Statistics and Data links roundup for December 2010 through March 2011:

• Discrete Choice Methods with Simulation, by Kenneth Train, Cambridge University Press, 2002 – Discrete Choice Geodatenzentrum – Hier erhalten Sie vielfältige Informationen über die Geobasisdaten der Bundesländer und des Bundes. Nutzen Sie unsere Dienste und interaktiven Karten für Bestellung, Download, Suche oder Verarbeitung von Geoinformationen.
• Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland – Statistik lokal – Statistik lokal 2010 ist eine von den Statistischen Ämtern des Bundes und der Länder gemeinsam herausgegebene Datenbank auf DVD, die Gemeindedaten für ganz Deutschland enthält. Mit Statistik lokal 2010 können Sie über 12 000 Städte und Gemeinden in ganz Deutschland anhand ausgewählter Ergebnisse aus allen wichtigen Bereichen der amtlichen Statistik mit derzeit rund 330 Merkmalsausprägungen analysieren und vergleichen. Die DVD enthält auch die Ergebnisse für alle Kreise (kreisfreie Städte und Landkreise), Regierungsbezirke/Statistische Regionen, Bundesländer und Deutschland.

Statistics and Data links roundup for January through September 2010
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Statistics and Data links roundup for November 23rd through December 29th:

• The Data and Story Library – DASL (pronounced “dazzle”) is an online library of datafiles and stories that illustrate the use of basic statistics methods. We hope to provide data from a wide variety of topics so that statistics teachers can find real-world examples that will be interesting to their students. Use DASL’s powerful search engine to locate the story or datafile of interest.
• Drawing graphs using tikz/pgf & gnuplot | politicaldata.org -

Statistics and Data links roundup for November 14th through November 23rd:

• SNAP: Network datasets -
• Network data -
• CASOS Tools: Network Analysis Data | CASOS – Network Analysis Data Casos & INSA
• NodeXL Teaching – CASCI – datasets incl. senate
• Statistics and Data links roundup -

It’s surprisingly difficult to find suitable datasets for a sna workshop that are relevant for political scientists.

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Image via Wikipedia

Radio 4 never fails to amaze me. This morning, just three minutes before the 9 o’clock news, they interviewed David Spigelhalter. Spiegelhalter is obviously the man who gave us BUGS. But he  is also Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge, and a man who can (within the 90 seconds they allocated him) explain to a lay public why a spade in knife-crime (last summer, four people were killed in the space of just one day) is not totally unlikely and does not necessarily indicate an increase in the murder rate, illustrating the idea of clustered risks in passing. He even convinced the anchor that stats is actually fun, even if you look at 170 murders per year in a population of just 7 million Londoners. I was duly impressed (you can listen here to the interview with Spiegelhalter). In fact, I was so impressed that I googled him once I reached the office and came across his website understandinguncertainty.org, which has full coverage of the London murder mystery (that is solved by modelling a Poisson distribution of the incidents).

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Via Simon Jackman’s blog: Chris Jordan found an intriguing way to visualise some very large, mostly scary national statistics, such as the as the number of plastic cups used on flights in the US every six hours (one million), or the number of cell phones retired every day (426,000). Amazing and aesthetically pleasing in a most disturbing way.Technorati-Tags: statistics, art, politics, USA

Six weeks ago, I have reviewed Kam’s and Franzese’s Modeling and Interpreting Interactive Hypotheses in Regression Analysis. This week, the topic of interaction effects pops up on the Social Science Statistics Blogs, with pointers to useful FAQs and other pages.
Technorati Tags: interaction effects, statistics, regression

Many hypothesis in the social sciences involve interaction: The effect of some variable x (say xenophobia) on some variable y (say support for the extreme right) is conditional on a third variable z (say ethnicity). Modelling interactive hypotheses looks straightforward on the surface: simply generate a third variable by multiplying x and z and plug all three in your regression. In Stata, this process can be automated by means of the built-in command xi or by desmat, which is available from SSC.

Click on the citations to get bibliographic data.

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