1. Does teaching matter at (American) research universities?

2. The haute stoner cuisine movement

3. How “post-socialist” is Eastern Europe?

4. Investment in most volatile sector of some of West Africa’s most volatile countries

On the law(s), see Black Look’s NigeriansTalk article. For a well-written deconstruction of the holy-prophet-laid-this-down angle, see Chxta’s NEXT article.

H/T Jeremy.

BusinessDay:

There is going to be lots of jobs and racketeering during the period. Artisans would make more money and thugs will have more jobs to do for their principals which would mean more money for them. The list of those that will benefit is endless.

Election campaign involves a lot of activities which include party meetings, road show/ awareness, lobbying among others. In each of the activities, money is spent in printing T-shirts, fez caps, handkerchiefs, wrappers, and even in food and drinks, among others.

And from an analyst:

The artisans that have developed muscles to function as party tugs will be gainfully employed and rewarded accordingly. This will motivate them to be willing to die for their political masters.

danah boyd writes in the closing paragraph of a beautifully brilliant rant:

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class. And I’m terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who don’t live in a lap of luxury. I say this as someone who is privileged, someone who has profited at every turn by being visible. But also as someone who has seen the costs and pushed through the consequences with a lot of help and support. Being publicly visible isn’t always easy, it’s not always fun. And I don’t think that anyone should go through what I’ve gone through without making a choice to do it. So I’m angry. Very angry. Angry that some people aren’t being given that choice, angry that they don’t know what’s going on, angry that it’s become OK in my industry to expose people. I think that it’s high time that we take into consideration those whose lives aren’t nearly as privileged as ours, those who aren’t choosing to take the risks that we take, those who can’t afford to. This isn’t about liberals vs. libertarians; it’s about monkeys vs. robots.

Being scared of the privacy issues was what made me leave Facebook two years ago.

Listen to this Planet Money podcast.

Stephen Smith writes in the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine about the relationship between France and its former colonies in Africa. One of the things he looks at is what has changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and what has not. There is a little about the economic relations, but I miss a discussion of stuffs like the control of the CFA Franc by France – which basically means the control of the monetary policies of Francophone Africa.

She describes him as a calm leader who was dedicated to the principles of democracy and the rule of law, both in Nigeria and West Africa.

For a somewhat different take on Yar’Adua, see Benson Eluma’s NigeriansTalk piece.

Institutional analysis has been successfully used to study changes in property rights and the negotiation of the collective-action problem inherent in managing common-pool resources under a variety of property regimes. It is particularly well-suited to the analysis of socio-ecological systems, and is compatible with theories coming out of ecological and economic anthropology. Yet despite the pioneering work of James Acheson and Jean Ensminger, institutional analysis remains unfamiliar to most anthropologists, primarily because of its theoretical foundations in rational choice and game theory, which many anthropologists see as irreconcilable with anthropology’s humanistic, reflexive, and relativistic biases. Institutional analysts circumvent the problems inherent in strict definitions of rationality through the concept of bounded rationality. This is a necessary first step, but still assumes the existence of an abstract Rationality as the underlying motivation behind human behavior, and as the normative baseline from which to measure “deviations” in human behavior. This paper is a step toward elaborating a more nuanced understanding of situated bounded rationality, based on situated cognition, humans’ evolved reliance on heuristics, and the predominance of preferences over actions (means) as opposed to preferences over outcomes (ends). This approach combines the strengths of two dominant types of actor-based models – the microeconomic and the psychological (behavioral) – and integrates them with the analysis of social structure. In this way, the approach proposed here reconciles institutional analysis with processual, cognitive, practice-based, and perhaps most surprisingly, phenomenological approaches in anthropology.

That is the abstract of a working paper titled Situated Bounded Rationality: linking institutional analysis to cognitive, processual, and phenomenological approaches in anthropology [pdf] by friend and colleague Brian Donahoe.

1. Akin pulls out tissues for President Yar’Adua

2. Goodluck Jonathan makes his first address as president to the country (Video)

3. Reuters says Yar’Adua death leaves succession wide open

4. Next gives details of the burial

5. Discussions and speculations about who will become the new vice president

6. Is it ever too early for 419ers to start trying to use the president’s death in scam emails?

The dust will settle soon. I reserve any major commentary until then.

Is it because of too much coffee and too little sleep, or is this as hauntingly beautiful as I perceive it to be?