New Required Reading
By Christopher Albon, June 25th, 2008,
Recently, a ‘Meme of Se7en‘ has been filtering through the conflict blogosphere. The best part of the meme was the requirement that the blogger pass it along to seven other bloggers via links. Why? Because I have been exploiting that rule to discover new and interesting blogs. Below are two blogs that have entered my required daily reading list.
Zero Intelligence Agents - What does political science, mathematics, and programming have in common? Ask Drew Conway. A doctoral candidate in political science at NYU, Drew blogs on the type of quantitative social science research I have fallen in love with. Think Freakonomics for national security. He also reads xkcd, which secures his place on my reading list.
Complex Terrain Laboratory - Matt Armstrong, Mark Safranski, Tim Stevens, and Michael Tanji are innovators in the conflict blogosphere and all are on my feedreader. Their group blog, CTLab, looks at conflict research through the lense of digital media. What does that mean to you? It means an approach to understanding conflict you have never seen before.
Christopher is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses explores the relationship between armed conflict and public health. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Jen. Read more about him at his website.
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June 26th, 2008 at 1:05 am
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the recommendation there, much appreciated. We are trying to expand the usual remit of security/defence blogging at CTLab and the relative newness of the global comms networks is obviously of great significance. We’re also attempting to bring in other perspectives on conflict, particularly from the social sciences, which have perhaps been somewhat marginalised in the past.
The terrain of conflict, and the human experience of it, is indeed complex, so we feel we need to draw expertise and experience from all quarters in order to both understand it and, potentially, to influence its prosecution and practice for the better. I’m glad you’re finding CTLab interesting and hopefully useful, and we of course welcome your input into discussions as the endeavour picks up speed.
Tim
June 26th, 2008 at 2:40 am
Chris,
Thank you for the post; I hope I can live up to it. After reading through your posts yesterday I put War & Health directly on my reading list.
You got yourself at least one new daily reader!