Alea Jacta Est This is the very last analysis before the election. A far-right nationalist candidate, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, is leading the polls with about 40% of the intentions, while the runner up candidate, Fernando Haddad, of a leftist coalition ... [Read more...]

Motivation What comes to your mind when you think about the most dangerous jobs in the world? The other day I was talking to a friend about high-risk professions. She told me journalism would be a risky one. At first I laughed at her, since she’s a j... [Read more...]

Pundits have been asking themselves over the last days how did Theresa May’s gamble fail? Although the Conservative party received 42% of the vote, Labour received 40%, and all the other parties received 18% between them. The Tories lost their parli... [Read more...]

With my Telegram account connected to @TeleR, the force of R can always be with me, where I have data. The following is a screenshot of my mobile: If you want to have R where you are too, you will only need a Telegram account, then search for the pu... [Read more...]

Tasks: Compute the Effective Number of Parties by year and region Using the American National Election Studies, compute the Effective Number of Parties in the electorate across regions and years/waves. The data The data come from The American National Election Studies (ANES). The ANES is a survey that covers ... [Read more...]

Ah, the numbers! The Olympic Games are back in high style in Rio. Despite Brazil’s sluggish economy and unfulfilled promises for this Summer Olympic Games, I’d say, my expectations were met yesterday with such a beautiful opening ceremony. Let’s ... [Read more...]

I had a conversation with people at the office about size and memory requirements that a computer must have to deal with a data frame. It started like this: suppose you have a data frame with 2,000,000 rows and 250 columns, all of which are numeric dat... [Read more...]

I was asked about my understanding of reproducible research, and how that applies to social research. Here is how I see: Reproducible research is key to any scientific method, including applied social sciences. My minimalist understanding of reproduci... [Read more...]

I worked a bit over the weekend preparing my talk to be delivered at the seminar organized by IBPAD this week at University of Brasilia, addressing the interfaces of Big Data and Society. I was invited to present the R package SciencesPo for an eclectic crowd. Eclectic in terms of ... [Read more...]

The Brazilian Carnival just ended this week, but for some people it is time to starting worry about crazy things that may have happened over the days of the flesh festival. Watching the news, the spokesperson of the Test and Prevention Center (CTA) in Brasilia estimated that the number of ... [Read more...]

Motivation I could finally made to the movies for watching the new Star Wars release this weekend. Although this episode wasn’t that spectacular, in my view, it did inspire some data seeking afterwards. I wanted to know how this film compares to others top movies in terms of worldwide ... [Read more...]

Motivation I finally made to the movies for watching the new Star Wars release this weekend. Although this episode wasn’t that spectacular, in my view, it did inspire some data seeking afterwards. I wanted to know how this film compares to others top... [Read more...]

I was searching in the arXiv repository for an interesting paper to read over the weekend, when I found this: “Studying Gender in Conference Talks – data from the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society”. The title and figures caught m... [Read more...]

Last week I attended a “Flower Festival” in Joinville, where I had opportunity to admire several of among the most beautiful and awarded flowers, orchids, and decoration plants. Surprisingly, though, I never had thought on flowers like fractals the way I did this time. Introduction Fractals attract lots of interest, ... [Read more...]

Yesterday, more Scots than ever since universal suffrage was introduced cast a ballot on the matter of independence. The turnout was itself phenomenal and that potentially implicates a series of questions for the government authorities and citizens. For the time being the sole question is: would this benefit one side ... [Read more...]

Just few hours before Scots head to the polls, there is not an overwhelming advantage of the anti-independence vote. Actually, the margin is shorter than last time I looked at it, but despite such a growing trend in favor of the “Yes” campaign in the last weeks, the “NO” side ... [Read more...]

Sometimes, the only thing we want is a chart that speaks for itself rather than boring regression tables in our research paper. Graphs are efficient at showing the broad picture of an issue. In fact, graphs in research papers seem to be gaining a momentum in political science. If you ... [Read more...]

In this post I will show one way to display explained variance using a line chart. For the best of my knowledge, there is no a default plot for displaying the effect of a factor on the deviance of multilevel models; so this is going to be a tentative for ... [Read more...]