Attention conservation notice: 8000+ words of political theory by geeks. For quite a while now, Henry Farrell and I have been worrying at a skein of ideas running between institutions, networks, evolutionary games, democracy, collective cognition, the Internet and inequality. Turning these threads into a single seamless garment is beyond our hopes (and not our style anyway), but we think we've been getting somewhere in at least usefully disentangling them. An upcoming workshop gave us an...

Attention conservation notice: 1400 words on a friend's proposal to do away with peer review, written many weeks ago when there was actually some debate about this. Larry is writing about peer review (again), this time to advocate "A World Without Referees". Every scientist, of course, has day-dreamed about this, in a first-lets-kill-all-the-lawyers way, but Larry is serious, so let's treat this seriously. I'm not going to summarize his argument; it's short and you can and should go read it...

Sometimes, all you can do is quote verbatim* from your inbox: Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2012 09:31:57 -0400 From: Stephen Wolfram To: Cosma Shalizi Subject: 10-year followup on "A New Kind of Science" Next month it'll be 10 years since I published "A New Kind of Science" ... and I'm planning to take stock of the decade of commentary, feedback and follow-on work about the book that's appeared. My archives show that you wrote an early review of the...

Attention conservation notice: Boring details about getting finicky statistical software to work; or, please read the friendly manual. Some of my students are finding it difficult to install the R package pcalg; I share these instructions in case others are also in difficulty. For representing graphs, pcalg relies on two packages called RBGL and graph. These are not available on CRAN, but rather are on the other R software repository, BioConductor. To install them, follow the instructions...

In which we are devoted to two problems of political economy, viz., strikes, and macroeconomic forecasting. Assignment; macro.csv Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View

What time series are. Properties: autocorrelation or serial correlation; other notions of serial dependence; strong and weak stationarity. The correlation time and the world's simplest ergodic theorem; effective sample size. The meaning of ergodicity: a single increasing long time series becomes representative of the whole process. Conditional probability estimates; Markov models; the meaning of the Markov property. Autoregressive models, especially additive autoregressions; conditional...

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste. Susan Whitfield, Life along the Silk Road Not-quite-historical fiction: life stories of sundry Silk Road characters — merchants, monks, soldiers, artists, ordinary widows — distributed from Samarkand to Chang-an, and from 700 to 900 AD. These are all more or less composites of actual people, glimpsed from the archaeological record, and especially through the manuscripts preserved at Dunhuang and saved/stolen by Aurel Stein. (In fact...

In which the arts of estimating causal effects from observational data are practiced on Sesame Street. Assignment Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View

Estimating graphical models: substituting consistent estimators into the formulas for front and back door identification; average effects and regression; tricks to avoid estimating marginal distributions; propensity scores and matching and propensity scores as computational short-cuts in back-door adjustment. Instrumental variables estimation: the Wald estimator, two-stage least-squares. Summary recommendations for estimating causal effects. Reading: Notes, chapter 24 Advanced Data...

In which we use graphical causal models to understand twin studies and variance components. Assignment Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View