangers of Demolition
From the NYT, Suicide Bomber Kills Kandahar Mayor: Mr. Hamidi had launched a contentious campaign to destroy illegal homes in northern Kandahar city. The campaign was strongly resisted by the people who lived there, many of whom had been there for years. A day earlier, there had been a protest and the mayor agreed to meet with the protesters on Wednesday. The bomber…
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Athens, Protests, & Geography
From Salon.com: How Athens’ geography feeds unrest The Greek streets once again erupted over austerity. How much do the actual streets have to do with it? http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/06/30/greece_geography_revolt/index.html Oddly, no mention of Scott’s Seeing Like a State.
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Online Courses
Thoughts on online courses and the future of undergraduate education in Political Science at a large state university. I propose that the department consider radically revamping the undergraduate program, shifting to many online lecture courses for first and second year students paired with small (<25) seminars for upper level students. A couple of points of…
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Sports Mutiny, Wisconsin Protests, Charlie Sheen, and Chinese Billionaires
Chuck Klosterman had an interesting question during a Bill Simmons podcast recently. He put forward an idea that various controversies filling the headlines that could not seem further apart – Charlie Sheen’s antics, the Detroit Pistons mutiny, the NFL labor negotiations, and the protests in state capitals around the country – are really all about…
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Egypt – Waterloo for Selectorate Theory
Selectorate theory posits that all regimes can be thought of as beholden to subsets of the population, called selectorates. Democracies have subsets that are essentially the entire population, or the electorate. Dictatorships are said to have a much more limited set of the population that is in the selectorate. Egypt shows a fundamental flaw in…
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Contagion
Jordan. King Hussein fires cabinet. Enough? Yemen. Saleh will not seek a new term nor install his son. His discount rate increases dramatically, no?
Jeremy Wallace 