As I am finishing up my thesis I have recently been plotting effects from many models. An important aspect of this is to show the uncertainty surrounding different estimates and effects. Following a paper by Gary King, Michael Tomz and Jason Wittenberg... [Read more...]

Earlier this year I had a lot of fun learning how to use the BeautifulSoup and mechanize modules in python to scrape websites. My goal was to scrape the European Parliament website for information on the activity levels of the different MEPs. I struggl... [Read more...]

TikZ is an awesome macro for producing beautiful graphics in LaTeX. I use it constantly as it has a very intuitive syntax, and it is easy to define global settings for your plots, ensuring that the graphics in your paper are all uniformly styled. One t... [Read more...]

One of the things I do frequently in my research is the apply some function on a large number of rows in a data set. I am a great fan of the loop structure in R, and use this a lot. I know one should always vectorize and avoid loops ... [Read more...]

In the area of political science where I am active (european politics) it is very common to simply estimate a model, and start drawing inferences immediately. This is a shame as drawing inferences from a model without assessing how well it fits the dat... [Read more...]