Wiki-6-D Challenge: "John Wilkes Booth" to "Zordon"

I'm going to relay a challenge issued to me by my brother this morning. Can you start wikipedia's article on John Wilkes Booth and get to the article on Zordon (the disembodied floating mentor of the power rangers) in less than six clicks?

Post your answers. Your linked path must stay within wikipedia without taking shortcuts through index pages. The first person to post the shortest path wins five points, redeemable for swag and glory at the company store. Discretionary bonus points may be awarded for style.

PS. Here's a five-step route to make the return trip from Zordon to Booth. Note that since many wikipedia links are one-way streets, so this path isn't much help going the other direction.

Starting at: Zordon

1. Robert L. Manahan
2. United States
3. American Civil War
4. Abraham Lincoln
5. John Wilkes Booth.
   

PPS: This post relates to network theory, which relates to complexity theory ... to social science ... to political science, and is therefore germane to this blog. Starting at complexity theory, the same holds for my previous post about Sync.

Sync

Inspired by Team Hedengren, I've decided to post more often on this blog.  It makes for a great New Years Resolution, *plus* an excellent way to procrastinate on already overdue term papers.  (Don't worry, they're overdue for legitimate reasons.)

Today I want to plug an excellent book I reread over the break: Sync : The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order.  The book starts off with an improbable chapter about fireflies.  Evidently, there are places in the world where fireflies spontaneously start to blink in unison every evening.  (See blurry youtube video here.)  The puzzle: how do all these bugs achieve perfect unison?  They don't start of in sync, they're not particularly smart, and they don't share a metronome or a conductor.

Strogatz (the author) goes on to relate how scientists (including himself) have started to crack this problem.  He describes the strong similarities among fireflies, human sleep cycles, pacemaker cells in hearts,  superconductors, power grids, collapsing bridges, and so on.  It turns out that all of these systems are governed by the same kind of spontaneous order.  The book is part mystery novel, part math book, all very readable.  Definitely worth a visit to the library or bookstore.

(And now I'll head back to my term paper on "Issue-specific part unity.")

The economics of stable marriages

I've been studying matching models, a branch of game theory that explores what happens when groups have to figure out how to pair off. These kinds of dynamics in job markets for freshly minted professionals, post-season bowl games, and most famously, marriage.

Here's the abstract from Bergstrom and Bagnoli, "Courtship as a Waiting Game." It cracks me up.

In most times and places, women on average marry older men. We propose a partial explanation for this difference and for why it is diminishing. In a society in which the economic roles of males are more varied than the roles of females, the relative desirability of females as marriage partners may become evident at an earlier age than is the case for males. We study an equilibrium model in which the males who regard their prospects as unusually good choose to wait until their economic success is revealed before choosing a bride. In equilibrium, the most desirable young females choose successful older males. Young males who believe that time will not treat them kindly will offer to marry at a young age. Although they are aware that young males available for marriage are no bargain, the less desirable young females will be offered no better option than the lottery presented by marrying a young male. We show the existence of equilibrium for models of this type and explore the properties of equilibrium.

For a guy who's been happily married since 22, it's an unflattering picture. Of course, five years later I'm still making close to $0 annually, so maybe that's time not "treating me kindly."

It's like the SAT for Supreme Court justices...

Here's a nifty data thing.  Check out the Martin-Quinn scores for Supreme Court justice at http://mqscores.wustl.edu/.   This is a nifty application of a branch of statistics called item-response theory, which is most often used for designing standardized tests.  Just like the SAT designers peg students' "aptitude" from high to low based on their responses to questions, Martin and Quinn have pegged each justice on an ideological scale using their votes on various cases.

The Martin -Quinn site has a nice little graph showing all the justices and their ideological points over time.  (You can't miss it.  It animates over and over and over.)  Bonus points if you can name the Nixon appointee who trends way liberal in the 60's and 70's!

Data is downloadable, just in case you wanted 80 years of data about Supreme Court ideology.

Hiatus

So the semester has started up again, bringing ~400 pages of polisci reading a week. We're three weeks in, with 10 to go before the break. Here's my strategy for keeping an interesting blog up and running for the duration:

First, I've added a widget that lets me share items of interest from my RSS reader. (It's down on the right.) (In garish green.) These posts will be the creme de la creme of the dozens of feeds I try to keep an eye on. Anything in here is, IMHO worth a look.

Second, I'm going to loosen the topical boundaries of this blog past education policy. For the time being, that probably means a political science take on American government, since that's what I'm immersed in. I will continue to lean quantitative, so look for lots of data, game theory, and nifty statistics.

Finally, this is the end of editing. Most of these posts will be dashed off, spellchecked once (not twice) and sent.

yoroshiku