Latest news
My New Book! I just shipped my book, Predicting War, Predicting Peace: Modeling Real-World Decisions off to the publisher. It will be forthcoming from Lambert Academic Publishing and available at Amazon.com in a few weeks.
Publisher's Blurb: The two key questions in national security decision-making and international relations theory remain: When do states make war and engage in conflict? When do states make peace and engage in cooperation? Despite the importance of these questions, the “why” of decision-making continues to be debated by foreign policy practitioners and scholars. The ability to predict, even probabilistically, the outbreak of war and the probability of peace will provide an important tool for policy makers, and a starting point for future research. This book, drawing from the author’s experience as a senior military leader, planner, and diplomat; along with recent work in cognitive psychology, provides a new approach to simulating the process of decision and predicting the likely results. Using a computer simulation of how leaders process and interpret information, it shows how the interaction between the situation and other leaders’ decisions can cause both perceptions and preferences to rapidly shift – leading quickly from calm to crisis and back. Foreign policy practitioners, national security professionals, and scholars will find this new approach to be useful in today’s challenging environment.
Teaching I will be continuing to teach for Air University, the University of Phoenix, and Ashford University for this fall. .
Twitter Experiment As an experiment, I will be using Twitter during my up-coming classes. Go to my Academics page for more details. Follow me at http://twitter.com/BillHPhD
Conference Paper Presentation. My paper "Playing From Memory" was presented to the Political Psychology panel at last April's Midwest Political Science Association meeting in Chicago.
I got a fellowship! I was selected to attend the Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Training Program, which is held at the University of California, San Diego. The workshop is being hosted by the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.
Free Software for Starving Students! No joke, no "gotcha". Western Oklahoma State College has picked up the Software for Starving Students project, which is a pretty good compilation of free (not adware, not trialware, free) software for students. Lots of great open source tools, including Open Office, drawing and web design tools, music and video players, useful utilities, and even some games. This comes in either Microsoft or Mac flavors. Highly recommended.
For you Linux fans, I highly recommend the "Education" version of Ubuntu, edubuntu. Free, and open source. And, with the live CD, you can just boot off the CD without affecting your windows installation. It's a great way to experiment with Linux.
Note: The mainstream version of Ubuntu: 11..04 "Natty Narwhal", can be found at http://ubuntu.com. This version now comes with the live CD, plus you can run Ubuntu under Windows without having to do anything to your hard drive. Ubuntus cost absolutely nothing (free as in beer), but yet provide a state of the art, fully functional, operating system that does not require any activation and does not impose any restriction on its use (free as in freedom). Highly recommended!
