With the expansion of all-day schooling in Germany, students’ extracurricular activities are being brought into greater focus in educational and social sciences. However, the diverse range of activities and individual biographies makes it difficult to gather data on the variety and periods of extracurricular activities in classroom-based surveys. This paper introduces a tailored calendar...
The death of SAS and SPSS in academia
Where is the growth? In R and Stata, of course:
What’s interesting is the discrepancy between the death and growth rates. Mixed in here is a hidden trend, I believe, where scholars are much less likely in general to mention the statistical software they used in their research.
Pensions costs are killing Northern Kentucky U
The university’s payments into the state pension system have skyrocketed from $3.9 million in 2010 to $15.3 million this year. The projected cost for 2018 is $19.4 million. Mearns, who laid out the budget situation in a presentation here, said 2 percent of NKU’s operating budget went into pension costs in 2010 and that nearly 10 percent of the budget will be dedicated to the pension...
Who knew Art Garfunkel was a mathematician?
He also does a lot of mathematics, having read it as a student at Columbia. “I’m precise. I think in proportions. I play games with numbers and I proportionalise. I imagine we have now done 1/8th of our interview.” I check my watch. He even took a job as a maths teacher at one point, in the Seventies, despite being a world famous pop star. “I’d just got married and moved to Connecticut, and there...
What does Daryl Hall think of higher education?
One of the current debates is over “cultural appropriation” – The idea that white people should not appropriate the culture of ethnic and racial minorities. I know that you don’t like the term “blue eyed soul.” Have you followed this conversation? Are you trying to say that I don’t own the style of music that I grew up with and sing? I grew up with this music. It is not about being black or white...
The problem with quant research that most quant folks refuse to acknowledge
This is one of the reasons I am a big proponent of replication and transparency in what we do. How is it that economists, working in good faith, wind up with dubious results? To start, they can overanalyze the data. Modern computers spit out statistical regressions so fast that researchers can fit some conclusion around whatever figures they happen to have. “When you run lots of regressions...
Directly access College Scorecard data with R
Via Ben Skinner, a doc student at Vanderbilt (if you’re hiring next year, you should definitely give him a hard look):
Making students volunteer makes them volunteer less
Does ‘compulsory volunteering’ affect subsequent behavior? Evidence from a natural experiment in Canada This paper estimates the impact of ‘compulsory volunteerism’ for adolescents on subsequent volunteer behavior exploiting the introduction of a mandatory community service program for high school (HS) students in Ontario, Canada. We use difference-in-differences approach with a large...
Speaking truth to power about qualitative research
From a rejection letter to a qual researcher, about why the manuscript was being rejected: Of course, the whining and outrage was predictable. More here: Let’s face facts: it’s a quant world now. Policymakers and stakeholders don’t want to hear stories about the lived experience or any other such nonsense. Funders are increasingly adopting a similar mindset. The trend is only...
Data on Churchill’s drinking
He died 50 years ago this month – the anniversary of his funeral will be marked later this week — at the ripe age of 90. A miracle, considering he had drunk an estimated 42,000 bottles of Pol Roger champagne through his life; he thought nothing of starting the morning with cold game and a glass of hock and ending it at 3am with the best part of a bottle of cognac. […] After...