This week has been a rather stat oriented week of posts.  I blame this on the fact that political economy and peacekeeping has been dominating my official academic life in the form of a comprehensive exam.  The silver lining is that I will soon have political economy and peacekeeping content galore.

To keep everyone entertained this Friday, I wanted to revisit what has become one of my favorite little write ups on social network analysis, matrix math, and why we should be concerned about how our meta data gets used.  Kieran Healy is a Duke professor of sociology, and wrote this in response to the revelations about the NSA’s PRISM program.  He does a great job demonstrating the math in an accessible way, while also elegantly demonstrating why we should be wary of talking points such as “…we only capture meta data, not the content of transmissions…”

Have a great weekend!