johnfulwider.com | polisci

I’ve been looking for a place to share my ginormous stack of political science comprehensive exam flashcards (see above) with the world, and I just found it. Quizlet, a free service written by a high-schooler, lets you type in flashcards or import them from a spreadsheet. You can take some pretty snazzy quizzes online, share the flashcards with others, and print them out. Schnazzy.

I think what I’ll do when it comes time to study for Ph.D. comps (in about a year) is type in all my master’s comp flashcards, and in so doing study and do something nice for others at the same time. (At Nebraska, we have to take comps twice.)

(Via Lifehacker)

There’s a new mind-mapping service called bubbl.us. I’ve taken to using mind-mapping for starting new research projects and papers. It helps me order my thoughts and increase productivity because I dump everything I can possibly think of onto paper before I start nosing around the Internets and getting lost in its series of tubes. Not only does my mind map almost automatically produce good search terms, it gives me organized places to put notes about material I find on JSTOR or Google Scholar.

Eszter Hargittai’s Stata Goodies Page has a number of resources including a Stata program that splits a continuous variable into a number of categories.

Here’s a place to post comments and ask questions about my One-Day Consensus Conferences, other similar forums, and deliberative democracy in general.

Well, “memetic phylogeny,” anyway. Did you know that the
apparently very much modified phrase, “I, for one, welcome our robot overlords,” didn’t start out that way? People have been sampling the Simpsons:

Kent Brockman reports on Channel Six.

Kent: We’re just about to get our first pictures from inside the spacecraft with “average-naut” Homer Simpson, and we’d like to — aah!
[Camera shows a close-up of an ant floating in front of the three astronauts]
Everyone:Aah!
Kent: Ladies and gentlemen, er, we’ve just lost the picture, but, uh, what we’ve seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over — “conquered”, if you will — by a master race of giant space ants. It’s difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.