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Science has a special issue this month on forecasting political behavior, which included an essay by Cederman and Weidmann in which they discuss the limitations of current conflict forecasting models, as well as the areas where they’re better than many people, including political science scholars, think they are.

I was going through the Petrarch2 dictionary code, working on live updating of dictionaries for the human coding interface, and ended up taking a look at the dictionaries’ coverage of different CAMEO event codes.

I’ve been working a lot of automated geocoding of text over the last 6 months, and I’ve found myself consistently describing the same set of tasks or ways to extract location information from text.

It’s been a very forecast-y week. Between (finally) reading Phil Tetlock’s excellent Expert Political Judgement, going to a half dozen panels at ISA on forecasting and event data, and today’s NPR story about the Good Judgement Project, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make political forecasts and how we know when they’re good.