- Democratic Dominoes: A Guest Post - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog - In a recent paper, co-author Andrea Dean and I investigate whether democratic dominoes like the ones American foreign policy posits actually exist and, if they do, how “hard” they fall.
Does democracy really spread between countries? If so, how much? We find that democratic dominoes do in fact exist, but they fall significantly “lighter” than foreign policy applications of this principle pretend.
Countries only “catch” about 11 percent of their geographic neighbors’ average changes in democracy; the modesty of this spread rate is consistent over time. Our analysis extends back to 1850, but 150-plus years ago, like today, changes in countries’ democracies were only mildly contagious.
- 80smusicvids.com - Content -
- MPIP - Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project -
- Featured Desktop: All About the Icons - Desktop icons - maybe they should be about task and not about application?
- The Top 50 School Districts 2008 - Philly Mag - Several statistical techniques were used to combine and rank the school district data on performance, including factor analysis, standardization of scores, and Grey relational analysis, to create a common metric for comparison. If a school had a small amount of missing data, the mean of the missing item was used, so as not to bias the outcomes and so we could include the school’s results within its district. These techniques were also used to rank elementary, middle and high schools within districts. Finally, we examined performance with respect to costs in each district, to identify overperforming school districts.
- 4/29truth.com: John McCain is a Cylon. -
- Cranky With The Culture - What our culture is giving us now is fast food when in the 60’s and 70’s, it was a meal. The action movies and the video games and the hip hop records may provide us a jolt of energy–Cultural Red Bull–but there is neither brain nor body sustenance in much of the music and film.
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