Tag Archives: foreign policy

Mapping Literal Place Names

Place names are another one of those micro-institutions. They often carry a linguistic legacy indicating some important discoverer, inhabitant, or conqueror. Changes in place names are significant too. (Would Sinatra’s “New Amsterdam, New Amsterdam” have rolled off the tongue nearly as nicely?) As the names accumulate history and new generations become accustomed to them, however, we often lose the literal sense of their meaning. In an effort to help undo that, the Atlas of True Names ”reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings,of the familiar terms on today’s maps of the World, Europe, the British Isles and the United States.”

Here are a couple of examples, and there is much more at the link:

sample_us_west

true-names

Risk, Overreaction, and Control

11-M_El_How many people died because of the September 11 attacks? The answer depends on what you are trying to measure. The official estimate is around 3,000 deaths as a direct result of hijacked aircraft and at the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania. Those attacks were tragic, but the effect was compounded by overreaction to terrorism. Specifically, enough Americans substituted driving for flying in the remaining months of 2001 to cause 350 additional deaths from accidents.

David Myers was the first to raise this possibility in a December, 2001, essay. In 2004, Gerd Gigerenzer collected data and estimated the 350 deaths figure, resulting from what he called “dread risk”:

People tend to fear dread risks, that is, low-probability, high-consequence events, such as the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. If Americans avoided the dread risk of flying after the attack and instead drove some of the unflown miles, one would expect an increase in traffic fatalities. This hypothesis was tested by analyzing data from the U.S. Department of Transportation for the 3 months following September 11. The analysis suggests that the number of Americans who lost their lives on the road by avoiding the risk of flying was higher than the total number of passengers killed on the four fatal flights. I conclude that informing the public about psychological research concerning dread risks could possibly save lives.

Does the same effect carry over to other countries and attacks? Alejandro López-Rousseau looked at how Spaniards responded to the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid. He found that activity across all forms of transportation decreased–travelers did not substitute driving for riding the train.

What could explain these differences? One could be that Americans are less willing to forego travel than Spaniards. Perhaps more travel is for business reasons and cannot be delayed. Another possibility is that Spanish citizens are more accustomed to terrorist attacks and understand that substituting driving is more risky than continuing to take the train. There are many other differences that we have not considered here–the magnitude of the two attacks, feelings of being “in control” while driving, varying cultural attitudes.

This post is simply meant to make three points. First, reactions to terrorism can cause additional deaths if relative risks are not taken into account. Cultures also respond to terrorism in different ways, perhaps depending on their previous exposure to violent extremism. Finally, the task of explaining differences is far more difficult than establishing patterns of facts.

(For more on the final point check out Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, which motivated this post.)

Python for Political Scientists, Spring 2013 Recap

pythonThis spring Josh Cutler‘s Python course was back by popular demand. (This time it was known as “Computational Political Economy” but I like the less formal title.) I participated this time around as a teaching assistant rather than student, and it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. The course syllabus and schedule is on Github.

Class participants were expected to have a basic familiarity with Python from going through Zed Shaw’s book over Christmas break outside of class. Each Tuesday Josh would walk them through a new computer science concept and explain how it could be used for social science research. These topics included databases, networks, web scraping, and linear programming. On Thursdays they would come to a lab session and work together in small groups to solve problems or answer questions based on some starter code that I supplied. I generally tried to make the examples relevant and fun but you would have to ask them whether I succeeded.

The class ended this past Saturday with final presentations, which were all great. The first project scraped data from the UN Millenium Development Goal reports and World Bank statistics to compare measures of maternal mortality in five African countries and show how they differed–within the same country! This reminded me of Morten Jerven’s book Poor Numbers on the inaccuracy of African development statistics (interview here).

In the second presentation, simulated students were treated with one of several education interventions to see how their abilities changed over time. These interventions could be applied uniformly to everyone or targeted at those in the bottom half of the distribution. Each child in the model had three abilities that interacted in different ways, and interventions could target just one of these abilities or several in combination. Combining these models with empirical data on programs like Head Start is an interesting research program.

The third presentation also used a computational model. Finding equilibrium networks of interstate alliances is incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to do analytically when the number of states is large. The model starts with pre-specified utility functions and runs until the network hits an equilibria. Changing starting values allows for the discovery of multiple equilibria. This model will also be combined with empirical data in the future.

For the fourth and final presentation, one participant collected data on campaign events in Germany for each of the political parties during the current election cycle. This reminded me of a Washington Post website (now taken down) detailing campaign visits in 2008 that I scraped last year and used in lab once this semester.

These examples show the wide variety of uses for programming in social science. From saving time in data collection to generating models that could not be done without the help of algorithms, a little bit of programming knowledge goes a long way. Hopefully courses like this will become more prominent in social science graduate (and undergraduate) programs over the coming years. Thanks to Josh and all the class participants for making it a great semester!

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Note: I am happy to give each of the presenters credit for their work, but did not want to reveal their names here due to privacy concerns. If you have questions about any of the presentations I can put you in touch with their authors via email.

Kurds and Statelessness

Kurdish peshmerga--literally "those who face death"--standing guard at Shenarwe Mountain

Kurdish peshmerga–literally “those who face death”–standing guard at Shenarwe Mountain

Last week one of my academic heroes, James C. Scott, came to Duke to give two talks. The first was a lunchtime discussion of his recent book, Two Cheers for Anarchism. The second was a lecture elaborating on The Art of Not Being Governed. We have discussed the argument of the latter book here before. To oversimplify quite a bit, Scott says that the upland peoples of Southeast Asia consciously evaded the intrusion of lowland governments into their lives.

Scott recognizes that his argument applies outside of Asia as well, but does not delve into specifics. My favorite example of this is the Kurdish people, who are located in the mountainous region of northern Iraq, southern Turkey, northeastern Syria, and northwestern Iran. As Scott would say, they are at the periphery of several states and the center of none. It is also an increasingly strategic region, and Kurds find themselves in a position to shape the balance of power:

After decades of persecution and genocide, the Kurds have found a way to operate in a neighborhood where clear-cut borders can often be more of a nuisance than a boon. Loosely promised a state by the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, the Kurdish people have learned the hard way that maps don’t necessarily dictate facts on the ground, as any observer of Mideast history and politics can attest. “Though the Kurds are said to be the world’s largest stateless people,” writes Time contributor Pelin Turgut, “Kurdish leaders … say they are no longer interested in a single Kurdish state but in a loose federation that spans various national borders.” Rather than waiting for Mideast leaders or the international community to make a deal for a state, the Kurds seem to be playing a regional game of “Let’s Make A Deal.”

With the recent call for a ceasefire by PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, Kurdish-Turkish relations appear to be improving. This is an important transition since until now Kurdish leaders have been closer to Baghdad than Ankara. Bashar al-Assad has recently increased Kurdish autonomy as he seeks their support in Syria’s civil war. To take an optimistic view, this stateless people may soon find themselves playing kingmaker in the region.

See also: “The Kurdish Factor” by Matthieu Akins

Off to ISA

Blog-ReceptionThe International Studies Association is meeting this week in San Francisco. This will be my first time attending, so I found Megan MacKenzie’s survival guide helpful. Here are some relavent Do’s:

  • Do remember that a full-on formal business suit isn’t necessarily the standard for men or women–especially if you are under 25.
  • Do keep a stash of protein/granola bars, fruit, yogurts in your room and in your conference bag.

And some Don’ts:

  • Don’t follow the advice “ask a question at every panel, but start by talking about your research first.”
  • Don’t take it personally if the presentation you have been feverishly preparing has less than 3 attendees or it turns out you’re on a smashemup panel with 4 other folks who do completely different things. (added by commenter Daniel Levine)

Safe travels to all who are attending, and maybe I will see some of you at the blogging reception.

The Randomness of Borders

Fifty US States Redrawn with Equal Population

Fifty US States Redrawn with Equal Population

Rivers and oceans help to form natural boundaries, but if it’s a straight line you can bet that it’s essentially random–and it might even be in the wrong place:

Four Corners Monument, which marks the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, lies 1,807 feet (550 meters) east of where it would have been placed in 1875 had surveyor Chandler Robbins used a modern GPS device to pinpoint the coordinates he was tasked with locating.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. Once set in stone, monuments become law. “Even if the surveyor made some grand mistake, once the monument is set and accepted, end of story. Where the monument is, that’s where the boundary is,” said Dave Doyle, chief geodetic surveyor at the National Geodetic Survey (NGS).

Those straight lines have a value though–they are easy to verify and make it simple to calculate the land area within a specified region. Linear borders for a parcel of land can increase its value up to 30 percent say economists Gary Libecap and Dean Lueck:

They look at the 116 billion square meters of land in the state of Ohio. Because of an accident of history, a large fraction of these square meters were assembled into irregularly shaped parcels via an uncoordinated process of private claims by independent individuals. The rest were assembled first into rectangular parcels along the lines of the survey called for in the Northwest Ordinance and then transfered to private ownership.

It’s worth reading the paper to get all the details, but the punch line is that this difference in the initial bundling of small bits of land had a lasting effect on how they are used. Today, more than 200 years later, a flat square meter is worth 30% less if it was initially assigned to an irregularly shaped parcel.

I have been reading up on border arrangements in Europe and Africa lately as part of a project on state-making. The best introduction I have found so far is that of Jeffrey Herbst, who argues that maps and formal boundaries were not developed in Africa because low population densities made them useless. In fact, it took until 1975 for population density of Africa to rival that of Europe in the 15th century. For another look at the randomness of borders, check out this paper by John McCauley and Dan Posner.

See also: Ian Lustick on Israel’s borders

Hackers vs. Diplomats

XKCD's Map of the Internet, 2006

XKCD’s Map of the Internet, 2006

Katherine Maher’s Foreign Policy piece got a lot of (deserved) attention last week. If the topic interests you, go read the whole thing. I’ll highlight the parts that are most relevant to our recent conversations on internet politics.

On the web as geography:

Like all new frontiers, cyberspace’s early settlers declared themselves independent — most famously in 1996, in cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Barlow asserted a realm beyond borders or government, rejecting the systems we use to run the physical universe. “Governments of the Industrial World,” he reproached, “You have no sovereignty where we gather.… Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.” …

Barlow was right, in part. Independence was a structural fact of cyberspace, and free expression and communication were baked into the network. The standards and protocols on which the Internet runs are agnostic: They don’t care whether you were in Bangkok, Buenos Aires, or Boise. If they run into an attempt to block traffic, they merely reroute along a seemingly infinite network of decentralized nodes, inspiring technologist John Gilmore’s maxim: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

On the promise of the internet for promoting freedom:

Information has always been power, and governments have long sought to control it. So for countries where power is a tightly controlled narrative, parsed by state television and radio stations, the Internet has been catastrophic. Its global, decentralized networks of information-sharing have routed around censorship — just as Gilmore promised they would. It gives people an outlet to publish what the media cannot, organize where organizing is forbidden, and revolt where protest is unknown.

On the changing reality–increasingly state-based control:

Recently, the network research and analytics company Renesys tried to assess how hard it would be to take the world offline. They assessed disconnection risk based on the number of national service providers in every country, finding that 61 countries are at severe risk for disconnection, with another 72 at significant risk. That makes 133 countries where network control is so centralized that the Internet could be turned off with not much more than a phone call.

It seems our global Internet is not so global.

From my perspective I can only hope that we will find the equivalent of “internet mountains” that will remain hard to govern. It is possible that some nation states will even facilitate this. (I am thinking here of The Pirate Bay’s move from a US-based .com domain to a Swedish .se address.) The emperor may still be far away, but he’s getting closer.

The German Tank Problem

Restored Panther tank, recovered from a Polish swamp. Private collection of the late Jacques Littlefield, Portola Valley CA.

Restored Panther tank recovered from a Polish swamp. Private collection of the late Jacques Littlefield, Portola Valley CA.

A few weeks ago I was talking with Kieran Healy about the impact the Second World War had on social science research. Specifically we discussed Machine Dreams and Keep from All Thoughtful Men. The conversation became less esoteric more interesting when he brought up the German tank problem, which I had not heard before in this particular form.

Richard Ruggles of Harvard and Henry Brodie of the State Department wrote the original statement of the problem in a 1947 JASA article:

In early 1943 the Economic Warfare Division of the American Embassy in London started to analyze markings and serial numbers obtained from captured German equipment in order to obtain estimates of German war production and strength….

Various kinds of captured enemy equipment were studied by this technique. The first product to be so analyzed was tires, and after this tanks, trucks, guns, flying bombs, and rockets were studied. Aircraft markings were not studied by the Economic Warfare Division, since, by previous agreement, the British Air Ministry bore the responsibility for all estimates on aircraft production. The uses of the intelligence derived from the markings were varied. At times it helped decide the target systems of the air forces; on other occasions it gave indications of German strength in weapons such as tanks and rockets.

The Allies needed to estimate German manufacturing capacity for a number of reasons. That information would give them a sense of how quickly the needed to produce to keep up. It would also let them know about how many factories would need to be targeted for air raids. This could also allow US and British forces to estimate whether the raids were effective at reducing German production.

So how did they do it? Well, in typical German fashion the Axis powers were quite organized, and many vehicle components bore markings that revealed information about their provenance. The Allied researchers used a bit of intuition (month codes should have more variance than year codes, for example) coupled with solid statistical know-how. Back to Ruggles and Brodie:

[A]ll Mark I tanks fell in the series 0 to 20,000, all Mark IIs in the series 20,000 to 30,000, and so on. When the cases in any particular series were arranged in an array, it became evident that some central authority had allotted the various producers one or more bands of numbers within the series.

Oversimplifying just a bit, the serial numbers were quasi-random draws from a uniform distribution. If each number revealed information about the date and place of manufacture, the Allies could estimate the rate at which Germany was producing tanks and the number it currently had. In statistical terms the problem is to estimate the maximum of a uniform distribution. (Perhaps I found Kieran’s example so interesting because I have been asked to solve this problem in a number of ways in statistics homework assignments but never with such a real-world motivation.)

After the war actual production data became available, allowing us to see how good the estimates actually were. I’ll omit the technical details of estimation for now, but they are available in the paper and at the Wikipedia article linked above. In short the statistical analysis was pretty darn good–much better than any of the guesses by field agents at the time:

RugglesBrodie

Allied estimates of German war production tended to be fairly accurate. The use of statistical methods greatly improved the accuracy of estimates of human intelligents agents.

For tanks specifically, estimation accuracy increased as the war went on. Analysts were even able to approximate the proportion of tanks produced by each manufacturer.

RugglesBrodie2

RugglesBrodie3

Not bad! I hope you have enjoyed this bit of history as much as I did. It’s a nice motivation for estimating the maximum of a discrete uniform distribution. More than that, though, it’s a testament to the applicability of statistical know-how to potentially life saving problems.

(NB: This is my 300th post on YSPR since we got started nearly two years ago. Thanks for being part of the conversation!)

Leadership Targeting and Perverse Incentives

Enrique Pena Nieto with supporters. Photograph: Daniel Aguilar/Getty Images

Enrique Pena Nieto with supporters. Photograph: Daniel Aguilar/Getty Images

If targeting of Drug Trafficking Organization (DTO) leaders in Mexico has contributed to high levels of violence, as I argue in a working paper, then why hasn’t the Mexican government stopped the policy? Under former president Felipe Calderon there were a number of possible answers, included the fact that his get-tough policy toward crime was a major part of his campaign strategy in 2006. But that does not explain why the policy has persisted under the new president.

When Enrique Pena Nieto won the 2012 election he promised that his crime fighting policy would aim to “reduce violence and above all protect the lives of all Mexicans.” The new administration acknowledges that leadership targeting led to increased violence, and a number of experts seem to agree. So why hasn’t the policy been changed?

The answer comes down to cold hard cash, and lots of it. US officials have been strongly supportive of DTO leadership targeting, echoing as it does the American policy of targeting terrorist leaders. And they have backed up that rhetoric with generous funding for Mexican security forces:

On Monday, Interior Minister Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said the strategy caused a fragmentation of criminal groups that had made them “more violent and much more dangerous,” as they branched out into homicide, extortion, robbery and kidnapping.

The next day, Jesus Murillo Karam, the new attorney general, said in a radio interview that the strategy was responsible for spawning 60 to 80 small and medium-sized organized crime groups.

But just because the strategy has taken some hits doesn’t mean it’s dead. And Peña Nieto, who took office Dec. 1, is unlikely to kill it….

Peña Nieto is also unlikely to jeopardize the generous security assistance provided by the United States, which helped design the kingpin strategy. The U.S. is intimately involved in carrying it out, providing intelligence on drug leaders’ whereabouts and spending millions to strengthen the Mexican security forces who act on that intelligence.

All of which probably explains why, shortly after the ministers’ criticism of kingpin, a top presidential advisor told The Times that the new government had no plans to abandon it.

“That will not stop at all,” said the advisor, who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

One can appreciate the rock and hard place between which Pena Nieto finds himself. His party has been criticized for being in the pocket of the cartels, so he cannot afford to look weak. There are also the entrenched interests of the military and police to keep in mind–they have no interest in giving up power. Unfortunately for the tens of thousands of Mexicans who have lost their lives or loved ones to violence over the last seven years, their voice in the government has not kept his word.

More Baby Name Regulation

We just talked about this less than two weeks ago: countries that have lists of banned baby names, or lists of permissible names. Azerbaijan will soon join the second category, with one important difference. The Azeri government’s justification for the new rule is that some monikers are politically unacceptable:

The “green” list will include names which can be freely given to children. The “yellow” list will contain unwelcome names – these might be ones likely to be mocked or that sound bad in other languages. The names from the third category, the “red” list, will be forbidden. They might refer to people who are considered aggressors against the Azeri people or have double or obscene meaning in the Azeri language.

A government committee has been compiling the list of acceptable names (currently about 8,000) for several years. The most common bans are for “foreign sounding” names like Dmitry and Lenin. “National” names like Pioneer and Tractor are on the green list.

[via PRI's The World]