If you’re really dying to read my stuff, follow me at Twitter (@tvchurch) or on Google Reader. I may also put up a few posts at my old blog, RedWhiteMaizeAndBlue, in a not-technically-affiliated-with-Pepperdine sort of way.

I hit 6,000 impressions since October of last year. The NCAA post continues to generate page views. I’ll be doing a much more comprehensive post about it this March.

Thanks for reading.

Why I blog:

There is a painful non-convexity in academic research.  Only really good ideas are worth pursuing but it takes a lot of investment to find out whether any given idea is going to be really good.  Usually you spend a lot of time doing some preliminary thinking just to prove to yourself that this idea is not good enough to turn into a full-fledged paper.  Knowing that most ideas are unlikely to pan out there is an incentive not to experiment on new projects.

That’s from CheapTalk. I started blogging years ago with the understanding that my audience was three of my nerdy friends. For me, blogging is a way to bookmark cool ideas and fix them in my mind by getting them down on paper.

A few articles that caught my eye:

1) Here are two great posts on inequality (Scott Sumner) and (Will Wilkinson). Sumner in particular talks about what inequality statistics fail to measure. Wilkinson’s paper “Thinking Clearly about Economic Inequality” is a classic and *must read* you are going to discuss inequality. There have to be measures of inequality out there that take into account the factors Sumner mentions. Does anyone know of any?

2) Should we engage flawed institutions like the UN Human Rights Council? A report highlighted by David Bosco says:

The overall message from the General Assembly is clear: The Obama administration’s re-engagement in UN human rights diplomacy has persuaded some non-Western countries to rethink their positions. But, in general, the drift away from the West continues, and core disagreements will continue to split the UN membership in the years ahead.

He notes: “They argue that the emnity that the Bush administration generated masked a broader trend against liberal internationalism at the U.N. and a shift toward a strong defense of sovereignty.”

I fear that the costs, in the short term, of sitting on the UNHRC vastly outweigh the eventual benefits from reforming the organization through engagement.

3) The Nobel Prize may highlight China’s human rights problems.

4) Bad news in the Ukraine about political liberalization? Alex Brideau says maybe not.

Haven’t been blogging much because school started back up, and I’ve continued doing research from this summer at the Hoover Institution. More on that later.

1) A talk on complexity and diversity by Scott Page. Professor Page was a terrific professor to have at Michigan – whip smart and very funny. However much you can watch, do it. Make it to his talk ~7:50 on genetic selection, at least. Update: I’ve watched most of the talk while catching up on my reading. Terrific.

2) Keith Hennessey’s very informative post about what White House economic advisors do. Seriously, read this article just to get a feel for how the White House staff operates in relation to one another.

3) P!=NP? I remember James Somers teaching me about the P=NP problem back when we were sophomores in college, but not much else (James is currently offering 3:1 odds that the proof doesn’t actually contribute to the P=NP problem).

4) The incredible children of the H-1B visa. We need more of them.

5) Iranian politics is much more complicated than just Ahmadinejad.

It refers neither to Islam nor to veils. Officials insist the law against face-covering is not discriminatory because it would apply to everyone, not just Muslims. Yet they cite a host of exceptions, including motorcycle helmets, or masks for health reasons, fencing, skiing or carnivals.

I was unaware that Spain and Belgium are also considering bans.

Does anyone know how many Muslims are in the French parliament? The bill goes to the Senate in September. I imagine it will receive near unanimous support there as well? Hopefully it will be ruled as unconstitutional.

What I cannot believe is that the Department of Homeland Security wanted to deny him asylum. I don’t know how the nuts and bolts of asylum work, but couldn’t Yousef have appealed to his Shin Bet friends to vouch for him?

I’ve refrained from commenting on the Gaza-Israel blockade/aid convoy situation.

First rule of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: No one is blameless.

Second rule: There is no level-headed discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Let’s just hope that twenty years from now this isn’t the point in history we identify as the start of a new war in the Middle East.

Promoting his new documentary “South of the Border” in Caracas, Stone heaped praise on Chavez, saying he is leading a movement for “social transformation” in Latin American.

The director defended his decision not to interview Chavez’s opponents, saying that people already hear those complaints and that the movie is not intended as a detailed examination of Chavez’s record.

Ugh. I recently came across this paper (PDF) on uneven playing fields in democracies by Lucan Way and Steven Levitsky. It’s incredibly important to make the distinction between illiberal and liberal democracies. Venezuela has elections, but that doesn’t mean it is a liberal democracy. Opposition candidates face very real punishments for running against Chavez, and radio and television stations who feature anti-Chavez messages often have their broadcasting licenses revoked.

That’s not democracy, and Stone shouldn’t “deeply admire” Chavez.

I’m in the back.

Meeting Meg was fun, but I had another surprise. On my phone bank list was Frank Fiorina. No way, I thought, is this Carly Fiorina‘s house. So I made the call, got the answering machine (“You’ve reached Carly and Frank Fiorina…”), and left them a polite message. Lo and behold, I had called Carly Fiorina’s house.

Meg told me I won the award for best phone call of the day.

College thesis writing is a haphazard, often random process (as opposed to a doctoral dissertation, which takes more care). You have a few weeks to find a topic. You settle on one based on a combination of what hasn’t been written, availability of sources, and, if you’re lucky, a passing interest in the subject. Then you need an argument. You don’t really know anything, though, so you end up overcompensating by making a stronger argument than the facts merit. If you aren’t overstating your case, you aren’t doing it right. You then have a semester to write a 50-page essay—a task that would be difficult even without the added burden of classes, extracurriculars, and the intense hepatic demands of senior spring.

I would love to see some numbers on how many senior theses are produced in their final few weeks, as opposed to steady contribution throughout the year/semester. I imagine there is a healthy correlation between overall quality and steady work, which partly contributes to why graduate level theses tend to be better (there is also a selection bias).