We now return, after a long hiatus, to our discussion of matching violent events across datasets. Before diving into the details we want to remind readers about what we’re doing here and why it’s important. The immediate context is a discussion of major flaws in this paper by Carpenter, Fuller and Roberts (CFR) that claims … Continue reading The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 3
Event Data
The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 2
This is my second post with Josh Dougherty of Iraq Body Count (IBC). We asserted in the first one that Carpenter, Fuller and Roberts (CFR) did a terrible job of matching violent events in Iraq, 2004-2009, between the IBC dataset and the SIGACTs dataset of the US military and its coalition partners. In particular, CFR … Continue reading The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 2
The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 1
I argued in an earlier post that matching deaths across lists is a nontrivial exercise that involves a lot of judgement and that, therefore, needs to be done transparently. Here is the promised follow up post which I do jointly with Josh Dougherty of Iraq Body Count. In fact, we’ll make this into another multi-part … Continue reading The Perils and Pitfalls of Matching War Deaths Across Lists: Part 1
What can you do with the Peru Data?
Somebody asked a fair question in the comments surrounding the release of the Peru dataset: what can you do with it? That is a very big question that I can't fully address in a blog post. Still, I'll try to offer a few useful thoughts. Perhaps some readers will jump in with better ideas. Also, I'd … Continue reading What can you do with the Peru Data?
Economics of Warfare – Lecture 1
This morning I gave my first lecture in my Economics of Warfare class. I plan to continue to post a lecture each week. I don't plan to write an abstract for each lecture but you can get a sense of the material covered by looking at "categories" and "tags".
Predicting Armed Conflict Events
Zee Media is launching a news channel and web cite and, somehow or other, I wound up as featured in their web site launch. Here is the link. Although I find it a bit harrowing to watch myself so much on camera I would say that Zee came up with an interesting and original way to present … Continue reading Predicting Armed Conflict Events
Predicting the Size Distribution of Violent Events in War
I gave this presentation yesterday at the UK Ministry of Defence. It is based on work in progress with my former student Stijn Van Weezel and Neil Johnson of the University of Miami. This continues a long-standing research programme I've had with Neil and many other people for more than a decade. The high points … Continue reading Predicting the Size Distribution of Violent Events in War