cluelessresearch.com

Here is very common situation. You are writing a paper or report and is addicted to the all the goodies (font, bibliography, and most of all, math) LaTeX offers to the “chosen ones”. However, your coauthor or coworker is not inclined to spend the inordinate amount of time required to learn LaTeX. What do you do?

If your coauthor is willing to use something other than Word, you could convince him/her to try Lyx. Lyx is a “what you see is what you mean” editor using a LaTeX backend. My experience with it is limited, but I know people that are very happy with it. If you think you want to learn LaTeX but are afraid to take the plunge, this is a very good option.

Not everyone is happy to try new software, however. I think Markdown might provide a useful way to cooperate.

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

How does it look? You can see for yourself here. The syntax is very natural. Headings can be marked as:

A First Level Header
====================

A Second Level Header
---------------------


or as

# First Level Header

## Second Level Header


*This* is how you put emphasis. An introduction to markdown can be found here.

Once your text is ready for publication, you can convert Markdown texts into LaTeX or .rtf (among other choices) using the extremely cool Pandoc. Using Pandoc, you can use math in LaTeX style (like so: $y_{ic}=\gamma_{00}+\gamma_{10}x_{ic}+\gamma_{01}z_c+\gamma_{11}x_{ic} \cdot z_c+v_{ic}$)

Pandoc allows other LaTeX code in the text, such as tables and equations, so you can minimize the going back and forth between Markdown and LaTeX.

Would this work in a coauthoring environment? Would people freak out by the mere thought of using a markup tool? I will let you know when I try this out myself.

In the United States, only in two states is prostitution legal: Nevada and (gasp!) Rhode Island. It is commonly referred to as the “oldest profession in the world”, but not much evidence is presented to support that fact. Finally, it seems that a group of Yale researchers has found some evidence by studying Capuchin monkeys.

The researchers (M. Keith Chen, and economist, and psychologists Venkat Lakshminarayanan and Laurie R. Santos) were interested in finding out if species other than humans also act in market-like fashion, and/or exhibit similar biases to those observed among us. They ended up observing behavior that might support the “oldest profession” contention, I think. You see, like a more than a couple of Homo sapiens I know, Capuchin monkeys are exclusively focused on food and sex. The researchers intended to use their food seeking behavior to study their actions when currency and trade are introduced in their environment.

The research was published at the June 2006 issue of the Journal of Political Economy (link to the paper), and has been discussed in the Freakonomics blog.

It turns out that the, ahem, other interests of the Capuchin monkeys showed up in their research as well. Stephen J. Dubner, the other freakonomic, tells the story during a keynote at the AIIM Expo:

The topper to Dubner’s stories to the AIIM audience involved an
incident in which one of the capuchins threw a tray of washers that
ended up spilling into the general population area. The monkeys, as
expected, fought for the coins and, except for one, were easily bribed
with the opportunity to purchase food in order for researchers to get
the washers back.

‘Out of the corner of his eye, Chen saw that one monkey gave a coin to
another (instead of rushing to exchange it for treats.) He thinks, am
I witnessing the first instance of monkey altruism? No. He was
actually witnessing something he said he really wished he hadn’t
seen,’ said Dubner.

After a brief grooming ritual, the monkeys who exchanged the coin
started to have sex. Immediately after the incident, the paid monkey
went over to Chen to get food in exchange for returning the coin,
Dubner said.

Well, it may not prove that prostitution actually is the oldest profession. But, in this market at least, it emerged pretty damn soon!

(via Slashdot)

The TSE for unknown reasons pulled out the Access files for the 2002 election. I haven’t looked at them in a while, but here are the two that I have:

estcand2002

and

VotoMun_DadosCand_2002.mdb.zip

these are big files. Let me know if you find out that just one of the two is needed or if you have problems downloading. eleoni at gmail dot com