Bates_Motel

I'm wondering what the negative effects of applying to study civil war could be? I know a lot of people on PSR seem to think it's overdone. My advisor (small LAC) says it may not be the best idea, as competition could be more fierce.

I'm not super sure where to ask this question, but this seems as good as any. For my writing sample (for this fall), I'm looking at using a dataset a social scientist used in one of her articles. The data is available and is listed as "replication data," but I'm not sure if this means it's only to be used to replicate her findings and not generate new findings from the same data. Is simply citing the source sufficient, or should I seek formal permission to use the data set?