Two cool pieces in the New York Times this weekend; one that lots of political scientists are noting, the other, I suspect, no one is:
In the weekend magazine, a piece on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who for years has been honing software to predict political outcomes:
A professor at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, he is well known academically for his work on “political survival,” or how leaders build coalitions to stay in power. But among national-security types and corporate decision makers, he is even better known for his prognostications. For 29 years, Bueno de Mesquita has been developing and honing a computer model that predicts the outcome of any situation in which parties can be described as trying to persuade or coerce one another. Since the early 1980s, C.I.A. officials have hired him to perform more than a thousand predictions; a study by the C.I.A., now declassified, found that Bueno de Mesquita’s predictions “hit the bull’s-eye” twice as often as its own analysts did.
And about as far away from that as you can get, in the arts section a long wonderful piece on the dancing films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers:
In the 1960s and ’70s you had to wait for Astaire-Rogers movies on television or in revival houses. In the case of “Roberta” (1935) you often had to wait years. Ms. Croce rightly calls this “their most ebullient film.” But MGM (which remade it in 1952 as “Lovely to Look At”) tried to bury it for decades. Now you can get a DVD boxed set of all 10 Astaire-Rogers movies and watch “Roberta” to your heart’s content. The “Swing Time” DVD can be watched with a commentary by John Mueller, whose 440-page study “Astaire Dancing” (1986) is...indispensable to Astaire studies...
So why do I cite this? Although the piece doesn't mention it, John Mueller, in addition to being an author of an important work on Astaire, is a professor of political science at Ohio State whose work on international relations and other issues is widely read. Political scientists--we're everywhere.
