Best advice I ever got from a poli sci professor — at Northern Illinois, class of 2021 — was "do anything but a poli sci PhD" (from @ches-thurber.bsky.social circa 2019).
Can also confirm that my salary as a federal Management and Program Analyst was higher than most of my PhD graduate friends 😬
Pivot to (Central) Asia
> 50 years of stability
50 years ago we were 3 years away from the Iranian Revolution and 4 years away from the Iraq-Iran War. Anyone who thinks that 50 years of stability in geopolitics is even possible in this domain — well, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell them.
It is 1979. Amidst economic uncertainty, the United States is partnering with Afghan forces to challenge a US adversary.
It is 2007. Amidst economic uncertainty, the United States is partnering with Afghan forces to challenge a US adversary.
It is 2026. Amidst economic uncertainty...
You cannot be saying this kind of thing when your primary job is podcaster.
Data Organization in Spreadsheets Karl W. Broman & Kara H. Woo Pages 2-10 | Received 01 Jun 2017, Accepted author version posted online: 29 Sep 2017, Published online: 24 Apr 2018 1. Introduction 2. Be Consistent 3. Choose Good Names for Things 4. Write Dates as YYYY-MM-DD 5. No Empty Cells 6. Put Just One Thing in a Cell 7. Make it a Rectangle 8. Create a Data Dictionary 9. No Calculations in the Raw Data Files 10. Do Not Use Font Color or Highlighting as Data 11. Make Backups 12. Use Data Validation to Avoid Errors 13. Save the Data in Plain Text Files ABSTRACT Spreadsheets are widely used software tools for data entry, storage, analysis, and visualization. Focusing on the data entry and storage aspects, this article offers practical recommendations for organizing spreadsheet data to reduce errors and ease later analyses. The basic principles are: be consistent, write dates like YYYY-MM-DD, do not leave any cells empty, put just one thing in a cell, organize the data as a single rectangle (with subjects as rows and variables as columns, and with a single header row), create a data dictionary, do not include calculations in the raw data files, do not use font color or highlighting as data, choose good names for things, make backups, use data validation to avoid data entry errors, and save the data in plain text files.
Every day is a good day for sharing one of the most useful papers about research data ever written. PLEASE get your people to understand and follow this advice.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
More details and context about what being a woman math major in the early-2000s was like and why it was so damaging here:
cooperativeoverlapping.substack.com/p/a-fuller-s...
Love that the website is awash with "it's actually okay because" skeets today. 🙃
There has been lots of commentary, on this website, regarding the allegations made against Daniel Biss during his time as a math professor at Chicago.
Current norms are that faculty-student sexual and romantic relations are much more suspect. That is, in my experience, a good thing.
As a 17-year-old commege sophomore, I was sexually harassed by my math professor. It changed, markedly, the trajectory of my life.
I'd earned a full scholarship to study science & engineering at 15. That became impossible when I couldn't even sit in a room alone with a professor without panicking.
Congratulations!
I recommend this report from the Royal Society in 2020.
royalsociety.org/news-resourc...
Important question! The electrolysis of water to gain hydrogen is an option, but the cost range is higher because electrolysis energy costs to get hydrogen from water, which the Royal Academy of Sciences estimates to be 85% of total costs.
my bloomberg terminal is just showing the scene where wile e. coyote runs off past the edge of a cliff, is this good?
Name of the hospital that saved my life (Lucile Packard Children's Hospital) and famous historical figure (Eleanor Rykener) got me Lucille Eleanor.
Run from it, hide from it, the Haber-Bosch Process comes for you all the same.
The interrelationship between the demographic transitional and industrial revolution is also interesting scholarly literature, about which preceded which. See Khan (2008) in Business Review.
ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fedpbr...
Sure! I mean, adoption of innovations in yield-increasing technologies is also itself interesting. Zvi Griliches on hybrid corn is a classic.
www.econometricsociety.org/publications...
Routledge version by Ester Boserup's book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure.
I mean my quip was Boserupian, that societies across the globe have adapted to population pressure with agricultural intensification, and this is a long-run trend across societies.
I'm gonna out myself as being hashtag woke, but personally I prefer to listen to indigenous forms of knowledge, like the choices of the Haudenosaunee to focus production on optimizing caloric yields with the Three Sisters and having early forms of specialization of labor.
Shawn Sprague wrote an interesting piece back in 2024 for the BLS Beyond the Numbers publication on this.
www.bls.gov/opub/btn/vol...
Average weekly hours worked have been decreasing for private nonfarm weekly average hours worked since Q4 1981, punctuated by recessions. There's some interesting recent research on this issue.
Active debates on this question, as far as I can tell! Social policy, automation, and broader macroeconomics does not exist in a vacuum. A summary of some of the notable work up to 2001 on this question can be found in the E-H Encyclopedia.
eh.net/encyclopedia...
Pretty sure the Rubio doctrine is don't tell Trump about things, wait for him to get bored, tell him ~outcome~ is success on the old thing, let him take credit for victory on the old thing while he's distracted on the new thing.
Congrats 🎉!
Who needs Grand Strategy when you can have "fuck it, let's just see where the vibe takes us" Strategy?
The owners of farms who lament the costs of automation overwhelmingly rely on low-wage, high precarity workers who are often undocumented, disadvantaged, and desperate for employment of any sort.
Farm wages are overwhelmingly less than nonfarm wages, especially non-supervisory wages.
Throughout industrialized nations, there's been a long-run decline in hours worked annually. This time is, in fact, used on leisure and other non-work activities.
This has been concurrent with mechanization, automated manufacturing, and the decline in agricultural share of total employment.
Every year we are doomed to recreate Lockhart, and every year we try again try to fit society into cogs that fit our mechanisms, over and ever again, and we face the debate between subsuming all to it or allowing ourselves to be outside of it.
I feel like we're always reinventing a Lockhart's A Mathematician's Lament.
Mathematics for most people is rote application of hand and increasingly digital computation. Which remains a disservice to the creative, exploratory, and playful nature of exploring problems outside of plug and chug.