A colleague has put me onto this fascinating piece from the New Yorker, a review of Philip Tetlock’s book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?. It is a salutary read for those of us who are paid to be political experts; Tetlock found that experts' predictions of whether things would improve, deteriortae or stay the same was ( Read more... )

Reading through Newsweek's fascinating account of how President Bush (failed to) react to Katrina, I was struck by something I've written about here before: the very imperfect information flow from the field to decision-makers. Many interesting observations in the Newsweek article including: When Hurricane Katrina struck, it appears there was no ( Read more... )

13) Knowledge, Power and International Policy Coordination, ed. Peter M. Haas

Originally published as a single issue of the academic journal International Organisation (of which I had not previously heard) this is a very lightly edited repackaging of the papers from that journal by the University of South Carolina Press (of which I had also not ( Read more... )

I've been musing on the way in which information flows in international politics, and my musings have led me to a memory ( Read more... )

2) The Ethos Effect, by L.E. Modesitt Jr

I got this largely at cherylmorgan's suggestion; in an exchange of email a while back, she said that given what I do for a living, she suspected that I would find it an interesting read, and would love to hear my professional opinion of it ( Read more... )

9) The 9/11 Commission Report. OK, perhaps there were less grim things to be reading as I shunted between planes yesterday at Belfast City Airport and then Heathrow; but it's a gripping story, told well, and basically leaves little room for conspiracy theorists - including conspiracy theorists who wanted the Iraqi government to be linked to the ( Read more... )

I just got one of those fake degree spams, you know:

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