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    NYT on Improving the Peer Review Process

    Wednesday's New York Times reports on recommendations by an independent panel on how the journal Science could improve its review process (see here). The panel was instituted after Science had to rectract papers by Dr. Hwang Woo-suk that were based on fabricated results. The panel recommended four changes:

    (1) Flag high visibility paper for extra scrutiny in the review process
    (2) Require authors to specify their individual contributions to a paper
    (3) Make more raw data available...

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    Inauthentic Paper Detector

    Sebastian Bauhoff

    A group at the Indiana School of Informatics has developed a software to detect whether a document is "human written and authentic or not." The idea was inspired by the successful attempt of MIT students in 2004 to place a computer-generated document at a conference (see here). Their program collated random fragments of computer science speak into a short paper that was accepted at a major...

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    Income, partisanship, and voting

    Andrew Gelman has an interesting post up about voting behavior in rich states and poor states, showing how voting patterns differ across the country when you condition on the income of the voters. There is not much of a relationship between per capita income and support for Democrats among poor voters, but there is a strong relationship among rich voters: rich voters in poor states are much more likely to support the Republicans than rich voters in rich states.

    On a related note,...

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    Incompatibility: Are You Worried?

    Jim Greiner

    I’m a teaching fellow for a course in missing data this semester, and one topic keeps coming up peripherally in the course, even though we haven’t tackled it head-on just yet. That topic is incompatible conditional distributions. And here’s my question for blog readers: how much does it bother you?

    Reduced to its essence, here’s the issue. Supposed I have a dataset with three variables, A, B, and C. There are multiple missing data patterns, and suppose (although it’s not essential to the problem) that I want to use multiple imputation to...

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    Incumbency as a Source of Contamination in Mixed Electoral Systems

    Jens Hainmueller

    Since the early 1990s, more than 30 countries have adopted mixed electoral systems that combine single-member districts (SMD) in one tier with proportional representation (PR) in a second tier. Political scientists like these type of electoral systems because each voter gets to cast two votes, the first vote according to one set of institutional rules and the second vote according to another. Some have argued that this allows for causal inference because it offers a controlled comparison of voting patterns under different electoral rules. But does...

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    Information and accountability -- Snyder and Stromberg

    Jim Snyder and David Stromberg have produced a very interesting working paper called "Press Coverage and Political Accountability." It's a big paper and I haven't processed the whole thing, but I think it is an important and clever paper that speaks to big issues about the media and democratic accountability.

    The goal of the paper is to trace the cycle of political accountability: politicians go about their jobs, the media reports on the politicians, voters consume the news and become informed about the politicians, and politicians...

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    Inheritance Laws

    Jason Anastasopoulos, guest blogger

    Question: Many political philosophers that focused on questions of property (including Plato) believed that equality of conditions were necessary for the development of a virtuous citizenry and virtuous leaders. The key to creating this equality of conditions, they argued, was the implementation of strict inheritance laws limiting the transfer of wealth from one generation to the next. Does anyone know of any quantitative models or empirical studies that examine the interaction between social stratification and inheritance laws...

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    Initiative for Innovative Computing - Edward Tufte

    The Initiative in Innovative Computing, an interdisciplinary program that aims to "foster the creative use of computational resources to address issues at the forefront of data-intensive science," is hosting a talk by Edward Tufte next week. It is easy to forget that Tufte began his career as a political scientist, long before he became known for his work on the visual representation of evidence. His 1975 article on "Determinants of the Outcomes of Midterm Elections" is one of the 20 most-cited articles...

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    Instrumental Variables in Qualitative Research

    You, Jong-Sung

    In large-N quantitative research, instrumental variables are often used to address the problem of endogeneity. In small-N qualitative research such as comparative historical case studies, researchers examine historical sequence and intervening causal process between an independent variable(s) and the outcome of the dependent variable in order to establish causal direction and illuminate causal mechanisms (Rueschemeyer and Stephens 1997). However, careful examination of sequence and intervening process through process-tracing may not solve the problem...

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    Intersex Twins

    The Economist and Time Magazine recently published interesting articles on a new type of twins. Apparently some twins are neither identical nor fraternal, but are `semi-identical'. That is, one twin is male and the other `intersex' (both male and female). You can read a short discussion on the biology in the articles, which also note that it’s unknown how common this type of twins is. More to worry...

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    IN, NC Predictions

    Since I have qualifying exams tomorrow, I'll keep this entry unimaginative. I've re-run my predictions for the Indiana and North Carolina primaries on Tuesday, adding a few new bells and whistles:

    • A turnout model
    • More covariates in the voting share model

    nc.dem.2008.pred.share.png

    ...

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    New exhibit in honor of the 100th anniversary of Louis D. Brandeis's confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court

    In honor of the centennial anniversary of Louis D. Brandeis’s confirmation to the United States Supreme Court, a new exhibit  celebrates his significant and lasting relationship with the Harvard Law School (HLS).

    Divided into three sections, it looks at his evolving relationship with the Law School from his student days, to his time as a devoted alumnus working to improve the school, and finally while he was a Supreme Court justice employing and mentoring HLS graduates.... Read more about New exhibit in honor of the 100th anniversary of Louis D. Brandeis's confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court

    Palm Sunday Children's Message

    Text from Church School Director Wes Conn's Children's Message for Palm Sunday

    Today is a special day in the Church. What is so special about today? (Palm Sunday: the day Jesus rode on a donkey into Jerusalem and people cheered and called him a king.) This story is the beginning of what is called Holy Week, a time when we remember Jesus’ last days and the love he has for each of us...

    “It was time for Jesus and his friends to go into Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish holiday...

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    Eastertide music from UChoir

    Spring Bursts Today

    This recording presents a selection of Eastertide anthems as they might be heard in the daily and Sunday services of the Memorial Church, Harvard University, during that glorious season.
    The Resurrection narrative—theatrical to the core—has long-inspired dramatic musical representation, and this recording offers a wide variety of Eastertide joy, from sixteenth-century England, through to a series of contemporary works commissioned by the Harvard University Choir. We are pleased to offer this recording as a free download. Released April 20, 2014... Read more about Eastertide music from UChoir

    A case for the case-control method

    In his opinion piece in this weekend's New York Times, Henry Louis Gates presents a taste of the research behind his forthcoming book, In Search of Our Roots:

    I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a...
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