this & that

• Picture #6 . I wept.
  
• Tales from the Hood defends aid that does work.
  
• A nice summary of the situation in Guinea from The Economist.
• A good example of integrating a development necessity and a cultural practice.
  
• Nollywood in pictures.
• Chris Blattman has some nice thoughts on the value of academic blogging.
  
• Is Somali piracy getting more sophisticated?
  
• Bet you didn't know what Vanilla Ice is up to now!
• Here's a nice summary of some of the methodological debates in political science, set in the context of the debate over Tom Coburn's insidious amendment. For the record, I'm among those political scientists who believe that the question should determine the method used, not vice-versa. I cannot tell you how many dull job talks that involved someone (naturally!) proving his or her tight little model on the basis of no empirical evidence I had to sit through in grad school. Those approaches tell us a little bit about how things work in a perfect world, but not much about the one in which we actually live. The most interesting work (and that with the most direct policy relevance) being done by political scientists today is by people who integrate multiple methods to explain a phenomenon.