Friday, October 4, 2013

The balance of power


Project description
This week’s assignment involves the sort of data collection and manipulation that
you might have to do for a project of your own. It seems straightforward, but the
devil is in the details: there are a lot of land mines even the simplest data-gathering
exercise. The assignment is designed to point them out and help you walk around
them.
The Correlates of War Project (COW) produces one of the most widely-used
datasets in all of international relations: the National Material Capabilities Index
(NMCI). This index consists of annual values for total population, urban population,
iron and steel production, energy consumption, military personnel, and military
expenditure of all countries in the international system, from 1816-2007. In order
to calculate a country’s overall capabilities, COW takes the average of each country’s
share of system-wide resources in each of these six categories.
In this assignment, you will reproduce a more limited version of the NMCI
using present-day data.
1. Go to the Wikipedia pages for world population, GDP, and military expenditures.
?? For each page, extract the relevant data into a separate Excel spreadsheet.
(For population, use United Nations estimates.)
2. Get rid of all columns except country name and the quantity of interest (GDP,
population, and military expenditures, respectively). Add a first row and use
it for column names (“Country” and “GDP,” for example.)
3. Tidy up the data. Get rid of any extra characters. Select the key numeric
variables, go to the Format menu, choose “Cells…”, and convert them to
General—this gets rid of commas, dollar signs, percentages, etc., which are a
real pain when saved to a .csv file. When working on this step, beware of the
following problems:
??Wikipedia is convenient, but the data quality sucks. Never forget this. If this were more than an
exercise, you’d take the time to find better sources.
1
(a) Unless you used Outwit Hub in step 1, some of the country names will
have spaces in front of them. These are a pain to get rid of. The simplest
way is to copy them from the Excel spreadsheet into a text editor, use a
Find-and-replace command to get rid of them, and copy and paste them
back into Excel.
(b) Some names and numbers have Wikipedia footnotes (“b”, “[20]”) stuck
on the end. Outwit won’t save you from these. Deleting them by hand
in Excel is probably the fastest way to get rid of them.
(c) Wikipedia authors don’t always use the same names for the same countries,
so you need to make sure they’re consistent before merging them.
In particular, watch out for “China” and “People’s Republic of China,”
“Gambia” and “The Gambia,” and various combinations with “Congo”
and “Macedonia.”
4. Once you’re done tidying, save each dataset to a separate .csv file.
5. Create an R command file that does the following:
(a) Read each of the three .csv files into appropriately-named data frames
(for example, Pop, GDP, and MilEx).
(b) Summarize each of these data frames.
(c) In each data frame, create a new variable that reflects each country’s
percentage of the world total. (That is, divide the data column by the
world total.) Make sure that this new variable is part of the same data frame as
the original data column.
(d) Merge the three data frames. Match the data using country name.
(e) Create your version of the NMCI by calculating each country’s average
share of each of these three resources. If a country has 2% of the world’s
population, 1% of world GDP, and 4% of world military expenditures,
for example, its average share should be (2+1+4)/3 = 2.33%.
Your final dataset should have 8 columns: the name of the country, GDP (total
and percent of world), population (total and percent of world), military expenditures
(total and percent of world), and NMCI.
Due to Assignment 4 Drop-box: three .csv files and an R command file that creates
the data set described in 5., above.

Anthropology


compare and contrast of ‘Chimpanzee and Bonobos”
Project description
-Write a short (2-page) Compare and Contrast Essay on the social structures of Chimpanzees and Bonobos.
- A “Compare and Contrast” essay is a thoughtful comparison of two different things. The point of this assignment is for you to discuss what social behaviors are similar between chimpanzees and bonobos and what social behaviors are different between these two species.
-This assignment is a type of research paper, not an opinion paper. Use your textbook as your primary source of information (Stanford, Allen and Anton’s “Exploring Biological Anthropology” 3rd edition). no Wikipedia, no Answers.com, no Enchanted Learning.com or any other similar tertiary source.

Political geography


Paper instructions:
Please write about the reading by Myers, Klak and Koehl about Rwandan and Bosnian media coverage. What are some of the general differences in the way the two wars are covered by the media? According to the authors, what are the 4 rhetorical devices used to construct the Rwandan conflict as a ‘primitive’ war. Be sure to explain what each device is. Finally, why is it important to examine the media, and the way the media represent conflicts?
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Health epidemiology


1. Describe in detail the epidemiology of the selected environmental health problem in terms of who, where, when and what. That is, what is the nature and the extent of the problem, who (persons) is affected, when (time) are they affected and where (place) are they affected? Make sure you describe in details any special groups or vulnerable populations that are at greater risk of than others. The extent of the problem must be described using the key measures of morbidity (incidence and prevalence rates) mortality (death rates), and disability (disability adjusted life years) used in public health. (20 points)
2. Discuss in details the risk factors for the problem. Make sure environmental, social and behavioral, cultural and economic factors contributing to the problem are described.

The value of higher education in today’s society


Paper instructions:
The research paper for this course should integrate these personal and professional skills and discuss the value of higher education in today’s society. Specifically address the following issues in your paper.
• What skills (teamwork, technology, communication, etc.) did you develop and/or strengthen?
• How will you use these skills to begin or improve your career?
• What opportunities does higher education provide to citizens?
• What have you gained from your educational journey and why would you encourage others to follow in your footsteps?
• How will you maintain a lifelong learning attitude?

IT Solutions


1. How can IT Solutions understand its present limitations and future opportunities?
2. What does it need to change – its internal business structure, its relationships with its clients, its agreements with its clients, the products it offers, they way it operates to thereby improve the client experience, the skills of its employees?
3. Has IT Solution got the right partnership strategy? Which business analytical tools should be used to analyze and improve the client partnerships for the future?
4. What intellectual assets does the company have?
5. Can IT Solutions convert its client partnerships into intellectual property?

Philosophy ethics

 Project description
 this essay must have a thesis early in the paper that tells the reader what you will argue for. ‘Argue’ is a key. the essay will be about Critically discuss Aristotle’s function argument. What does Aristotle aim to establish with this argument? Is he able to establish it? 

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