- Not the time for standards in Open Data, yet It seems with the rise of a new technology, it soon follows on the discussion on how to standardize it. This is true for open data and the call for standards of key data sets where data on a particular topic would share the same schema across cities, states, counties, and countries. The promise is civic apps, which help bring data from rarefied portals to every day people, could be built-once and used-everywhere (“frictionless”). This provided a tremendous value for governments who can see the value in their work for open data. Standards on building inspections, food inspections, parks/trails, and social service directory have been proposed.
- Felton Annual Report — A Eulogy I received the last Annual Report by Nicholas Felton. It is his 10th report in a series that began with a thin volume in 2005. I hesitate to say that I’ve “finally” received the report because I was not anticipating the conclusion of the series in any way. Instead, I had always looked forward to these reports, buying several copies of the sturdy, well-crafted, lithographed paper.His annual reports were quite important in my venture into data visualization. While at the Iowa Department of Education, I had the daunting task of implementing a higher pedigree of research while also explaining it to legislators, lobbyists, educators, my boss, etc. It is one thing to move quickly with data, it becomes more complicated when you everyone else must keep pace. At this point, data visualization became a serious tool to overcome this barrier.
- Big Data and Big Cities Naturally, a paper titled Big Data and Big Cities: The Promise and Limitations of Improved Measures of Urban Life piqued my interest. From the discussion, of “big data” four V’s, Glaeser et al. focused on large volumes of data. The paper discussed two types of big data: while researchers typically used aggregated data, such as totals by ZIP codes derived from Census surveys, one dimension of “big data” comes via administrative data sources such as individual IRS tax returns. The other type of source is from public, social media sources like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Streetview.
- What to post on open data portals? Let me Google, er, Bing that for you. Quick wins. An entire post–nay, novel–could be written about the life of quick wins. For data portals, quick wins are important. I’ve talked to a number of cities who have a fresh data portal and they wonder what should be posted first so they can get the quick wins needed to prove the data portal adds values. Generally, I hit some initial areas: Anything that is currently posted as a PDF Frequently FOIA'd data -- which helps the public and also saves staff time Anything that is currently posted as an Excel or CSVThe first two follow a different work path. For the last item, there is a great free, open-source tool which helps you identify Excel and other documents currently posted to a government website. Let Me Get That Data For You (lmgtdfy) leverages Microsoft Bing to find Excel, JSON, comma-separated (CSV), Shapefiles, and other documents that could be posted to the data portal.
- Open data as consumer protection [caption id=”attachment_1980” align=”aligncenter” width=”640”] Courtesy of Scott L. Licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)[/caption]
- Tools are not to blame, blame laziness PowerPoint and Excel aren’t the enemy, though a lot of people to seem to think they are. Frequently, I hear others say “don’t use PowerPoint” or snicker when someone mentions conducting analysis with Excel. This is wrong. There is nothing wrong with Excel or PowerPoint; I am a fan and user of both programs. The problem is the creativity and capability of those using those programs and it’s time to realize that.
- Data portals are tomorrow’s map room I’ve often found myself exploring a library’s map room or thumbing through old Census records while taking study breaks. I was often surprised how I could become engrossed with old data. Some of the fascination comes from a historical narrative of history from the perspective of that generations point-of-view, even if it was based on faulty logic or data that would be later crystalized. With the advent of open data, digital maps, and databases, how will we be able to explore historical data in the future; that is, how can we look at today’s data over the next 20 years?
- CDO as business development: Some notes from experience Luke Fretwell posted an interesting article on the role CDO has as a business development officer:If I was a Chief Data Officer [...] I would also proactively reach out to these companies to find out what data they’re interested in that government might be able to provide. This could help determine data release schedule/priority or expose low-hanging fruit opportunities and leverage quick wins. Having an established demand also makes it easier to convince internal stakeholders of the value and gives them an incentive to be more proactive in opening the data they manage.Business is one of the key areas targeted by portals. In addition to transparency, promoting civic development, and research, open data as a business development tool has become a more frequent target of open data initiative. The McKinsey report on open data, despite its misgivings, acutely noted the role that opening weather and GPS data had on creating new products in the economy. Like all constituents, requests from start-ups does help gauge the interesting datasets
- Is it really so bad? Stephen Few seems to be upset. In his yearly review, he touches on what sees as a year without any progress:Since the advent of the computer (and before that the printing press, and before that writing, and before that language), data has always been BIG, and Data Science has existed at least since the time of Kepler. Something did happen last year that is noteworthy, however, but it isn’t praiseworthy: many organizations around the world invested heavily in information technologies that they either don’t need or don’t have the skills to use.The terms “data science” and “big data” have long been debatable, not terms I feel strongly about, either. Somewhere, he misses even his own points:Data sensemaking is hard work. It involves intelligence, discipline, and skill. What organizations must do to use data more effectively doesn’t come in a magical product and cannot be expressed as a marketing campaign with a catchy name, such as Big Data or Data Science.Take the assumption that software is overblown and overinvested, the real missing component of research–or “data sensemaking”, because lets replace one made-up word with another–is the lack of human capital. The argument seems to be that the world needs both managers and staff who can wisely invest in analytical software and capable of carrying-out research.
- Feedback on FCC Net Neutrality
- Site Redesign Quick news…the site received a header-to-footer redesign over the weekend. The front page no longer reveals a blog, but instead, a landing page with various links to different online presences. The blog and other pages also received a redesign, using the Invisible Assassin theme.
- Hello, Chicago. I’ve been waiting to share the news with a wider audience. I have started a new role as Director of Analytics for the City of Chicago. Chicago has a ridicuously strong and wide-ranging open-data community, with strong support from the mayor to a group of volunteers who meet weekly to hack on city data. Instead of being a volunteer myself, I will be working with many of the sample people in a new capacity.
- Graduate students will win union rights…for now This past June the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) sought written opinions on whether the board should reconsider the Brown University case which prohibited unionization at private universities. The request was only surprising in that it came so late in the President Obama’s administration, caused by the Senate Republicans stubborn refusal to nominate NLRB members. But it only delayed the inevitable, that students will be able to unionize at private universities.
- Now Interactive: Transitions into the Workforce
- Visualizing Data
- Education paths for Iowa GED recipients Before leaving the Iowa Department of Education, I had the pleasure of working with Andrew Ryder on his dissertation, which studied the pathway from the GED to community college in Iowa.
- Notice: Moving to new domain The website is going to be changing domains this weekend. I’ll be moving to Dreamhost and away from Wordpress.com. I will be making the move in order to accommodate some exciting new projects for the website. But, as these things go, there may be some service interruptions. Everything should be ready by Sunday, June 3rd.
- Using Sublime Text 2 for R
- Agree with the point, but not the logic Education scholar, Gary Rhoads, was the lead author on a report released by Center for the Future of Higher Education, an organization that Dr. Rhoads leads. The main thrust is the troubling decline in community college funding and it’s impact on student access. Specifically, that the reducing the budget has put caps on programs and created a conflict with the community college “open admissions” policies. However, in attempting to argue this, the report makes an odd claim: “Enrollment in community colleges across the country is plateauing and declining despite rising student demand.”
- Data Nouveau: Ideas for Visualizations Starting a project where you need to make a series of graphs or a visualization can be frustrating. One of the hardest tasks is to find a theme, a style which you want to use. Though minimalism is the dominate “style” in data visualization, there is a lot of approaches to any graphical approaches. So I’ve started a blog, Data Nouveau, to browse sources of influence for data projects.
- Measuring Transitions Into the Workforce as a Form of Accountability
- Poverty Estimates for Children by Iowa School Districts U.S. Census Bureau released poverty and income estimates for small areas, including counties and school districts, in an interactive map. Here is a picture of poverty estimates for children (between 5 and 17 years-old) by Iowa school district.
- More on Midwest Urbanization Kyle Munson from The Des Moines Register wrote a featured article on the changing population base in the Midwest based on new Census data. Below is the graph from the article:
- Hollowing Out? Well-written books like Hollowing Out the Middle and Caught in the Middle have noted the net outward migration of education populations to urban areas. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago shows that real per capita income shows there is not as much disparity in real income per capita between the upper Midwest metro areas and non-metro areas as one might guess.
- Earnings and Unemployment by Major Wall Street Journal posted data from the venerable Center on Education and the Workforce on earnings and unemployment by college major.
- How to find salaries for a new job There use to be a lot of talk about H1-B visas. Mostly the conversation focused on whether workers born overseas were somehow “stealing” jobs, but in reality, it reflected an insufficient number of trained workers in a given sector. Regardless of that feeling, you can use H1-B visa applications to your advantage while job-hunting.
- The challenge of finding notes I ran across an old notebook from my days at the American Institute for Economic Research–the days when I studied and wrote in the philosophy of science–with a note the back pag:In describing the human body we must realize the whole and particulars. The whole is the body we see and touch. It is what we assign names, such as Scott or Tara. However, there are particulars, namely atoms that comprise the whole.
- Education the Workforce of the Future
- I really like Zotero’s new tab Firefox 4’s implementation is neat, 3.x was bland.
- STEMania A few STEM items today. From the most recent issue of Technology and Engineering Teacher by Ryan Brown, Joshua Brown, Kristin Reardon, and Chris Merrill:STEM education has been defined as “a standards-based, meta-discipline residing at the schoollevel where all teachers, especially science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers, teachan integrated approach to teaching and learning, where discipline-specific content is not divided, but addressedand treated as one dynamic, fluid study” (Merrill, 2009). However, which sciences are included, and does the level ofmath matter, and how is technology defined? The National Science Foundation includes sciences such as psychology,economics, sociology, and political science in the STEM definition (Green 2007 as cited in NCES, 2009). Other definitions include the technologies that are included in Standards for Technological Literacy: Content for the Studyof Technology (ITEA/ITEEA, 2000/2002/2007), while some solely focus on computer and information technology/science (NCES, 2009).How do you ensure STEM isn’t just for the smart (aka self-selection bias). Cynthia Brown:In general, the workforce pipeline of elementary school teachers fails to ensure that the teachers who inform children’s early academic trajectories have the appropriate knowledge of and disposition toward math-intensive subjects and mathematics itself. Prospective teachers can typically obtain a license to teach elementary school without taking a rigorous college-level...Andrew Rotherham on :We offer scholarships and other incentives in an effort to induce them. But people chose their career path for a variety of reasons, large and small. And it's worth asking if in this instance trying to change the choices of those who are in a position to make choices is really the most powerful leverage point here.Mr. Rotherham’s comment doesn’t directly address Ms. Brown’s, but is relevant since many STEM majors are taken away into quantitative business occupations.
- Educational Attainment of Adults over 25 in Iowa A new project is going to send me into map-making mode for awhile, here is the first bit (click for full size):
- Math 241 Final Download this Excel document. We will spend some time trying to understand what influences graduation rates. Graph a histogram for $/Student and SAT score. Copy & paste each graph into a word document. Describe whether or not each variable appears to be normally distributed. Estimate the mean, median, and mode based on the graph for both variables. Calculate the mean, median, and mode for %Grad. Create a scatterplot between %Grad and SAT score with %Grad on the x-axis. Do you believe there is a relationship? Explain why or why not and the direction of the relationship (e.g., positive, negative, or no relationship) The average SAT score in the United States is 1030. Conduct a hypothesis test which compares the distribution of this dataset to the national average at the 5% level. Is there a statistically significant difference? Conduct a hypothesis test comparing the average SAT for a Lib Arts institution and a Univ. Are there statistically significant differences at the 5% level? Conduct a multiple regression (copy and paste all three regression tables into the Word document): The equation for the regression is Grad% = %PhD + Top 10% + $/Student + Acceptance + SAT + School_Type. You may need to recode the School_Type into a binary variable. What variables explain differences, with statistical significance at 5%, in the graduation level at colleges. Explain, in plain language, the relationship between each significant variable and the graduation rate. Grinnell College, located in Iowa, has a 1244 SAT, 67% acceptance rate, 22,301 $/student, 65% were in the top 10%, and 79% of faculty had PhD's. Calculate the predicted value of their graduation rate. What's the difference between the predicted graduation rate and the actual graduation rate (e.g., calculate the number)? How much of the variation in %Grad is explained by this model? Email me the answer sheet (Word) and the results (either Excel and/or SPSS).
- Increasing Inaccuracy of State Revenue Estimates Every year, every state projects upcoming state tax revenues. It matters a lot. These estimates are used by legislators, technocrats, and the governor to determine spending for schools, health care, and agency or program in government. Sometimes, when states are on a biannual budget, spending must determine spending for two years. Imagine trying to estimate your living expenditures for two years. The Pew Center on the States and Rockefeller Institute of Government released a report on this issue.
- Statistics: Final This final is due Sunday, March 6 by 11:00pm. Finals must be submitted via email to the instructor. Submissions must include Excel workbooks, SPSS output files, and a seperate Word document which provides the answers. See below the “more…” link for the full exam.
- Majoring in “Universe”
- Finally, a paper out of this project Found here. It is based on the visualizing transitions into the workforce project that I have been working on and you can see to the left.
- Visualizing Tuition & Fees The Chronicle of Higher Education has put together an interactive chart showing tuition and fees at Iowa community colleges. Play through the timeline and you can see tuition and fees becoming a larger share of revenue for the 15 colleges, while state funding declined. There are a couple of notes along the way to highlight majors shifts.
- Updated Chapter My chapter for the Handbook for Institutional Research, “Workforce and Technical Skill Education and Its Assessment” has been substantially updated. The new draft is available here. The book is expected to be published this summer.
- Statistics Class Update Class-
- Statistics: Lecture Notes 1/26/2011 Link to the spreadsheet from class below. Images below the fold.
- I only wish it was an attempt at irony Mason City Globe-Gazette is discussing the future of the Iowa Core Curriculum, a statewide standard-based curriculum, and quotes the new director of the Iowa Department of Education:"I honor and appreciate the effort and work that has been put into it up to this point. There are a lot of people who have poured [sic] their heart and soul into trying to develop a really quality set of curriculum standards for Iowa ... but it has room to evolve and grow," [Jason Glass] saidMore than any other context, it is tough to stomach an even slight type-o (I make these all the time, unfortunately). It is even tougher to stomach a grammatical error–this was intentional, not a slip of the finger. Homophones usually are sorted in classroom learning or through a steady reading habit. So, whatever the state does, let us make sure there is still lots of reading, so we don’t rely solely on “writing” the way we speak or using daily idiosyncratic writing. K? Thx.
- Computer terminology & literary terms Search the frequency of words from books scanned by Google. Above shows the trends between the words to describe storage space in computers (e.g., hard drives) and “denouement”–a literary word to describe the dynamic structure of a story.
- Econ 102 – Final Can be found here.
- Iowa Projected Revenues Up Again
- Radio Iowa on community college enrollment By Kay Henderson
- Press: Fall enrollment up, decline potentially on horizon From Mason City Globe-Gazette:A record total of 106,597 full- and part-time students enrolled in community-college courses this school year, a 4.8 percent increase that marked the 14th consecutive yearly rise in the overall student population.
- Are There Enough Women in STEM?
- Calculating the Public-Economic Returns to Higher Education
- Minimalist Basic Graphs Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, a key book in the area of data visualization and something that is mentioned often in this course, introduced a minimalist theory of graphs. The book, which was minimalistic in both graphing and writing, introduced new varieties of basic graphs that reduced ink usage even further.
- Not Everything is Under “Insert”: Non-traditional Basic Graphs Bar charts, line charts, and pie charts…oh, my. Even improving these charts can still lead to a pretty dull layout. Data visualization has gained in popularity, for the most, because eye-catching charts are, well, eye-catching. Usually a graphic designer or statistician needs to create something outside of the traditional basic plots, something outside your Excel’s “Insert” menu. Yet, these graphs need to stay simple, with the same feel as a basic plot.Bullet ChartPop quiz, you need to compare your local college’s graduation rate to the national graduation rate. What chart do you use? Question 2; you need to compare your actual expenditures to budgeted expenditures. What chart is utilized? If you answered bar graph, then congratulations. But that is so dull.
- The Basics of a Basic Graph [caption id=”attachment_1310” align=”alignleft” width=”300” caption=”Piet Mondrian, Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930”][/caption]
- Potential graduate-student unionization re-re-reversal? [caption id=”” align=”alignleft” width=”202” caption=”Courtesy of CGAphoto”][/caption]
- y-axis at Zero If your graphing for my class, or just in general, start your axis at zero. It seems trivial, but can have a large impact on the graph. This was apparent in a recent presentation by the Iowa Legislative Services Agency on budget revenues for the current year. Below is a graph (blue line) showing state revenues from 2000 through August 2010.
- Tale of Two Stimuli Two notable progress reports were released last Wednesday. The first is an essay by economists Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank and Princeton economics, and Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics and former advisor to presidential candidate John McCain, on the impact of the federal stimulus program:...without the Wall Street bailout, the bank stress tests, the emergency lending and asset purchases by the Federal Reserve, and the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus program, the nation’s gross domestic product would be about 6.5 percent lower this year.
- I’m Not Familiar with Your Level [caption id=”attachment_660” align=”alignleft” width=”320” caption=”Lies, Damn Lies, & Bar Graphs”][/caption]
- Juice: Higher Education According to the National Center for Education Statistics, approximately 40 percent of students on college campuses are over the age of 25. "In general, there has been an increase in those over the age of 25 going back to school this past year," said Tom Schenk, educational consultant for the Iowa Department of Education. Schenk said more than 38,000 students over the age of 25 are enrolled in Iowa's community colleges, an increase over last year. Adult learners have a plethora of options in central Iowa. Here are details on some local programs.Here are the details.
- Oh the Humanities The New York Times has an article on the hardships of a humanities Ph.D. Among the highlights: it takes an average of 9 years to finish a humanities Ph.D. (if you do); high amount of debt (over $25,000); and the old age of graduates (35 years-old) which means less time available to recover all of that money.
- Career Cluster Transitions, A Simpler View An excerpt from the larger poster.
- n-Tuple Line Graphs: Wages of Graduates and Leavers
- Taxonomy of Data Visualization This post is a part of a collection for an upcoming course on Data Visualization at the 2010 Mid-America Association for Institutional Research annual meeting. These posts will be collected and placed on the course website. They may also be modified as the course develops to increase clarity.
- Political Evolution Politics can’t be captured as a one dimensional left-versus-right framework. So when one notes that young people are Democrates and older folk tend to be Republicans, it doesn’t capture the complete spectrum of political beliefs. Are 18 year-olds Democrats because they believe in individual liberty, such as abortion and drug possession, or because the favor restrictions on trade?
- Meet the Faculty… Click the image for the full article.
- The (Iowa) Community College Student [slideshare id=3359889&doc=thecommunitycollegestudent-100307163552-phpapp02]
- On Why We Don’t Need a National Student Unit Record System The 2008 College Affordability Act prohibited the U.S. Department of Education from establishing a student unit record (SUR) database. The database would contain individual student information of any student who attended a higher education institution eligible to receive federal funds (i.e., almost all).
- Recessionomics: Unemployment Rates
- K-12 Expenditures per Student and Performance Below is a plot showing the relationship between the density of students receiving free and reduced lunch and the percent making progress in mathematics in Iowa school districts. Families with limited income are eligible for free and reduced lunch, so it’s a proxy for poverty. The regression line shows the negative relationship between free and reduced lunch and proficiency on Math AYP. That’s expected, we know students coming from low-income households struggle academically for a variety of reasons…
- Non-economic Benefits to Graduate-student Unionization I’ve done quantitative research on graduate-student unionization before. In my research I found unionization has a modest effect on increasing wages and little to no impact on reducing wage inequality for graduate assistants.
- Organizing Email Sent Directly to You I wrote about this four years ago elsewhere. I just remembered it and posting it here for posterity (and for my own memory).
- Update on Unemployment Iowa finally received some good news regarding unemployment.
- Condition of Iowa’s Community Colleges & Radio Interview The Annual Condition of Iowa’s Community Colleges 2009 was released last week which highlights a bunch of data collected by the Iowa Department of Education on Iowa’s 15 community colleges.
- Alternatives to Student Testing Chad Adleman and the folks at Education Sector have recently released a report highlighting the deficiencies of Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) to measure student achievement. AYP is the (in)famous metric employed through No Child Left Behind to see if schools are improving on standardized tests. He concludes AYP is a seldom indicator of other long-term successes, like college continuation and college GPA.
- K-12 Expenditures and Enrollment Size From a working paper by Dan Otto on the economies of scale in Iowa’s K-12 schools:First, expenditures per student generally rise as district sizes fall below about 750 students. Given no additional knowledge about educational processes, it is possible there are economies of scale relative to school district size for these districts. It also is possible small districts have a tendency to spend more on education per student simply because they believe it is a valuable investment...The scatter diagram of reported data has a general shape similar to the letter “J” lying on its back. This is not conducive to linear regression, where every increase in district size would result in a fixed decrease in expenditures per student. Such a relationship would imply constant economies of scale throughout the range of possible school district sizes. That obviously is not the case here....The scatter diagrams of per student expenditures relative to district enrollments for these two categories are shown as Figures 4 and 5. Both of these plots have shapes similar to the total expenditure per student plot from Figure 3. These plots give good reason to believe that a reciprocal relationship exists between both instruction and administration with respect to district enrollment size...Looking at instruction expenditures and administrative services expenditures as a percent of total expenditures relative to district enrollment provides some additional insight. If increasing perstudent expenditures indicate that smaller districts inherently placed more value on educational investments in students, instructional expenditures as a percent of total budgets also would consistently rise among districts with smaller enrollments. A look at Figure 6 shows this is not the case. While there is significant variance in this measure across the entire range of district enrollments, there is not immediate visual evidence that smaller districts spend a consistently larger portion of their budgets on instruction. This would tend to go against arguments that small district expenditures per student are higher due to a cultural predisposition to invest more on education in smaller environments...It is clear expenditures per student rise at an accelerating rate as enrollment sizes fall below about 750 students. It also is clear expenditures per student are relatively constant at enrollment levels above 1,000 students. In fact, it is relatively easy to fashion a simple statistical relationship between district enrollments and total expenditures per student that accounts for nearly 40 percent of the expenditure per student variation across these districts. While we cannot be certain this is due to economies of scale among the smaller districts, data on instructional and administrative expenditures as percents of total expenditures tend to support this conclusion.
- Preview: From Major to Targeted Clusters [caption id=”attachment_482” align=”aligncenter” width=”600” caption=”From the upcoming The Annual Condition of Iowa's Community Colleges 2009”][/caption]
- Iowa Unemployment: Exploring the Denominator Iowa’s unemployment edged up to 6.7 percent in November from October’s 6.6 percent. The increase wasn’t statistically significant, so for practicality we can say it remained flat. However, the unemployment level isn’t too disconcerting, especially since Iowa is relatively low compared to other states.
- Preview: Community College Finances – Tufte Scatterplot I’ve actually shown this graph before at a State Board of Education meeting last year. I don’t think it was received as well as I had hoped. Many people were worried about the “complexity” of the diagram and I did hear some murmuring when I flipped to the slide. Below is the image of the graph and a fuller explanation is below the fold:
- Preview: Five-year In-state Retention Rate
- REC Estimates for Fiscal Year 2011 The Revenue Estimating Conference published their December predictions for fiscal year 2011 (July 2009 - June 2010). We know the margin of error for REC net revenue predictions for the following year 3.9%–higher than the ideal margin of error. REC revised, downward, their prediction to $5.403 billion in net revenues. Given their historical accuracy it may be somewhere between $5.192 to $5.613 billion next year.
- Accuracy of Iowa’s Revenue Estimating Conference A lot of people have been paying attention to the Revenue Estimating Conference (REC) the last two years. By law, REC meets three times a year–March, October, and December–to forecast tax revenues for the next fiscal year (between July and June). The legislature and governor use the estimates to determine expenditures…
- Wii Shortages and Myths (Pertinant to Econ 102) Last Christmas there was a bit of talk on the shortage of Wii’s. There are a number of examples where people claimed Nintendo intentionally withheld supplies, I’ll highlight one made at EveryJoe:Nintendo claims the shortage is not manufactured as one might wonder. While Nintendo claims a manufactured shortage is not good business, it does seem suspicious that the company did not ramp up production to meet demand for the Wii’s second Christmas appearance. Certainly the laws of supply and demand are working in Nintendo’s favor with customers clamoring to get their hands on a coveted Wii and dishing out the money to pay the inflated pricetags associated with it.Of course shortages, by definition, indicate prices could (and possibly should) be higher. However, Nintendo does not capture those increased prices. Often, Wii’s sold for hundreds of dollars above retail on sites like eBay or Craigslist. Nintendo does not receive those revenues from secondhand markets, but goes to those sellers.
- LaTeX for Undergraduates [caption id=”attachment_394” align=”aligncenter” width=”600” caption=”Old "LaTex for Undergraduates" Banner”][/caption]
- Iowa Economy: Manufacturing Jobs in Iowa Here mostly as a reminder. Source: Des Moines Register.
- Applied Microeconomics From a series of forum posts:Person 1: I wasn't all that impressed with [Johnny Walker] Blue... it seemed to go so far down the "how smooth can we make it" path that it didn't have a whole ton of personality...
- Fall Enrollment 2009 Presentation The Iowa Department of Education released the Community College Enrollment Report for Fall 2009. Enrollment exceeded 100,000 students for the first time in the fall semester due to a dramatic year-to-year increase. Below is the presentation given to the state board and the full report can be found here.
- Visualizing Transitions into the Workforce Presentation
- AIRUM 2009 Presentation: Calculating Returns to Degree Using Adminstrative Data [slideshare id=2398491&doc=calculatingreturnsusingadminstrativedata-091101182631-phpapp01]
- In Depth: What We Said
- Why have two dimensions when one is half the price [caption id=”” align=”aligncenter” width=”585” caption=”A One-Dimensional Approach”][/caption]Data visualization is great because it can merges statistics–a largely positive science–with explanation. Thus, unacquainted individuals fully into a conversation without relying on complex structures. However, I think many writers on data visualization underestimate how easy it is to forget the positive statements from statistics and turns into rhetorical statistics without a good theoretical basis.
- Preview: Visualizing Transitions into the Workforce
- Econ 101 – Lecture Notes 9/29/2009 Lecture notes on the basics of money and banking with audio.
- Econ 101 – Lecture Notes 9/22/2009 Lecture notes on aggregate demand and aggregate supply.
- Econ 101 – Practice Problems Sorry for the delay, it’s been an issue getting technology to work for me. Below is the practice problems focused on inflation adjustment and creating price indexes. Below that document is a link to the answers. There is no due date.
- Lecture Notes – 9/15/2009 Here are lecture notes on GDP, returns to scale, production, and growth theories.
- Econ 101 – Homework #4 [scribd id=20140374 key=key-1yv9rje2xnv8yk3rzwpp]
- Longitudinal Data and Higher Education Accountability [slideshare id=2019982&doc=longitudinaldataandhighereducationaccountability-090918165319-phpapp01]
- Econ 101 – Homework #3 [scribd id=19784826 key=key-2bpzd2ckia28vr8tgmj5]
- Preview: Visualizing Transitions to the Workforce The Iowa Department of Education and Iowa Workforce Development have teamed together to track students from community college into the workforce. While we’ve looked at returns to degree and in-state retention rate, we wanted to see where kids were working. In short, we looked at majors and tracked them into the industry. We aggregated majors into 17 groups (left) and 20 industries (right). In order to easily display the information I opted for a Circos display.
- James Heckman on NPR James Heckman, the Nobel-prize winning economist from the University of Chicago, spoke briefly on National Public Radio. My favorite part was Michael Martin asking why an economist (and there are quite a few of us) is interested in early childhood education:MARTIN: I hope the question doesn't bore you. But there are…many people who will wonder why and how an economist got interested in early childhood education.
- Baseball Stats ESPN’s interesting article on pitch count also contained some ugly graphs. The articles thesis is on starting pitchers now regularly pitching fewer than 100 pitches.
- Selection Bias and Online Dating [caption id=”” align=”aligncenter” width=”500” caption=”By KupKupLand”][/caption]
- To standardize or not standardize? Andrew Gelman compares standardized and unstandardized coefficients. Gelman has previously written a paper which addresses most of the shortcomings to unstandarized coefficients (e.g., raw coefficients, the stuff you see as a default) and addresses the issues brought up in the post. Unfortunately, he didn’t address the problems I was most interested in seeing. He writes:"What bugs me the most is regression coefficients defined on scales that are uninterpretable or nearly so: for example, coefficients for age and age-squared (In a political context, do we really care about the difference between a 51-year-old and a 52-year-old? How are we supposed to understanding the resulting coefficients such as 0.01 and 0.003?) or, worse still, a predictor such as the population of a country (which will give nicely-interpretable coefficients on the order of 10^-8)? I used to deal with these problems by rescaling by hand, for example using age/10 or population in millions. But big problems remained: manual scaling is arbitrary (why not age/20? Should we express income in thousands or tens of thousands of dollars?); still left difficulties in comparing coefficients (if we're typically standardizing by factors of 10, this leaves a lot of play in the system); is difficult to give as general advice."
- ECON 102 – Homework #3 and Test Reminder Homework #3 has been posted on the course page and below. This is due Monday, July 13th. There will also be a test on Monday.
- New York Times’ Take on Business Cycles
- Using Uploader.py to upload from Picasa to Flickr – Repost Below is a re-post from the original genericface blog. By far the most popular post, it has been replaced by easier tools, such as picasa2flickr.
- The Effects of Graduate-student Unionization from MEA Conference A presentation based on early results. This model has now been entirely replaced.
- Bayes is the New Black Presentation From 2007 International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Science of Biology in Exeter, England.