Recently, the good folks over at the Exzellenzcluster (that’s German new-speak, folks!) Trier invited me over for a talk on our “networks in political science” project (which is not dead, just moving very slowly). Since this is multimedia month, they captured my voice and re-synched it with the presentation. Spooky stuff: all silly jokes, every “errrr” and all my nasty comments on various colleagues near and far are now online forever. Makes you wonder about scientific, technical and social progress. But if you could not be at Trier on this evening, or just cannot get enough of my lovely voice, just click below.
Martin-Quinn Scores : Description – Measuring the relative location of U.S. Supreme Court justices on an ideological continuum allows us to better understand the politics of the high court. In addition, such measures are an important building blocking of statistical models of the Supreme Court, the separation of powers system, and the judicial hierarchy. This website contains the so-called “Martin-Quinn” measures of judicial ideology developed by Andrew D. Martin (Washington University, School of Law) and Kevin M. Quinn (Harvard University, Department of Government)
Data.gov – The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.
CRAN – Package LearnBayes – LearnBayes contains a collection of functions helpful in learning the basic tenets of Bayesian statistical inference. It contains functions for summarizing basic one and two parameter posterior distributions and predictive distributions. It contains MCMC algorithms for summarizing posterior distributions defined by the user. It also contains functions for regression models, hierarchical models, Bayesian tests, and illustrations of Gibbs sampling.
Event History Analysis: Statnotes, from North Carolina State University, Public Administration Program – Event history analysis (also called survival analysis, duration analysis, or transition analysis) is an umbrella term for a set of procedures for time series analysis. Coleman (1981: 1) defined event history analysis in terms of three attributes: (1) data units (ex., individuals or organizations) move along a finite series of states; (2) at any time point, changes (events) may occur, not just at certain time points; and (3) factors influencing events are of two types, time-constant and time-dependent. Event history models focus on the hazard function, which has to do with the probabilities that an event will occur after any given duration. Duration to the hazard of death was the classic example in medical research, but the hazard may have a positive meaning also, such as duration until the event of adoption of an innovation in diffusion research.
Professor Jan Box-Steffensmeier Political Science 867 Event History – With reading list and slidesTopic 1: Event History Models: Introduction and Overview Topic 2: Parametric Models Topic 3: Cox’s Proportional Hazards Model Topic 4: Discrete Time Formulations Topic 5: Model Selection Topic 6: Model Selection, Assessment, Specification, & Diagnostic Methods Topic 7: Heterogeneity and Multiple Events
Someone asked me for the syntax/data required to replicate my old Electoral Studies piece on party identification in Germany 1977-2002. Its slightly preposterous title not withstanding, as of today it holds a proud 18th rank in Electoral Studies’ list of its current “Top 25 hottest articles” (bringing Web 2.0 and the sciences together was always bound to end up in disaster). So in the very unlikely event that you have been holding your breath for this, breath out: I finally got around to de-clutter my old files and uploaded the replication information to my dataverse:
Kai Arzheimer, 2010, “Replication data for: Dead Men Walking? Party Identity in Germany 1977-2002″, hdl:1902.1/15091 UNF:5:AkxnvIlPgabqb2zsZ39k1A==
I’m teaching a lecture course on Political Sociology at the moment, and because everyone is so excited about social capital and social network analysis these days, I decided to run a little online experiment with and on my students. The audience is large (at the beginning of this term, about 220 students had registered for this lecture series) and quite diverse, with some students still in their first year, others in their second, third or fourth and even a bunch of veterans who have spent most of their adult lives in university education.
The other day, a (rather clever) student told me that she has no real need for all these stats classes, because she will be a journalist. I told her that the world would be a better place if all journalists underwent compulsory numeracy classes. Here is the proof from my favourite newspaper. How long does it take you to spot the glitch?
Young people in the East Midlands were the most down-to-earth of those surveyed, expecting an annual salary of £33,468 by the time they reached their mid-thirties. However, even this figure is still around £4,000 higher than the average.
This is a true gem of interdisciplinary research: A recent article in the British Medical Journal demonstrates that the crisis may have toppled major banks and halved the value of your assets, but did not stop these silly little buggers from happily swallowing coins at a constant rate.
Sixteen months ago, we started the Political Science Peer-Review Survey. This week, the input form was shut down. That is about three quarters of a year later than expected, but then again, I underestimated the fallout of my move back to Germany. Moreover, until a few weeks ago there was still a tiny trickle of replies coming in. So far, we have found few major problems with the data. The RA has spotted two instances where the respondent somehow managed to save the data at various stages of the interview, thereby inflating the number of respondents. Moreover, it’s amazing how many political scientists read ‘percent’ and give absolute numbers
Right now, the RA is enjoying is well-deserved holiday. He’ll be back in four weeks time, and we hope to have a data set ready for distribution by June.
Over the last two decades I have accumulated thousands of references that have travelled with me all the way from bibtex-mode through Endnote, Citavi and some more obscure packages until we finally came full circle and ended up in bibtex-mode again. To my mild surprise, my use of (some) keywords has been fairly consistent so that it was relatively easy (using make, bibtool and bibtex2html) to create a 380+ entries strong online bibliography on the Extreme Right in Western Europe. Enjoy.
