From the Monkey Cage: Italy just voted for two very different kinds of populism The botrnot package for the R language: Which world leaders are actually bots? (Use your own judgment) Science community blogs: recognising value and measuring reach Germany being Germany (or Bavaria?): German minister under fire for no women in leadership team 11…
This morning, I came across an outrageously funny a moderately amusing video involving Shaggy’s early 2000s classic, some seriously revamped lyrics, and the man himself (btw, is this blond-hairing an act of cultural appropriation?). Cheap laughs, and the almost heart-warming idea that the FBI could end this, and everything would go back to normal. And…
Last Monday was Commonwealth Day, the date formerly known as Empire Day. I know this because I heard some claptrap on the BBC about 2.5 billion hearts beating as one. All eyes on London etc. Otherwise I would not have known. Let me provide some context for this. At the moment, I live in downtown…
I’m still collecting references for the next iteration of the Extreme Right Bibliography (but I am almost there. Honest to God. Really). Meanwhile, while I should have probably been doing other things, I’ve brushed up my fairly rudimentary R skills and taught myself how to write a similarly rudimentary twitterbot. If you are reading this,…
Spoiler: no spoiler: “What the 2015 Greek debt negotiations tell us about Germany’s negotiating stance on Brexit” (Luuk Molthof on the LSE blog) 48% of scientists on Twitter are social scientists? Only 48%? Interesting piece in the Atlantic about the AfD parliamentary party in the Bundestag and the Bundestag’s interaction with them. If you really,…
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Political Science suffers from generational cycles of collective amnesia. For obvious reasons, (right-wing) populism is a hot topic again, and mature colleagues (cough) may bemoan the fact that they have seen it all before (at least twice). Let them moan. The wheel does get a little better each…
Gary King came here and gave a very cool talk. He experimentally varied the content of small-ish news outlets (!), and the national conversation on Social Media changed massively. In other news, ethics is overrated 😉 Germany’s SPD really dislikes the idea of being in power (or at least in a coalition) The New Statesman…
Personal blogs are so 1990s, yes? This is not the late 1990s. Hey, it’s not even the early Naughties, and has not been for a while. I have had my own tiny corner of the Internet (then hosted on university Web space as it was the norm in the day) since Mosaic came under pressure…
Women don’t like the AfD (and why would they?) The AfD is not particularly attractive for women. Survey data suggest that only one in three AfD voters is a woman. The new national executive has 14 memebers. Just two are of the female persuasion. This amounts to a cool 14%, even less than the female…
One of the best (and most depressing) articles on Trump I’ve read so far: “Inside Trump’s Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation” If you learnt R as a grad student and if that was some time ago (cough), here is help to get you started on the new ways of doing things in R To further drive…