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…
Being a political scientist is not considered an exciting occupation by people who have a life, and as party conversation topics go, electoral systems are pretty lousy. But with LibDem support somewhere in the high 20s (if the polls are to be believed), normal people start to wonder why 26% of the vote should give…
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…
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…
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…
I use emacs/$latex LaTeX$for all my textprocessing needs, and for the last four or five years, I have created all my slides with Till Tantaus excellent “beamer” class. At the moment, I’m teaching a 2nd year stats course (imagine doing this with PowerPoint – the horror! the horror!), so I sometimes use graphs from the…
I’m teaching an introductory SNA class this year. Following a time-honoured tradition, I conducted a small network survey at the beginning of the class using Limesurvey. Getting the data from Limesurvey to Stata via CSV was easy enough. Here is the data set. But how does one get the data from Stata to Pajek for…
Without doubt, late December is exactly the right time for reflection and (re-)assessment. Looking back on the last months, I had too many conference dinners, not nearly enough conference beers/chats, and definitively too many conference papers to read. Amongst these, the prize for the most original political science graph (along with the price for the…
Here is a short presentation on the electorates of the Western European Extreme Right I gave last Thursday at the Collège Doctoral Européen de Strasbourg. And here is the Summary Clear socio-demographic profile: young, male, working/lower middle class Clear attitudinal profile: Not necessarily fully paid-up extremists But dissatisfied with politics and suspicious of immigrants and…