State Capacity and Leadership: Why Did China Take off?

Why the scientific revolution did not take place in China--or didn't it?

This essay makes the case for two conclusions. First, why the scientific revolution did not take place in China is not a question that historical research can answer. It is becomes a useful question primarily when one locates the fallacies that lead people to ask it. Second, a scientific revolution, by the criteria that historians of science use, did take place in China in the eighteenth centur...

Cut-off Sampling Design: Take all, Take Some, and Take None

Extended Abstract. Sampling is the process of selecting units (e.g., people, organizations) from a population of interest so that by studying the sample we may fairly generalize our results back to the population from which they were chosen. To draw a sample from the underlying population, a variety of sampling methods can be employed, individually or in combination. Cut-off sampling is a pr...

Estonian Genome Project - before the take-off and take-off

I will give an overview of the preparations of the EGP including all aspects of the project and current satus of the pilot phase, describe the informatics part of the project together with other aspects (legal, ethical, logistics, financial etc.) and where we stand in terms of population genetics and genotyping technology in order to start using the sample collection for case--control studies f...

Take Your Time, Take Your Space: Civil Peace, Spatial Proximity and State Capacity

Recent works have highlighted that civil wars can have transnational dimensions and diffuse through spatial patterns. Other authors have investigated the relationship between polities and civil peace. The aim of this paper is to study whether the study of civil peace can be linked with state capacity and its interactions with spatial and temporal dynamics. Though some authors have suggested tha...

Medicare at 50: why Medicare-for-all did not take place.