Blowing my horn and others'

A touch of self-promotion and some recognition of a couple of friends. First, Andre Blais and I recently converted some of our research into a report for Elections Canada on youth electoral engagement. At the end, we recommended that, among other things, Elections Canada experiment with online registration and voting in a by-election. They appear to be going forward with this advice. It's nice when one's work has some influence!

More importantly, a couple of friends are up to great things. My colleague at UCSD, Chris Dawes, was recently awarded the Peggy Quon Award for the PhD student most likely to contribute to the scientific study of politics. You'd never know that Dawes was a graduate student by looking at his publication record (e.g. Nature, PNAS, APSR, JOP, Economic Letters, QJE, PRQ) but it is true. He does wonderfully interesting research, so he's well deserving of the award. I should like to note that it's been won previously by very notable political scientists, including Jamie Druckman (the first winner) and my colleague Ben Nyblade. 

Second, my friend Ben Rusch is about to release an album. He wrote every song and played every instrument. He's incomprehensibly talented and creative. You can watch a first cut of the first video of his album here. It's shot in the wonderful Hampstead Heath near his home.