http://cluelessresearch.com political methodology, brazilian politics, etc. Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:43:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en geopy is a geocoding toolbox for python. See the website for installation instructions. It uses third-party geocoders (such as google maps) so you can add geographic coordinates to the addresses in your application. I cooked up my first python script to use it. You give it a csv ... http://cluelessresearch.com/2007/11/geocoding/ There is a new (I think) website for learning R that looks pretty decent: Quick-R(http://www.statmethods.net/). It was created by Robert Kabacoff, whom I had the pleasure to meet several months ago. We discussed R briefly at that time and he was just getting into it. Apparently he has been busy! ... http://cluelessresearch.com/2007/11/quickr/ Gelman linked to a post by Krugman on the red state blue state research. I followed the link to find this pearl in the comments to Krugman's post: Maybe more people reside in the lower third of income than in 68-72, taking in for inflation and stagnant wages. — Posted by ... http://cluelessresearch.com/2007/10/reading-comments-in-blogs-make-you-dumb/ There's a great piece by Steven Pinker on why we curse. I do have a quibble though He asks: To take just one example, why do people use the ungrammatical Fuck you? And why does no one have a clear sense of what, exactly, Fuck you means? and argues that ... http://cluelessresearch.com/2007/10/f-you/ Nice piece on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his forecasting model. It calls game theoretic political science a "branch of mathematics", but I guess that is a compliment. Not enough credit is given, however, for the inputs of whatever models one is using. You can't reliably make good predictions ... http://cluelessresearch.com/2007/10/bdm-at-good-magazine/ I spent a week with the wife and el kiddo visiting my folks. Very nice overall, wonderful warm weather and plenty to do. It was also an eventful week in Brazil: the Panamerican games were/are going on in Rio (not that anyone in US would know, it is barely a ... http://cluelessresearch.com/2007/07/aerochaos/ ABEP, the Brazilian association of market research firms, has just approved the new "Brazil criterion" or CCEB.  CCEB is the standardized way to measure survey respondents'  consumption power by asking questions about consumption items they have and the education of the head of the household. They argue this better than ... http://cluelessresearch.com/2007/06/breaking-news-a-college-degree-in-brazil-is-worth-4-fm-radios-more-than-high-school/ So, I am reading this interesting review by University of Chicago's Jerry Coine of a book proposing the Intelligent Design (a.k.a. the new creationist) "theory". The book in question, by Lehigh University's biologist Michael J. Behe, basically argues that random mutations cannot lead to the complex changes we ... http://cluelessresearch.com/2007/06/biologists-and-statistics/ So, I am using my macbook and suddenly it becomes really hot, and the fan starts at full speed. Perhaps I am encoding some music or video? Or am I doing some fancy statistical analysis? Not really. It is Stata waiting for me to press a key! WTF!! It's been like ... http://cluelessresearch.com/2007/06/another-stata-rant/ I am writing a paper with a coauthor promoting the use of graphs instead of tables in political science. We did some research on the current use of tables and graphs and found out that a substantial proportion of the tables is devoted to the display of regression results. So we ... http://cluelessresearch.com/2007/06/regression-plots/