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{ Category Archives } Social Science

Social science-related posts.

Favorite Music Reviews: A New Series (hopefully the City Paper won’t steal my idea this time)

Earlier today, I tried starting a blog post series of my favorite–note, not best–songs. The first one was going to be Reverend Gary Davis’ I am the Light of this World (which would have been followed by about eight other Davis songs; I sweat him hard), but the limits of blog software led me to [...]

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2009 03 09 Jason Album Reviews
Music Comments (0)

Old Fashioned Thinking for Old Fashioned Issues

A while ago, The Economist posted a Daily Chart (see below) about the frequency of coups, posing the question why are there less now then there were. I suspect they answer their own question while highlighting the limitations of too many political scientists and analysts. That is, The Economist (as well as the others I [...]

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2008 12 30 Jason Contentious Politics Comments (0)

Money Velocity

Money velocity. Wow. I can’t believe I just learned about this, and I suspect that political scientists and political economists are–once again–way off in their data choices. Several of my own past projects would benefit from redoing the analysis with money velocity rather than GNP, etc.

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2008 12 30 Jason Finance/Economics Comments (0)

Sentence of the Day (not quite)

From a USIP Special Report titled Securing the Future:
At a minimum, the security sector includes actors directly involved in protecting civilians and the state from violent harm (e.g., police and military forces and internal intelligence agencies), institutions that govern these actors (e.g., ministries of interior, defense, and justice; and national security councils), and oversight [...]

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2008 09 06 Jason Contentious Politics Comments (0)

Absent-Minded Professors

Science 2.0 sounds a whole lot like epidemiology, political science, sociology, and–egad!–anthropology. *eye roll*

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2008 03 09 Jason Healthcare Comments (2)

The Latest Fashion: Eliminate Copyrights And Patents

The New Yorker has a great article about a study done that identifies the lack of copyrights and patents in the fashion industry as a major source of the industry’s continued success. The article is definitely a good read, although I do not know why the author is so stubborn (at the end) in thinking [...]

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2007 10 04 Jason Finance/Economics Comments (0)

Cool Re-appropriation Of Common Practices

I love reading about how various cultures (e.g., local, youth, etc.) re-appropriate common practices and transform them into something that is essentially different. In this Reuters article about cell phone usage in Africa, missed calls are being transformed into something useful:
You beep someone when you call them up on their mobile phone — setting its [...]

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2007 09 27 Jason Other
Tech Comments (0)

Tax-Payer Research That’s Off Limits

The blogosphere recently exploded in outrage over awareness that Congressional Research Service research is not publicly available.
For those who do not know, CRS is the research arm of Congress. They are probably best known for budget analysis, but they also do an incredibly wide variety of other top-notch research. You might remember some of their [...]

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2007 02 21 Jason Comments (1)

On Smashism (i.e., my debut in Washington City Paper)

Here’s a Washington City Paper article of me being pissed about DC9’s fascist New Year’s celebration. Despite what DC9 says, they didn’t want to hear from me (I had e-mailed them and the reporter had my contact information): read me!

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2007 02 02 Jason Music Comments (0)

Presentation On Follow-up Research On Second-Order Election Model Posted

I have posted the PowerPoint file Nils Ringe and I presented in New Orleans at the 2007 Southern Political Science Association conference. The presentation–titled Refining and Redefining the Second-Order Election Model: Protest or Pure Preference Voting in Central and Eastern Europe–may be difficult to follow, especially if you are not familiar with the second-order election [...]

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2007 01 18 Jason Administration Comments (0)