Author Archives: schrodt735

Seven current challenges in event data

Posted on March 13, 2019

This is the promised follow-up to last week’s opus, “Stuff I Tell People About Event Data“, herein referenced as SITPAED. It is motivated by four concerns: As I have noted on multiple occasions, the odd thing about event data is … Continue reading →

Posted in Methodology, Programming | 1 Comment

Stuff I tell people about event data

Posted on March 5, 2019

Every few weeks—it’s a low-frequency event with a Poisson distribution, and thus exponentially distributed inter-arrival times—someone contacts me (typically from government, an NGO or a graduate student) who has discovered event data and wants to use it for some project. … Continue reading →

Posted in Methodology | 1 Comment

Instability Forecasting Models: Seven Ethical Considerations

Posted on February 20, 2019

So, welcome, y’all, to the latest bloggy edition on an issue probably relevant to, at best, a couple hundred people, though once again it has been pointed out to me that it is likely to be read by quite a … Continue reading →

Posted in Methodology, Politics | 2 Comments

Yeah, I blog…

Posted on September 13, 2018

A while back I realized I’d hit fifty blog posts, and particularly as recent entries have averaged—with some variance—about 4000 words, that’s heading towards 200,000 words, or two short paperbacks, or about the length of one of the later volumes … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Happy 60th Birthday, DARPA: you’re doomed

Posted on September 6, 2018

Today marks the mid-point of a massive self-congratulatory 60th anniversary celebration by DARPA [1]. So, DARPA, happy birthday! And many happy returns!! YEA!!! That’s a joke, right? Why yes, how did you guess? A 60th anniversary, of course, is very … Continue reading →

Posted in Higher Education, Methodology | Leave a comment

What if a few grad programs were run for the benefit of the graduate students?

Posted on July 16, 2018

I’ve got a note in my calendar around the beginning of August—I was presumably in a really bad mood at [at least] some point over the past year—to retweet a link to my blog post discussing my fondness for math … Continue reading →

Posted in Higher Education, Methodology | Leave a comment

Witnessing a paradigm shift?

Posted on June 18, 2018

The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn is famous—beyond an apparent penchant for throwing ashtrays [1]—for his vastly over-generalized concept of “paradigm shifts” in scientific understanding, where a set of ideas once thought unreasonable becomes the norm, exchanging this status with … Continue reading →

Posted in Methodology | 1 Comment