This year's Gosnell Award winners for best research presented on political
methodology at a conference are John Freeman, of the University of
Minnesota, and Jeff Gill, of Washington University, St. Louis.  Their paper,
"Dynamic Elicited Priors for Updating Covert Networks" was presented at the
Political Methodology annual meetings in July, 2008.


The Freeman and Gill research develops a Bayesian method to combine elicited
priors from experts to improve inference about the nature of social
networks.  The application in the paper is on networks where individuals
have an interest in keeping their connections hidden.  Terrorist networks
are examples.   One of the real strengths of the research lies in the
prospects for extensions to problems across political science.  The paper
improves on our methods for collecting and analyzing hard-to-quantify
information about organizations, networks, and relationships.

Congratulations to John and Jeff.  

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