News
IQSS Faculty bring home awards
by Sebastian Stockman, IQSS
July 9, 2008
Two members of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science faculty -- IQSS Director Gary King and Faculty Associate Kevin Quinn -- received awards for papers from the Society for Political Methodology last month. Quinn, an Associate Professor of Government, received the Gosnell Prize -- for an unprecedented third time -- for his "What Can be Learned from a Simple Table?
ICPSR Summer Internship Program
January 15, 2008
The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world's largest archive of digital social science data, is now accepting applications for its annual summer internship program. ICPSR is a unit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. ICPSR's data are the foundation for thousands of research articles, reports, and books. Findings from these data are put to use by scholars, policy analysts, policy makers, the media, and the public.
IQSS Fellow Earns Prestigious Political Science Award
by Sebastian Stockman, IQSS
January 15, 2008
Dawn Brancati's question, "Decentralization: Fueling the Fire or Dampening the Flames of Ethnic Conflict and Secessionism?" caught the attention of the attendees at last year's American Political Science Association annual meeting.
How can we tell? The former Harvard-MIT Data Center Post-Doctoral Fellow and current Institute for Quantitative Social Science Fellow recently received the Franklin L. Burdette Award, which the APSA bestows annually on the best paper presented at the previous year's meeting.
The Unintended Consequences of Holding People Accountable
by Elizabeth Gehrman, Special to the Harvard News Office
September 15, 2007
Campbell's Law has nothing to do with soup. It holds that "the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
James Robinson Receives Multiple Honors
by Sebastian Stockman, IQSS
August 31, 2007
It was a good year for James Robinson.
The Harvard Professor of Government and Institute for Quantitative Social Science faculty associate has racked up four major awards over the last several months.
Along with his co-author, Daron Acemoglu of MIT, Robinson won the 2007 William H. Riker Book Award from the American Political Science Association - given to the best book on political economy published the previous year - for their Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, published by Cambridge University Press.
Wiffle-ball Fever Grips IQSS
by Sebastian Stockman, IQSS
July 15, 2007
Bill Horka dove to his left, smacked the wiffle ball up into the air with his left hand and snatched it as he fell to the ground. Cheers came from both teams as Bill - the Ozzie Smith of Core Services - stood up and brushed himself off.
Targeting in Social Programs
by Sebastian Stockman, IQSS
February 2, 2007
Richard Zeckerhauser's recent book Targeting in Social Programs, co-written with Yale Professor Peter Schuck, has drawn praise from reviewers on the left and the right.
Whiteboard and Endless Statistics
by Elizabeth Gehrman, Special to the Harvard News Office
November 15, 2006
The whiteboard that covers hundreds of feet of the curved hallway at IQSS is not always covered with equations - but lately, it usually is. And most of them are in the haphazard hand of James M. Robins, M.D., a faculty associate at IQSS and a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the School of Public Health. "I'm not the most organized person in the world," says Robins, his chair rolling over a splash of papers that spill out of his briefcase and onto the floor of his office. "So the equations usually sit there for a while before I type them into my computer."
Kevin Quinn on How Words Shape Democracy
by Elizabeth Gehrman, Special to the Harvard News Office
August 1, 2006
There has been much talk in the United States in recent years about what the New York Times Magazine recently called "The Framing Wars". That is, the subtle - and not-so-subtle - ways politicians and parties use language to promote their views on a given topic, and how word choice can change the nature of a debate.
An Astonishing Sixty Years--the Legacy of Hiroshima
by Olivia Lau, Harvard Department of Government
March 9, 2006
For most of the world, August 6, 2005 passed without much notice. For Thomas Schelling, the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Economics, the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was remarkable for its very unremarkableness. On March 2, 2006 , in a talk sponsored by the IQSS Political Economy Workshop and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Thomas Schelling spoke on "The Legacy of Hiroshima" to a rapt audience of Harvard faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates.