Explorations of Quantitative and Formal Research in Political Science
I may be late to the ball on this one, but in discussing a project that we're working on, fellow QP blogger Michael Allen recently pointed me to the "kountry" package for STATA. The package was created by Rafal Raciborski for the purposes of facilitating the creation of country codes and switching between codes provided by … Read more
Via Andrew Gelman at the Monkey Cage, an article on this recent Gallup poll regarding people's income and their perceptions of income distributions, tax burdens, etc.
The thrust of the article is that there are some disparities between where people fall in the overall income distribution and their perceptions of how the tax burden should be distributed—Not my normal thing, but interesting nevertheless.
More below…
Voir Dire posted a working paper yesterday that is worthy of reposting given its broad implications. The paper "University Rankings by Cost of Living Adjusted Faculty Compensation" by Terrance Jalbert, Mercedes Jalbert, and Karla Hayashi in the International Journal of Management and Marketing Research can be found at SSRN. The abstract can be viewed at either Voir Dire or SSRN, so I will save the space and not repost it here, but a bit more information can be found after the jump. It is perhaps sufficient to say that the aggregated and averaged data can be tremendously interesting to any of us that influenced by the academic job market.
A recent medical study has gained some media attention by finding and arguing that, among other factors, consumption of margarine by infants leads to lower IQ scores. The study, based on 590 New Zealand European children claims many other factors can contribute to the IQ of children such as consuming fish weekly and grains 4 … Read more
USA Today provides an infographic detailing the number of corruption convictions per 100,000 people. Using statistics from the Department of Justice, the article boldly declares that North Dakota is the most corrupt state in the Union while infamous Illinois comes in at a late 17th: Using conviction rates of corruption as a proxy for the … Read more
Traveling for Thanksgiving gave me the opportunity to abandon my daily reading schedule and come back to a stockpile of new posts to read. The highlights thus far from the last 5 days: – Flowing Data has a chart contest. The winner receives two Tufte books. Entries are due on Friday. – Andrew Gelman has … Read more
On October 7th, a peer of mine collected 20 surveys from self-selected (volunteered) members of the political science department (from first year graduate students to professors) on an electoral challenge. The survey presented seventeen different questions in regards to electoral outcomes and those who were able to predict the most accurately 14 of the 17 … Read more
The Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog posted an interesting tool (direct link) that attempts to discern your gender identity by evaluating your browser history. Particular websites are weighted based on the known gender ratio of the user base for that particular website and creates a new score. The site assures users it … Read more
I am not a visually oriented person or, more appropriately, I am less than stellar at design. This may not be a surprise to anyone that has seen my attempts to assemble a wardrobe, but this is also true in the sense of organizing information – whether it is in a paper, on a poster, … Read more
Below the jump are a few music videos that celebrate the joys of graduate and statistics life. Enjoy