The Quantitative Peace

The Danger of Online Articles

I listen to several podcasts each work during my daily commute to and from the office.  One podcast, the Skeptics Guide to the Universe (SGU), has several segments each week, with a few discussing scientific findings.  My favorite is a game for the panel where three scientific research findings are offered and the panelists guess which one is false. That is, a finding is made up by the host; often, it is in the opposite direction of a recent study. The other two findings are "science;" a result that has been published in a recent journal.

Two episodes ago (#330, 11/12/2011), the podcasters were sent an email from a listener that linked to a peer-reviewed study that offered the following result:

Remote, retroactive intercessory prayer said for a group is associated with a shorter stay in hospital and shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection and should be considered for use in clinical practice.

That is, the BMJ study had people, in the year 2000, pray for patients with bloodstream infections during the years 1990-1996.  The study shows a statistically significant reduction in both the duration and level of the fevers the patients had. Naturally, this confounded both the guests and the panelists, which lead to a lengthy discussion about the obvious flaws of the study.  

Within a week of that podcast airing, a listener informed the hosts that the BMJ's December issue tends to contain whimsical studies for the sake of humor.  That is, the study should not be taken seriously or touted as coming from a peer-reviewed source.  In the printed version of the journal, these articles would be grouped together and the farcical nature of the study would be obvious.  For example, the 2010 issue contains the following studies:

• Effect on gastric function and symptoms of drinking wine, black tea, or schnapps with a Swiss cheese fondue: randomised controlled crossover trial
• Testing the validity of the Danish urban myth that alcohol can be absorbed through feet: open labelled self experimental study
• Beauty sleep: experimental study on the perceived health and attractiveness of sleep deprived people
• Can he fix it? Yes, he can!-- A case of a woman wearing Bob the Builder goggles to correct her idiopathic ocular neuromyotonia. 

The lesson learned, of course, is that the context of an article can mean everything.  Taking any of the above articles as serious, peer-reviewed work would be erroneous. While we in political science have special issues that can contextualize studies, I have not come across anything that demanded the context of the journal for an article to be interpretted correctly.  I am amused by the prospect of having our own fake studies.  This, perhaps, could be the proper forum for an article on the daily temperature high in Washington D.C. and Senate votes on force (with forecasting for global warming).

Quick Link: The Top 10 Worst Graphs in Science

Karl Bowman offers a list of the top 10 worst graphs in the scientific literature. Bowman not only critiques each graph, but also offers suggestions to improve the graph in the future.

For this list, the social sciences were not included. I imagine that we have some relatively uninformative displays in our articles, but I have not seen a comparable list for our discipline---perhaps due to the obvious disincentives that exist for compiling such a list together. 

 

 

Two Comics for Friday

If you are not subscribed to these two comics, then this will be new to you.  If you already have them on your RSS feed, well, you get to suffer their propagation.* 

The ever-linkable XKCD offers the rational incentives on leaving reviews for hotels (and other places). Poor reviews may drive demand down, which should lower the price of your consumption.

SMBC, often delving into philosophy, science, and economics, has offered two economics-related comics in the past two days. Yesterday's comic posits the economists value of humans versus other objects and today's comic offers a, perhaps obvious, comic on the incentives of self-cat-napping (the bad kind). 

 

*I'm directly linking to the comics so they will get the benefits of future readers, advertisment impressions, and the proper amount of web-traffic they deserve.

Thanks for the Muammaries!

Ghadaffi's photo album seems slightly less helpful than Saddam's.

Jonathan's Card Has Ended

Penny Arcade, a comic that usually discusses video games and the video game industry, weighs in on Jonathan's Card--apparently, homo economicus can gain utility by not only defecting and receiving the largest share possible, but also gains utility purely by gaming the experiment. Unfortunately, it appears the test has come to an end (Starbucks deactivated the card) due to abuse and apparent fraud in the experiment (perhaps Tycho-types have won).  The premise of the project was to have a publicly available Starbuck's card that anyone could use. The card started with a balance and anyone with a smart phone could use it to pay for coffee at Starbuck's.  Likewise, anyone could add money to the card to buy coffee for strangers they would likely never meet.  The data of transactions was made publicly available, published on twitter, and some graphing has occurred.

It was suggested that this might have been a viral marketing campaign by Starbuck's, but it appears that this was not the case after all.  

A few sites have posted more detailed analysis on the card:

• Huffington Post's coverage
• Social Commerce
• Odio and theft from the experiment (original tweet)
• The official Facebook page where people share their stories of how the card impacted them.

War Songs

Blogging has been lite lately, but in response to Phil's subtle nudges, I've decided to offer up my own list of war songs.  I'm approaching this from a more general angle of "war songs" as opposed to songs that are strictly anti-war.  These songs are not necessarily supposed to reflect any particular personal views of war--they just happen to be drawn from the general body of music that I grew up listening to.  That said, there are most certainly some common themes.  

As a general rule I will list songs by song title and then artist.  Some of these will probably be songs/bands that many people are familiar with, but others less so (as an aside, it was almost a sport in high school to seek out rare and obscure records--not because the music was particularly good, but that's how you win, duh).

1. The Trooper -- Iron Maiden: (Song link)  Everything about this song is amazing--the narrative, the guitar work--everything.  The guitar riffs in particular are simply classic.  But aside from the musical component, the lyrics are especially good, as they tell a graphic and coherent story.  Furthermore, this story takes us back a ways to a time when we're talking about fighting with muskets and cavalry charges.  I mean just look at the imagery!
2. Aces High -- Iron Maiden: (Song link)  Yes, another Maiden joint.  They're fantastic.  Anywho, unlike the Trooper, Aces High is all about dog fights.  The guitar work is again phenomenal, having this sort of frantic quality to it that matches up with the song's lyrics quite well.  The chorus serves as a nice foil to the rest of the song and gives the listener a sense that they are almost soaring through the air.  
3. World War II -- English Dogs: (Song link)  The English Dogs made a transition shortly after this song toward more of a punk-metal style, some of which is available on the iTunes.  Nowhere near the more poetic and technical styling of an Iron Maiden tune, this song has nevertheless always stuck with me.  I think what's always fascinated me about this song is the context in which it was written.  During the early to mid 1980s many other English punk bands were (as the song suggests) singing about the perils of nuclear war and the impending nuclear apocalypse.  This seems sort of obvious given the backdrop of the Cold War at the time.  Alternatively, this song points out that World War II was a pretty hellish experience, and in so doing, sort of asks the question, "what more do you want?"  
4. War Ensemble -- Slayer: (Song link)  This is probably one of their more aggressive/famous songs, and the connection is pretty obvious.  Their lyrics are also incredibly graphic, which I think is appropriate given that war is a pretty miserable thing.  We don't need to experience it directly to know that it's not something that we should seek out for enjoyment.  That said, we're surrounded by music, movies, video games, etc., that try to find the poetry or excitement in an otherwise hellish experience, and I think this song speaks to the far darker aspects of war.  Like Iron Maiden, but in a totally different way, old-school Slayer has a way about them when it comes to evoking a particular type of imagery.  Honorable mention should also go to "Hallowed Point" (Song link) which is also on the Seasons in the Abyss album.  While this song is not directly about war, I think it definitely relates quite closely.  
5. Generals -- GBH: (Song link)  Another song that has stuck with me for a long time.  This song speaks to a few different points, but I think the most important of them are these ideas of the exploitation and manipulation of the common foot soldier, and asking these questions about why/how an individual is told to fight.  The song ends by raising these questions of the human costs that are incurred, and combined with the chorus, I think does a successful job at linking these themes of serving some abstract and higher cause with the aforementioned micro-level themes of the human suffering and costs (of those on the winning side, might I add).  
6. Let's Start a War -- The Exploited: (Song link)  This speaks to some of the same themes as the previous song, but I think it more directly speaks to the different costs that are incurred by members of different classes in society.  I've never been a huge fan of the Exploited, but this is another song that I've always remembered.
7. Viva la Revolution -- The Adicts: (Song link)  Not so much about war in an interstate sense, but more about social upheaval and civil conflict.  Still, a great song and perhaps appropriate given the current state of things around the world.  This band was a great one in large part because of their style--they drew heavily on clockwork orange imagery for the band's (and especially the lead singer's) look.  While not as graphic as the other songs, this was just a really fun one. 

I'm sure there are probably some songs that I'm leaving out, so this list may be revised if I think of anything.  My thanks to Phil for the idea--I had a lot of fun thinking about this idea and sifting through my music collection.  And as I mentioned before, some of these songs don't necessarily have a particular message about war itself, but when you comb through this stuff it just reminds you how influential warfare has been in shaping the musical world.

Sci-Fi Poli Sci, Episode I: Regime Types Across Sci-Fi Universes

Assuming that one is looking for them, it is fairly easy to find internet arguments that stem from comparisons among and between science fiction universes, and a great many of these arguments center on comparing governments within those universes. Which government is more democratic: Star Wars' Galactic Republic or Star Trek's United Federation? Who is more repressive: Firefly's Alliance or Star Wars' Galactic Empire? How do the military assets of the Stargate universe stack up against those found in all of the other sci-fi universes? Indeed, given that nerd culture is now nearly synonymous with pop culture, these conversations seem to be quite common, particularly if one regularly eats lunch with the bloggers at The Quantitative Peace.  However, while some political scientists and economists have tried to answer questions that have clearly spawned from science fiction, I am unaware of any that have attempted to apply some of the more commonly used quantitative measurements in political science to the governments seen in such universes. Therefore, this post represents a first attempt to apply quantititative measures from political science to the polities envisioned in some of the most beloved science fiction franchises, in an attempt to answer the question: Which sci-fi governments are the most democratic, and which are the most autocratic? In the paragraphs below, I take a close look at a few sci-fi governments and use a couple of the more popular measures of regime type to compare them.

While this is mostly an attempt to have some Friday fun with political science measurement, I do not think it is an entirely frivolous exercise.  If our measurement schemes are valid, then they should apply quite nicely across regimes, even imagined ones.  Furthermore, as someone who regularly teaches classes about quantitative research in political science, I think there may be instructional advantages to using fictional regimes to introduce students to the methodological challenges associated with developing valid quantitative measures of such things as human rights, regime type, military capabilities, etc.  In fact, the use of fictional governments may allow the instructor to escape the various normative hang-ups and national attachments that can often impede undergraduates' willingness to pursue strict coding guidelines in quantitative data collection.  Thus, to quote Paul Krugman (1978, 2), "while the subject of this [post] is silly," the content should make sense, and as such, the post should be viewed as a "serious analysis of a ridiculous subject."

Obama's Next Cabinet

Via Steve Clemmons at The Washington Note, The New York Times has a story on who will be tapped to be the next Secretary of Defense.  And the winner is?  Mr. Leon Panetta!  Panetta is currently the director of the CIA, and according to the Times article, it is expected that Obama will soon announce Panetta's move to the Pentagon upon the exit of Bob Gates.  

Of course this move opens up Panetta's post at the CIA, and apparently some low-level no-name general named David Petraeus is expected to move on in to that post with Panetta's move to the DOD.  Personally, I think this is the more interesting side of the story.  It's not new for a military leader to be put into the top spot at the CIA--Panetta's own predecessor Michael Hayden was an Air Force General, and the Agency's first four directors were all high ranking military officers.  The most famous among them probably being Hoyt Vandenberg and Walter Bedell Smith.  But I suppose the question here is what is it that Obama is hoping to get out of Petraeus' appointment to the CIA?

Petraeus is arguably one of the most versatile and effective generals that the United States currently has.  That said, this is far from a guarantee that he will be an effective administrator in the CIA, which is notorious for being incredibly resistent to change.  Furthermore, the Agency's reputation has been pretty beat up since 9/11, so its moral is bound to be pretty low.  This problem has been accentuated by the fact that many Agency directors often have very poor relations with the White House.  Basically, there's a lot to do.  Although I do think there's reason to believe that Petraeus will have a significantly stronger relationship with Obama than many directors have had with their respective presidents.  

But at the moment I think the strongest connection that Petraeus has with the CIA currently is the use of drones to attack insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  At first glance this may sound like a cozy relationship--Petraeus has certainly had contact with CIA officers working in the area, and those responsible for operating the drones in the area.  But I'm skeptical at just how in sync Petraeus' preferences would be as the Agency's leader with those career officials in the Agency itself.  Some authors have argued that the CIA has, throughout its history, pretty firmly embraced the sexier tasks of covert operations as opposed to intelligence gathering.  Currently this has manifested itself in the form of the CIA's stewardship of the drone programs.  

Alternatively, Petreaus' approach to Iraq and Afghanistan has placed a significant emphasis on the human element of the operations--he's been pretty active in integrating military and political operations and taking a more robust approach to warfighting.  If he appoaches his job with this same sort of emphasis on robustness while at the CIA, then I wonder just how much resistance he'll run into should he try to beef up the intelligence gathering and analysis areas of the CIA's operations.

Basically, there's a distinct possibility that Petraeus will be a bad Director of Central Intelligence--however great a general he may be.  And this is not necessarily any fault of Petraeus'--as I mentioned above, the CIA has a reputation for being particularly difficult for its bosses to deal with.  Furthermore, replacing Stanley McChrystal with Petraeus may have been a brilliant political move that offered Obama some cover from critics, but playing the Petraeus card can only work so often.  I'm not convinced that letting him be for the time being wouldn't be a better bet.  Some day he might make a great Secretary of Defense, but until he's eligible he might just be of greater use in the field.  But maybe there are some political points to be had by bringing him closer to the administration?  

Welcome Aboard!

The title is slightly inappropriate, as Italy had previously decided to send military advisors to Libya.  Maybe we should say welcome more aboad, or welcome aboard again.  Well...whatever.  The point is Britain and France had previously been pleading with their NATO allies for more support in the air campaign to remove Ghadaffi from power and replace his autocracy with a "democratic government" protect civilians.  But now the Italians have decided to contribute some planes to the campaign to help out their British and French pals.

I don't know what the recent media climate has been like in Italy, but with Berlusconi's troubles lately, I have to wonder if we're observing an example of that elusive animal---the diversionary use of force.  Or, maybe it's simply a desire to exert more control over a conflict that has been having some less than desirable spillover effects on states that are geographically proximate to the turmoil unfoling in North Africa.  I think events over the past couple of weeks have continued to add some support for what others have previously made note of regarding the effects of immigration on decisions to partake in the Libyan intervention (See these links for previous comments on this subject by Steve Saideman and Phil Arena).

Healthcare Incentives

I've apparently been sitting on this post for a while, so this might be (is quite literally) old news for many out there.  It's an op-ed piece from The New York Times from a few months back on the healthcare legislation (No, this it not about IR).   

What caught my eye was at the end of the article when he starts talking about the incentives created by mandating that people obtain health insurance.  The gist of it is that in spite of all of the cries about this legislation representing the onslaught of the communist hoards, this kind of legislation might actually help to promote the capitalist spirit.  Leonhardt (the author) argues that ensuring that everyone has access to decent healthcare and retirement will allow/encourage individuals to take greater risks than they otherwise would.  When individuals get healthcare primarily through their employer, and when individual premiums are generally through the roof, thereby leading many healthy people to not buy insurance if they don't already have it, people will be more reluctant to leave the safety of their cushy corporate or government job for the sake of starting up a business.  Leaving that job means having to provide yourself with insurance at a much higher cost, and this is something that those with a family may be especially reluctant to do.

I think this article has two particularly interesting points.  1) It challenges the typical narrative that surrounds the healthcare by offering a third view, asserting that this does not have to be a zero-sum game between fans of the free-market and fans of social welfare programs, and 2) offers a decent example of the potentially counterintuitive effects that some legislation might have.  

One problem that I have with this argument is that it assumes most individuals are generally worried about the provision of healthcare for their families, and seems to ignore that other important aspect that employment carries---money.  While ensuring your children's health coverage is certainly important, putting food on the table is also important.  If one parent's income can provide for the family so the other parent can give a crack at starting a new company, then that's great.  However, I suspect that many people would still be reluctant to leave their jobs knowing that this will potentially slice their family income in half.  Even if everyone is still covered by the spouse's workplace coverage, that's a pretty big gamble.  This does not mean that Leonhardt's argument is wrong per se, but that it may simply apply to a much smaller subsample of the population than he makes it sound.  I would imagine that this would also have some minor effect in increasing the unemployment rate, if we assume that of all the folks that do decide to take this gamble, the majority will not succeed in starting up a successful business.     

I think this is a generally incomplete picture, but fundamentally serves as a decent example of how the effects of legislation can be counterintuitive because they alter the basic incentive structures that people face.  Granted, it will take several years to find out if the legislation has ever had these sorts of effects.