Spam! Spam! Spam!

I get a lot of academic spam from predatory journals & fake conferences. Most of it never makes it past the filters, but this machine-written chunk of nonsense will always have a special place in my ❤️. Probability! should definitively become the standard way of greeting academic elders.

Failing better in Stata

The Stata idiom capture quietly makes it so that any output from the subsequent command is suppressed, and that even critical failures are happily ignored. Your script soldiers on, and you are none the wiser. I always thought that this is a wonderful metaphor for organisational behaviour. In unrelated news, every other summer, Statacorp comes…

Shrove Monday in Academia

How it started It’s no secret that Mainz is a carnival hot spot. Shrove Monday, the day of the biggest parade and the most frantic celebrations, is a de facto public holiday in the city. But the de facto bit is important here: the city can’t make it a proper holiday, yet nobody who can possibly avoid it…

Teaching stats online with memes

Why yes, of course nothing says memefy just like a series of online lectures that everybody wants to fast-forward. And I have the tweets to prove it. So I’m teaching a mandatory stats/methods class (always popular). Online. Following the advice from my own kids, I have memified the outline. For your own syllabus needs, here…

Max Weber and German Political Science

Back in the mist of time that would eventually coalesce into my memories of the 1990s, I met a fellow PhD-er at a summer school. She had just returned to the fatherland after doing an MA in the UK and found re-integration into German Political Science rather difficult. The toughest bit, according to her, was…