Paul Kowert's Resources for Students

Information for Students about:

Research and Writing
International Relations
Game Theory & Strategy
Japan and East Asia
Political Psychology

Students in
INR 2001,
Click here.

In need of a little
inspiration? Watch CMU
Professor Randy Pausch's
"last lecture" on achieving
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The following categories contain links to helpful information for my undergraduate and graduate students in international relations. In some cases, these are links to information available elsewhere on the web; in others, they are links to material I have created specifically for this purpose. Your feedback and suggestions for additions to this material are always welcome.

Social Science Basics

You know about search engines like Google and AltaVista, but you might also find the Social Science Information Gateway to be a useful resource.
Columbia International Affairs Online offers access to a wide variety of material specifically relevant to international relations.
The Center for Security Studies in Zurich, Switzerland, maintains a clearinghouse of information about International Relations and Security Studies.
Writing
- All students should know what plagiarism is. Avoid it.
- For all students, here is some more basic advice on common writing problems.
- Sandy Eggo's website, The Armchair Grammarian, is a good online guide that can answer many of your grammatical questions. It also has links to many other websites that may be helpful to writers.
- Graduate students should read Daryl Bem's superb contribution to "Writing the Empirical Journal Article."
- Also for graduate students, here is some advice on choosing and refining a research topic.
- More information for students who wish to pursue an independent study can be found in the following guidelines.
- Finally, for inspiration, the American Rhetoric website contains audio clips of the "100 most significant American political speeches."
Philosophy of Science & Research Design
- Bill Trochim, a professor of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University, maintains a Center for Social Research Methods that contains a wealth of useful advice on human and social research, including a detailed Knowledge Base on research design issues.
- Edmund Chattoe's bibliography of works on the philosophy of economics and the philosophy of science (many of which are address issues of the philosophy of social science in general).
- An overview of logical positivism, contained in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Another good essay, also from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on the philosophy of social science. It asks: "Are the social sciences really sciences?"
Research Methods
- The University of California at Berkeley Library's bibliographic Guide to Social Science Research Methods.
- Georgia State University professor William Evans maintains an excellent list of resources on content analysis (quantitative and qualitative analysis of text).
- Harald Klein's Text Analysis Info Page.
- HyperStat's Online Statistics Textbook.
- Clay Helberg's discussion of "Pitfalls of Data Analysis (or How to Avoid Lies and Damned Lies)."
- The Australia National University's online statistics course, SurfStat Australia.
- The University of Glasgow's Valerie J. Easton and John H.McColl offer many helpful definitions of statistical terms in their online Statistics Glossary.
- Vanderbilt political science professor Richard Tucker's helpful list of online data sources, including speeches as well as political, economic, and public opinion data.
- The International Crisis Behavior Project data archive.

International Relations

For excellent information about weapons, arms control, and national security issues, see the Federation of American Scientists website.
The Foreign Affairs website contains background information, opinion, and analysis of various topics in international realtions.
The Foreign Policy in Focus website has reports on a wide variety of foreign policy topics organized both regionally and topically.
The International Crisis Group website offers reports on a variety of global hotspots.
The International Crisis Behavior Project maintains an excellent archive of information and data pertaining to international crises.
An interview with Kenneth Waltz in which he discusses theory in general, as well as his own theory of international politics.
Two good sources of online map quizzes, to improve your basic knowledge of geography, are:

Game Theory & Strategy

Mikhael Shor's gametheory.net website contains a superb collection of resources for the study of game theory, including extensive links to other sites, lecture notes, practice quizzes, and even games and examples of game theory applied to popular culture.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on game theory, which includes helpful definitions of most of the basic concepts.
Robert Nau, a business professor at Duke University, can help you learn "Who's who and what's what in the history of rational choice theory, broadly defined."
Paul Walker has prepared an excellent timeline and history of game theory from antiquity to the present.
David Levine's Economic and Game Theory website contains a brief overview of game theory as well as examples of recent research, oriented particularly toward economic applications.
The Constitution Society's list of links on the "prisoner's dilemma."
Bryn Mawr College's Serendip interactive learning system that lets you play prisoner's dilemma online.
The SMAC team at the University of Science and Technology in Lille, France, maintains a detailed website focusing on iterated prisoner's dilemma. This site includes computer simulations that allow you to play iterated prisoner's dilemma on line.

For students in INR 3303 ("Foreign Policymaking"):

Practice problems and solutions for calculating expected utility, in PDF format (download the problems first, and try to solve them; download the solutions later).
Practice problems and solutions for finding rollback equilibria in extensive form games, in PDF format.
Practice problems and solutions for finding Nash equilibria, in PDF format.
More practice problems (#2) and solutions (#2) for finding Nash equilibria, in PDF format.
Practice problems and solutions for finding mixed strategy equilibria, in PDF format.
More practice problems (#2) and solutions (#2) for finding mixed strategy equilibria, in PDF format.

Homework exercise 1 (simple utility theory).
Homework exercise 2 (applied utility theory).
Homework exercise 3 (extended form games): problems 2a, 2b (bonus), 2c, 4, and 5 in Dixit & Skeath, pp. 79-80.
Homework exercise 4 (extended and matrix form games).
Homework exercise 5 (matrix form games).
Homework exercise 6 (iterated games).

A study guide for the first exam.
A glossary of basic terms and strategies for solving simple games in bilateral strategic bargaining (useful for the second and third exams).
A study guide for the final exam.

Japan and East Asia

The Asian Studies Virtual Library Website.
Stanford University's JGuide to Japan Information Resources.
Duke University maintains an excellent Japanese Studies Website.
The UCLA Asia Institute's website has links to a gread deal of information.
The University of Massachussetts Online Resources of Japanese Studies page is also excellent and contains an extensive list of Japanese databases and information sources.
A list of Graduate Schools of International Relations in Japan, maintained by the Brussels School of International Relations (University of Kent at Canterbury).
Kelley L. Ross, a Philosophy Professor at Los Angeles Valley College, maintains an impressively detailed chronology of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese imperial reigns, along with a list of Japanese regents and prime ministers. Another, simpler list of Japanese emperors is contained in the online Wikipedia.

Class Notes

Section I: Historical Overview.
Section II: Security and the Alliance. See also, supplementary Notes on Korea.
Section III: The Secret of Japan's Success
Section IV: The Secret of Japan's Failure.
Section V: Images of Japan and the US.
Section VI: Japanese Cultural Power

Study Guides and Assignments

Japanese and Asian News Sources

AsiaWeek Archives (in English). Access to back issues.
Far Eastern Economic Review (in English).
Foreign Press Center of Japan.
Japan Times (in English). The Japan Times also offers a helpful search engine for finding information about a specific topic (in English).
Japan Today (in English).
Kyodo News Service (in English).
Mainichi Daily News (in English).
Mainichi Shinbun (in Japanese).
Nihon Keizai Shimbun's Nikkei Net (in Japanese).
Nikkei Net Interactive (in English).
Okinawa Times (in English)
Okinawa Times (in Japanese).
Saga Shimbun (in Japanese). The Saga Shimbun also offers a helpful search engine for finding information about a specific topic (in Japanese).
Sankei Shinbun (in Japanese).
The Daily Yomiuri (in English).
Yomiuri Shinbun (in Japanese).

Commentary on Japan's Foreign Relations

Gaiko Forum, a journal of "Japanese perspectives on foreign affairs." Many articles from back issues are available in PDF format.
The Japan Information Access Project website offers commentary on Japan and Japan-US relationns.
Website of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Website of the US Embassy in Tokyo.

Japanese Security & Defense Issues

Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs maintains this page on Japan-US Security Arrangements as well as a more general page on Japan-US Relations.
Exhibits of the Kyoto Museum for World Peace at Ritsumeikan University, including a good series of photographs and commentary on Japan's "15 year war" in the Pacific.
A website about the Nanjing Massacre.
NuclearFiles.org maintains extensive information about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Websites of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.

Japanese Economic and Trade Issues

Nomura Research Institute's Website, which contains a good deal of information about the Japanese economy.
Nouriel Roubini, an Associate Professor of Economics and International Business at the New York University Stern School of Business maintains an excellent website with news relevant to the Japanese economy and with useful statements on the Japanese economic crisis.
Well-known economist and New York Times editorialist Paul Krugman's old website on the Japanese economic crisis (at MIT) and his new website (at Princeton). There is also an Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive with material relevant to Japan's economy.

Data on Japan

The Japan Information Network's Statistics Page, maintained by Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs..
Bank of Japan website, which includes a good deal of economic data.

Political Psychology

The homepage of the International Society of Political Psychology.
The homepage of the International Bulletin of Political Psychology.
The Summer Institute in Political Psychology at Ohio State University.

Department of International Relations
Florida International University
University Park Campus
11200 SW 8th Street
Miami, Florida 33199

Email kowert@fiu.edu

Telephone 305-348-2556

Fax 305-348-6138