Where have all the True Finns gone (from the ESS)?
I’m upset: It looks like voters and supporters of the radical right Finns Party were miscoded in the current version of the European Social Survey (round 10).
Category: Data and Methods
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…
Markov’s chain (of fried chicken trucks)
Centrist statistics dads, where would you rather go for lunch?
What we are reading: Comparative survey data, random effects and some best practice tips
Working with repeated comparative survey data – almost a howto There is now a bonanza of studies that rely on surveys which are replicated across countries and time, often with fairly short intervals, with the ESS arguably one of the most prominent examples (but also see the “barometer” studies in various regions). Multi-level analysis is…
Cloud computing and backups
I began putting stuff on the internet for fun and non-profit at some point in the previous millennium. In 2008, almost exactly 13 years ago, I registered this domain. After eight years of mostly uneventful but very slow shared hosting with a tiny company somewhere in Germany’s Wild East, I upgraded to a cheapo virtual…
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…
How the tidyverse changed my view of #rstats
Back in the mist of time, when I should have been was working on my PhD, I found a blue book on the shelf that a previous occupant of the office had left there. As I learned later, it was The Blue Book that introduced the S language, the predecessor of R. I got sidetracked…
Wakelet as a tool for archiving online debates on (academic) events
Wakelet – what is it, and why should academics care to “curate” tweets about events? Bear with me for a second. The sad state of curating and social story telling Until about about a year ago, there was a storify.com. Their business idea was that people would “curate” tweets, facebook posts and other stuff found…