University Administration Jobs and Hiring Practices
This morning, UNC students and faculty awoke to an email from UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp notifying the university community that Dr. Bruce Carney , Samuel Baron Professor of Physics and Astronomy and the interim Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at UNC, has been appointed the permanent Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost. I have absolutely no doubt that Dr. Carney deserves the job, will serve the university proudly and competently and will prove to be a very good hire in the years to come. Dr. Carney has been at UNC since 1980, starting off as a lowly assistant professor and working all the way up to his current endowed chair and serving as chair of the Physics department and both Senior Associate Dean and Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences along the way. What was interesting to me when I read the email from Chancellor Thorp was that the university held a national search, brought in three external candidates for interviews, lectures and Q&A, and then hired the internal, interim position-holder that was not a candidate for the position.
Categories: climate Tags: climate, college, document-has, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently
Connecting Government and Academia
Yesterday, I spent the day in Washington, DC attending an all-day panel on political violence that brought together an array of academics from various fields including political science, criminology, sociology, public policy, statistics, mathematics and psychology, private sector analysts and researchers, and government practitioners from various departments and agencies. The panel was put together by the Institute for Homeland Security Solutions , a collaborative effort between Research Triangle Institute International , the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, and the Human Factors and Behavioral Sciences Division (HFD) of the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, which is the primary research and development arm of DHS. I'm not allowed to divulge any details from the all-day event nor can I talk about who was present or what they said since government officials and agencies were involved and are funding the project (which kind of sucks but makes sense and is understandable), but this kind of academia-government interaction is exactly the type of collaborative effort that is needed to foster cooperation between academics and practitioners, and the kind of interaction that Joe Nye, Dan Drezner and others have called for in recent months. One of the primary goals of the discussion was to bring social science scholarship and methodology to the table to help government agencies find answers to problems and questions that they face on a daily basis. There is a lot that government practitioners can learn from social science research and the ways we approach complex questions.
Categories: climate Tags: climate, document-has, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently, social science
Categories: climate, internet Tags: climate, document-has, internet, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently
Economics of the Somali Pirate Business Model
This semester, I'm teaching four recitation sections of POLI 150: Intro to International Relations here at UNC (which is being taught by Dr. Oatley with Sarah and Will as fellow TA's). In each recitation I always like to spend the first five to ten minutes of class talking about current news and events in international politics and try to connect the theories and frameworks that we are teaching our students to the real world so they see that what they're learning actually does have value and provides explanatory power over topics outside of the classroom. For my Wednesday afternoon recitation, after whatever pressing new events (this week it was the coup in Niger, the Winter Olympics, Greek sovereign default, and the Dalai Lama meeting) that they bring up have been explored, somehow the conversation always turns to pirates, how Somali piracy works, how and why countries respond to pirate attacks, etc. It's a great topic to discuss anarchy, collective action problems, bargaining, state vs. non-state actors and informal networks and markets. It seems like my obsession with pirates is starting to rub off on my students as each week they're bringing up new interesting questions and finding really awesome articles like the one I'm linking to below. I was going to go into detail about this article, but instead I'm just going to completely outsource this post to Wired Magazine who provide an absolutely fantastic analysis of the incentives, costs and benefits facing not only Somali pirates but "shippers, insurers, private security contractors and numerous national navies" operating off the coast of Somalia. This is just an absolute must-read.
Categories: climate Tags: climate, document-has, economics, international relations, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently, pirates
US Navy and Pirates!
In my never-ending quest to make this blog the go-to place for piracy news, I bring you the most recent details of the US Navy and multinational task force kicking some pirate ass: Eight suspected pirates were apprehended after a counter-piracy task force foiled an attack on a vessel in the Gulf of Aden, authorities said Monday. The suspects were taken aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer, the USS Farragut, U.S. 5th Fleet spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Corey Barker told CNN. The 5th Fleet is part of multinational Combined Task Force 151, aimed at combating piracy in the Gulf of Aden and nearby waters. The eight were apprehended by coalition warships, the task force said in a news release issued Monday. The Tanzanian-flagged MV Barakaale 1 came under attack in the gulf and alerted other vessels in the region by radio. An SH-60B Seahawk helicopter, from the Farragut, was dispatched to the vessel, the release said
Categories: climate Tags: climate, document-has, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently, pirates
One Last ISA Post
For those who were interested in the content of my talk beyond what Alex wrote , Robert Farley of LGM live-tweeted the roundtable. Apparently, here's what I said: Winecoff: who am I? Winecoff: nobody who has any authority should ever listen to what I say. Winecoff: blogging opened important avenues for my academic work. Winecoff: dr.
Categories: climate Tags: climate, document-has, isa, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently
ISA
Today and tomorrow the entire IPE@UNC crew will be traveling to New Orleans for the annual meetings of the International Studies Association. Yeah, that's right: we're holding our annual meeting in New Orleans the same week as Mardi Gras. Tuesday is Fat, the conference starts on Wednesday
Categories: climate, internet Tags: academia, climate, document-has, international relations, internet, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently
Categories: climate Tags: climate, document-has, japan, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently
Did You Know?
When I was growing up, I'd have SportsCenter on in the morning while I was getting ready for school. My favorite segment of the show, "Did You Know?", always came up between 6:50 and 6:58am which was perfect since we always left the house at 7am sharp to make it to school on-time. I'm pretty sure that segment is the reason that I love facts and statistics so much. Another love of mine has been technology and gadgets, which has had me thinking lately about how quickly new technologies are invented that supersede the capabilities of current technology. A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about purchasing a Kindle and Will and I had a conversation about how quickly someone would invent something better and whether it was worth it to get the first generation Kindle with no backlight, no color and pretty much no frills or wait til something better came out. Bouncing around the interwebs lately has been noise about the release of the new Apple Tablet which may challenge the Kindle (although McMegan doesn't think so ). Apple is also slated to release a new iPhone, the 4g edition, sometime in April/May (which gets my pick for the greatest personal technological advancement of the naughties.) Or maybe something else will enter the market that will completely re-vamp current e-reader technology. I was pleasantly surprised to come across a video this morning that essentially combines my fascination with technology and my love of facts. This video is full of stats about information technology and innovation and is titled "Did You Know?" It's a really fun watch and shows us just where we are in the course of human civilization and what the future (hopefully) will bring our way
Categories: climate Tags: contact-the, deliver-this, feed, feed-content, miscellany, not-available-, publisher, that-requires, the-problem, the-publisher, the-specific, what-can-i-do-about-this, you-because
Economics Smackdown
Dan Drezner lays the smackdown on economics in this little bit of commentary from Marketplace . For decades, there was a clear but unspoken pecking order in the social sciences. Economists were royalty, and every other discipline was part of the peasantry. Economists were treated as real scholars, with their very own Nobel Prize and everything. Political scientists, on the other hand, were mocked for having the word "science" in the title. The old joke goes that an economist who switches to studying political science raises the average intelligence of both disciplines. It's not true, but the perception is powerful
Categories: climate Tags: climate, document-has, economics, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently, political science
CPI - Christmas Price Index
Clever holiday way of calculating yearly changes in prices by PNC Wealth Management: Thanks to the weak economy in 2009 the PNC Christmas Price Index increased by a modest 1.8 percent compared to last year in the whimsical economic analysis by PNC Wealth Management based on the prices of gifts in the holiday classic, "The Twelve Days of Christmas." According to the 26th annual survey, the price tag for the PNC CPI is $21,465.56 in 2009, just $385.46 more than last year. It is the smallest increase since 2002, when the index fell 7.6 percent. The PNC CPI exceeds the U.S. government’s Consumer Price Index, the widely used measure of inflation calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is down 1.3 percent this year. Among the 12 gifts in the Index, three items fell measurably from last year while five increased in cost and four remained steady. As part of its annual tradition, PNC Wealth Management also tabulates the “True Cost of Christmas,” which is the total cost of items gifted by a True Love who repeats all of the song’s verses. This holiday season, very generous True Loves will receive a bargain and pay $87,402.81 for all 364 gifts, a mere 0.9 percent increase compared to last year
Categories: climate Tags: climate, document-has, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently
The Year’s Best in Global Political Economy
Drezner asks for five nominations for the Albies, his award for most paradigm-shifting articles/books/ideas of the past year in political economy, named in honor of Albert Hirschman. Here are my suggestions: 1. The article in IO by Mansfield and Mutz on sociotropic attitudes and their influence on trade policy. I'm not 100% convinced in the result (and the authors have not yet made the data available), but if it holds up to further scrutiny it will make several decades of research -- and the dominant models of trade politics -- obsolete. 2. Jeffrey Friedman's article [pdf] in the Critical Review on the financial crisis. The thesis isn't exactly new; libertarians have long argued that regulations lead to perverse incentives that have deleterious effects. But in terms of this particular crisis and the particular mechanisms that contributed to it, I think his argument carries a good deal of weight.
Categories: amazon, climate, review Tags: amazon, climate, document-has, international relations, ipe, miscellany, moved-here-, permanently, review
Distilling Great Thinkers
Tyler Cowen has an interesting post over at MR: Following up on a discussion, Arnold Kling asks: 'Should we approach famous thinkers by digesting distilled versions, or should we study them in the original?' I'm for distilling, for reasons Arnold offers, but I'm also for reading the originals. Here are a few reasons why, drawn from a number of longer sources I have read and digested: 1. Secondary sources are unreliable and they do not capture or understand many of the original insights. To remove it from the distant past, what I get from John Rawls or Robert Nozick is quite distinct from what I get from their distillers. 2. Truly great thinkers require numerous distillers. Can you read just one book on Keynes? No.
Categories: amazon, climate Tags: academia, amazon, climate, document-has, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently
Gaming Chinese Marriages
Tyler Cowen passes along this little nugget from China, where a husband and wife entered into a contract whereby she may only beat him one each week.: The 32-year-old man, who was named by the Chongqing Evening News as Mr Zhang, took the unusual step after suffering intense abuse from his wife, who studies kung fu. "I don't want to beat him, but arguments are inevitable and I can't help myself," his wife told the newspaper. She added that in the week before they signed the deal, she had beaten him up three times. ... In order to curb his wife's aggression, Mr Zhang proposed signing a contract in front of his in-laws. If his wife breaches the contract, she has to return to her parents' home for three days. "She is very obedient to her parents, and her parents will support me and blame her," he said. I was a bit surprised that Cowen didn't tie this to the already-bad-and-worsening highly skewed female-to-male ratio in China, which is largely a product of the one-child policy but has the side-effect of creating a scarcity of women. This provides the existing women with lots of relationship leverage, which might be why Mr. Zhang's parents are relatively nonplussed: Mr Zhang's parents told the newspaper that although they felt bad that their son was regularly attacked, the couple were a good match.
Categories: climate Tags: china, climate, document-has, game theory, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently
Categories: climate Tags: climate, document-has, mathematics, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently
Russian Government Advocates Punching Russian Policemen
No, seriously : [H]ere’s one you don’t see very often: the Interior Minister of a country suggesting the people should literally hit back at the police. As reported in the Washington Post, Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev stated: May a citizen hit back at a policeman who has attacked him? Yes he may; if he is not a criminal, if he is walking along quietly and breaking no rules. Moreover, the Power Vertical quotes a Russian MP, Andrei Makarov, as suggesting: You can neither modernize nor reform the Interior Ministry. You can only abolish it. The whole police force needs to be decommissioned and cleansed with help from civil society and human rights groups.’ While such a comment might not be unexpected from an opposition deputy (to the extent that any even exist in Russia these days), what is particularly interesting is that Makarov is actually a fairly prominent member of Russia’s ruling party, United Russia.
Categories: climate Tags: argentina, climate, document-has, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently, russia
Categories: climate Tags: climate, document-has, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently
Tips for Conveying How Busy and Important you are to Your Colleagues
Feminist Law Profs Blog and The Faculty Lounge put up two great and funny posts on ways to look productive to your colleagues.
Categories: climate, review Tags: academia, climate, document-has, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently, review
PSA
The annual meeting of the Peace Science Society begins today (Friday) in Chapel Hill at the Franklin Hotel. It's not too late to register, and registration is free for those with institutional memberships (i.e. for those whose universities pay a blanket fee covering all faculty and students). The web site, including list of presentations, is here . There are many presentations of interest to IPE students, conflict students, and others as well. And IPE@UNC will be well-represented.
Categories: climate Tags: climate, document-has, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently
FYI
For those in the area, Fareed Zakaria will be speaking to the Triangle Institute for Security Studies tomorrow on Duke's West campus. More info here . Also, UNC will be hosting the annual meeting of the Peace Science Society Nov.
Categories: climate Tags: climate, document-has, miscellany, moved-here-, moved-permanently, permanently
