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Excerpt: Weird, sad but apparently true: at Nottingham University, a PhD student who works on islamic terrorism and an administrator were arrested (though released without charges) because they were in possession of an al-Qaeda manual downloaded from the internet. The twist: the manual was part of an MA dissertation and had been re-submitted as part of a PhD application. Now this is clandestine. THE has the full story, and boing boing has lots of comments on it. All of the sudden, the whole point of urging students to provide proper references and go back to the sources seems rather moot. Technorati-Tags: nottingham,…

Technorati Tags: al-qaeda, Islam, nottingham, plagiarism, political, Political Science, radicalism, science, terrorism, uk, university

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Excerpt:

[/caption] Last Saturday, we presented our ongoing work on collaboration and citation networks in Political Science at the 4th UK Network conference held at the University of Greenwich. For this conference, we created a presentation on Knowledge Networks in European Political Science that summarises most of our findings on political science in Britain and Germany and provides some additional international context. The picture on the right shows a subnetwork of about 320 scientists who mutually cite each others’ work. Watch out for the dense IR/methods cluster and the lack of (mutual) connections between…

Technorati Tags: analysis, bibliometrics, citation, networks, pajek, pdf, Political Science, presentation, sna

Good stuff: On orgtheory.net Kieran reports on a major breakthrough in the exciting and ever so slightly apocryphal sub-subfield of socio-physics. Beware of the Biggs-Hangeron.

continue reading The emerging standard model of socio-physics

Technorati Tags: fun, obscure, social science

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Excerpt: As a subdiscipline, the study of electoral behavior (or “psephology”) begins with a handful of monographs that were published in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. It’s amazing to see how concepts and ideas that were developed in Downs’ “Economic Theory of Democracy” or in the “American Voter” by Campbell et al. some 50 years ago inform our work to the present day. However, the study of electoral behaviour (or electoral behavior – the publisher keep changing the title just to confuse me) did obviously not end with these holy books. From the 1960s on, the discipline was increasingly defined…

Technorati Tags: election, elections, electoral behaviour, electoral studies, library, Political Science, scholarship, sociology, theory, US, voting

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Excerpt: Our project on social (citation and collaboration) networks in British and German political science involves networks with hundreds and thousands of nodes (scientists and articles). At the moment, our data come from the Social Science Citation Index (part of the ISI web of knowledge), and we use a bundle of rather eclectic (erratic?) scripts written in Perl to convert the ISI records into something that programs like Pajek or Stata can read. Some canned solutions (Wos2pajek, network workbench, bibexcel) are available for free, but I was not aware of them when I started this project, did not manage to install…

Technorati Tags: analysis, bibliometrics, citation, network, networks, perl, Political Science, R, science, sna, social, social networks, software, stata

Via Simon Jackman’s blog: Chris Jordan found an intriguing way to visualise some very large, mostly scary national statistics, such as the as the number of plastic cups used on flights in the US every six hours (one million), or the number of cell phones retired every day (426,000). Amazing and aesthetically pleasing in a most disturbing way.Technorati-Tags: statistics, art, politics, USA

Technorati Tags: art, Politics, statistics, USA