Stata is located in College Station, TX; no one in their right mind would bother going there. Raleigh, N.C. — A Raleigh man charged with pretending to be an Army officer and landing a helicopter at SAS headquarters in Cary was trying to impress a woman, federal authorities said Monday. […] Desgroux exited the helicopter in the uniform of a three-star general and told security officers that...
Jobs in progressive data & analytics
From the Polmeth listserv: Annie Wang <anniejw6@gmail.com> Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 9:42 AM Reply-To: Political Methodology Society <POLMETH@listserv.wustl.edu> To: POLMETH@listserv.wustl.edu Hey folks, A lot of progressive and Democratic organizations are gearing up for the 2018 elections, and there are many job openings in data and analytics. A friend and I started Progressive Data Jobs...
Stop using Excel, finance chiefs tell staffs
It was only a matter of time: Finance chiefs say the ubiquitous spreadsheet software that revolutionized accounting in the 1980s hasn’t kept up with the demands of contemporary corporate finance units. Errors can bloom because data in Excel is separated from other systems and isn’t automatically updated. Older versions of Excel don’t allow multiple users to work together in one document...
The “phantom reference:” How a made-up article got almost 400 citations
Pieter Kroonenberg, an emeritus professor of statistics at Leiden University in The Netherlands, was puzzled when he tried to locate a paper about academic writing and discovered the article didn’t exist. In fact, the journal—Journal of Science Communications—also didn’t exist. Perhaps Kroonenberg’s most bizarre discovery was that this made-up paper, “The art of writing a scientific article,” had...
NYC’s high school equivalency program is a complete boondoggle
Despite a $52 million budget last fiscal year, the DOE’s Office of Adult and Continuing Education, OACE, says it awarded only 150 diplomas — less than half as many as the year before. The lame results alarm City Councilman Daniel Dromm, chairman of the education committee, who held a hearing on adult-ed in September after a Post report. […] Insiders blame the failure on “gross...
Half of American colleges will be bankrupt in 10 to 15 years?
There are over 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States, but Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen says that half are bound for bankruptcy in the next few decades. Christensen is known for coining the theory of disruptive innovation in his 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” Since then, he has applied his theory of disruption to a wide range of...
Understanding xtsum output in Stata
I put this handout together for students in my causal class; you might find it useful:
The improbable origins of PowerPoint
PowerPoint is so ingrained in modern life that the notion of it having a history at all may seem odd. But it does have a very definite lifetime as a commercial product that came onto the scene 30 years ago, in 1987. Remarkably, the founders of the Silicon Valley firm that created PowerPoint did not set out to make presentation software, let alone build a tool that would transform group...
Sue the journal if it publishes an article critical of your research
Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson has filed a lawsuit, demanding $10 million in damages, against the peer-reviewed scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and a group of eminent scientists (Clack et al.) for their study showing that Jacobson made improper assumptions in order to claim that he had demonstrated U.S. energy could be provided exclusively...
Using big data to determine who betrayed Anne Frank
First published on Monday 2 October 2017 11.29 EDT A retired FBI agent has launched a cold case review into identifying those who may have betrayed the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family to the Gestapo in 1944. Investigative techniques developed in the past decade, including the crunching of big data to uncover leads, are to be used by a team of 19 forensic experts led by Vince Pankoke...