By popular demand (!), my state-by-state pendulum (pendula?) for 2010 is up (big PDF), just in time for the election.  550px wide JPG version is inline, below. This follows the same formatting I used in the 2007 edition. We start with the 2PP ALP vote shares recorded at the last election (incorporating changes ... [Read more...]

I am digging this countrycode package in R I just found, written by a UM grad student Vincent Arel-Bundock. Very nice. Thanks! countrycode("2","cown","iso3c") [1] "USA" It would be better if the package could handle failed matches a little more gracefully: e.g., __ countrycode(c(2,730,818),"cown","iso3c") [1] "USA" ... [Read more...]

Is out. On sourceforge. Along with a new rjags. Thanks Martyn. I’m looking forward to working my way through some of the improvements, which include block-updating of parameters in GLMs more use of R’s d/p/q family of functions for den... [Read more...]

A little bit of churn relative to the House’s 1st shot at this but otherwise a remarkably similar vote, with an estimated cutpoint almost at the same place; see some raw R output, below the fold, after the thumbnail… y is the vote to take up the Senate amendments; ... [Read more...]

I added another plot to the output generated by my overnight ideal point scripts: a scatterplot of estimated Senate ideal points against Obama vote share in their state (color coded by party, local linear regression overlays by party, labels for some big residuals). I suppose I’m surprised by the ... [Read more...]

From a recent mailing from Stata (highlighting by me): Funnily enough, there is a Daniel Rubin, a bio-informatics person here at Stanford. [Read more...]

Jeff Lewis at UCLA told me he teaches principal components with an image reconstruction example. This got me inspired to try it myself. A snapshot appears below, showing how the image quality improves quickly with a relatively small number of principal components. A full, Sweaved write up is here, making ... [Read more...]

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From the R-devel svn log. Nice addition… r50896 | falcon | 2010-01-05 12:05:31 -0800 (Tue, 05 Jan 2010) | 7 lines Changed paths: M /trunk/NEWS M /trunk/src/include/Defn.h M /trunk/src/library/base/man/Extract.Rd M /trunk/src/main/subassign.c M /trunk/src/main/subscript.c M /trunk/src/main/... [Read more...]

At Doug Rivers’ suggestion, I started investigating tooltips as a way to label points in R graphs. An example appears at the top of my blog, where I plot the ideal points (revealed preferences) of the (current) 111th U.S. House of Representatives against Obama vote share in their district ... [Read more...]

The 40 Republican senators currently in the U.S. senate represent 36% of the U.S population. See the graph below (click on the thumbnail for PDF). This is something I’ve been meaning to compute for a while now, mapping the cumulative distribution of senators’ ideal points onto the cumulative distribution ... [Read more...]