See the scan of the napkin (thumbnail, below; click on it for a bigger view).
A bunch of us were in a bar in Nashville TN, speculating on the proportion of the American population that could correctly identify the state in which Barack Obama spent most of his childhood.
See the proposed multiple choice survey question on the right; political scientists best guesses on the left. The guesses range from 11% (Larry Bartels) to 28% (Lynn Vavreck). I’m down for 18%. Read more »
1 of 3. My TA for 350C, Thomas Brambor alerted me to electoral-vote.com. It looks quite promising, especially the polling data in CSV format…!
2 of 3. Doug Rivers put me on to The Rather Difficult Font Game. I didn’t get a perfect score. Sniff.
Oh. Mi. God. The full horror is on You Tube. Herr Gruber’s daringfireball alerted me to this travesty.
I am one of a number of LaTeX users on the Mac platform noticing some font-mangling by formerly reliable friends such as LaTeX Equation Editor. The issue seems to be that Apple’s Type Services’ font caches are getting corrupted along the way, and then anything that relies on them will give odd renderings of typefaces. This includes applications such as Preview.app, Skim.app, and of course LaTeX equation editor. Adobe doesn’t use ATTSServer and doesn’t seem to be affected. Read more »
Via Shanto Iyengar, who simply said “strong leader?”
This was great. The inversion of the Bayesian critique of the stopping-rule/likelihood-principle controversy is very good.
Samuel Arbesman and Steven Strogatz at Cornell have been looking at DiMaggio’s 56 game heating streak with a ton of Monte Carlo simulations, resulting in a piece in the New York Times. Read more »
And perhaps the faculty too. See these photos.
Its been a glorious start to Spring here in Northern California. We celebrated the end of Winter quarter with a Happy Hour out on the lawn in front of our building.
Spotted in an Annabel Crabb piece in the weekend Sydney Morning Herald:
In a Sydney Town Hall debate in 2000, Gough Whitlam explained that he had never dropped the “C-bomb” in Parliament, despite his widely recognised capacity for colourful language. Read more »
I am doing the Spatial Voting module at the Washington University in St Louis edition of EITM (Empirical Implications of Formal Models); June 16-18, 2008. Read more »
Me. And she won.
Then she wins Indiana, he wins North Carolina. And we stumble through to June without any real change in the balance of pledged delegates. It is tough to see how he doesn’t become the nominee, the only question is when. Read more »
Not bad. Streaming the debate and a 25 person dial group from the Delaware Valley.
This is from the ABC affiliate in Philadelphia.
So here is something I’ve been meaning to gripe about for a while.
I’d like to have Sweave as the (default?) TeX command option when editing Rnw files. There is a little bit of material on this on the web: a suggestion that you augment the TeX-command-list with a Rnw-mode-hook. This proposed solution doesn’t seem to work for me very well: I never see the Sweave menu items in the command menu when editing a Rnw file.
So I created my own addition to the TeX-command-list: Read more »
I am working with James Holland Jones from the Anthro Department, fitting two-component bivariate normal mixtures to birth weights and gestational ages. Mixtures are kind of fun; most of my previous experience has been with univariate normal components: it is interesting to see how these things work (or don’t) in higher dimensions. Read more »
I am thoroughly enjoying Deepayan Sarkar’s book on Lattice, R’s trellis lookalike.
Trellis was one of those things that I thought looked cool when it came along, but with high start-up costs, so I never took the plunge, preferring lots of custom code for graphs of various flavors. Read more »
I am enjoying Skim. Bye bye Texniscope; it hadn’t been updated in a long time, seems a dead project. The Skim wiki has all the details on pdfsync integration. Read more »
An addition to Apple’s OS/X that I think came in with Leopard. Nice touch. You really don’t your laptop battery going dead in the middle of a software update.
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