As it turns out, it only took about five minutes of concerted Googling to find a simple shortcut that works on Macs and PCs. Check after the jump for my solution.

I’ve long been using Searchy to make custom search “triggers” that are activated like so: if I go to the address bar in Firefox (having downloaded the generated file from Searchy) and type, say, “w bagism,” I’ll be redirected to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagism. All Searchy does is find the search string (“Metafilter”) in the URL and concatenate it with the base URL (“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/“).

But now that I’ve switched to a Mac, I realize I can no longer create new Searchy shortcuts, because the file the site generates is a Windows registry addition. And because I’m now at a point in my life where I have much more call to look up, say, “bench warrant” than random Beatles references, I knew I had to figure out something new.

This is actually built into Firefox — no plug-ins required!

At that point, I discovered the secret underlying Searchy: to Firefox, all your custom search shortcuts are just bookmarks. Maybe I’m just dense, but Firefox supports this feature out of the box, even if they don’t document it well. At any rate, here’s what to do:

1. Pick your legal dictionary of choice. Black’s is the standard, of course, but it won’t work well for our purposes since using it requires you to be signed in to Westlaw, and Westlast doesn’t redirect to your lookup results after signing in. Same goes for Lexis and whatever dictionary they’ve licensed. Myself, I settled on the FindLaw dictionary for ease of setup.
2. Run a test search in your dictionary. For FindLaw, I searched for “test” and was directed to http://dictionary.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/search.pl?s=test.
3. Okay, now create a new Firefox bookmark. Fill in the Name field with whatever you’d like. In the Location field, paste the URL you got in the last step. Replace your search term (“test,” in my case) with “%s” (minus the quotation marks).
4. In the Keyword field, give your new shortcut a memorable trigger. I used “l” not only for “law,” but also because it’s convenient to type after hitting cmd + L to move your cursor to the address bar in the first place.
5. Hit OK. You’re done!

If everything worked correctly, you can now access your new shortcut by going to the address bar (cmd + L, people!) and typing your shortcut, followed by a space, followed by your search term. Voila!

One bonus I’ve just discovered for we Mac users: if you’re using Quicksilver and have your Firefox bookmarks indexed (I think this is a default setting), typing your trigger in Quicksilver’s first box and hitting enter will give you the “object” box, where you can type a search term and bring up a new tab with your results. Nice! Note that this might rely on having the Web Search plug-in installed, I’m not sure.

What I’ve spent the last year on is this, roughly: we know that nations interact outside the bounds of international law sometimes — they make secret agreements and all that. We also have a lot of ideas about why they do this, but these theories haven’t been tested in the real world using a random sample. That’s what I tried to do, and it turns out that it’s pretty hard to test international relations theories in that way. Nevertheless, within my constraints, I found that a lot of the common wisdom doesn’t hold up.

Overall, it’s good to be done. The weeks since turning it in have flown by, and I think part of that is simply because I haven’t had anything to take the place of the eighteen-hour days I was putting into my thesis before that. At this point, I can hardly recognize it as my own — the context it was written in was one of basic primal freaking out, and in these sunny late-April days I can hardly even put myself back into that mindset. One symptom of this disconnect is the collection of phrases I find just skimming back through that I’d never use in my usual writing, for instance. But, a quick skim does bring back a lot of the reading that I did over the last fourteen or so months. And really, getting a good grasp of the literature in a field is more important than standing by the conclusions reached in your very first academic paper. At least, that’s my take on it.

I wish I could have known what I know now when I was first setting out to design this whole project. For one thing, some of the assumptions I made in operationalizing individual theories are barely justifiable, and if I just had a little more time and a little more data I feel like I might have found support for a lot more of them. That’s why, actually, I’m not comfortable saying that actors don’t take, for instance, the potential for political embarrassment into account when choosing, say, the form of their agreements (I think the ginger wording of my conclusion in the thesis itself expresses this hesitance). What would really have been interesting is another month or so to fiddle around with regression modeling and figure out what degree of weight each of my independent variables are given under varying circumstances. My gut feeling is that this is closer to the truth — decision-making really seems expressible (in a none-too-elegant way, sure, but expressible nonetheless) as a weighted model of factors leading to a rational choice of level and a rational negotiation on publicity. But I’m no savant mathematician and this was no open-ended dissertation — I had limited resources, expertise, and time. So it goes.

Thanks to everybody who helped me out in writing it, and thanks to everybody who put up with me when it was all I could talk about. I really am happy with my finished product!

Anyway, no matter what overarching lessons one could extrapolate from such rare cases as these, they would certainly be useless to the field of political science. Useless, and awesome.

“8.30 plane to Detroit. Drove to Ann Arbor for lunch with the President of the University of Michigan and about forty other people at about 12 o’clock. It was a ghastly luncheon, not a drop to drink at the long reception beforehand – I hadn’t expected anything at lunch – totally inedible food, and speeches, which again I hadn’t expected, after lunch. Then over to the theatre for the commencement and honorary degree ceremony and my address to an audience of about four thousand. To be honest, I don’t think the address went very well: it was a good speech, but too long, thirty-four minutes, and slightly too elaborately prepared, as well as trying to say too much. In any event I always find commencement addresses difficult, and the total absence of alcohol didn’t help either.”

For you following at home, that president would be Mr. Administration Building himself, Robben Wright Flemming.

I’ve got my work cut out for me this summer.

With Superbowl XXL being played mere miles from my lonely subterranean office, I yet managed to get some work done on the job. Few people ever need their computers fixed during the Sunday night shift. Nobody, as it turns out, needs his computer fixed when the Superbowl’s on.

I had only Ann Arbor’s own WCBN to keep me company. I was happily diverted for at least fifteen minutes by DJ Jason Voss‘ on-air plug for his predecessor’s eclectic music blog, both-kinds.com. He’s mined (among other things) that same abortive folk movement that WFMU recently dug up: John Birch-core. Apparently, LSD is bad and so are Communists. MP3s abound.

As for my own ravings (considerably better-sourced than the above, I might hope), a thesis bibliography is in the works.