Statistics and Rock Climbing

Rock climbers, in my experience, are not especially given to discussing statistical factor loadings. For climbers, figuring out the loads on each element in the rope system has, shall we say, more grave and immediate consequences.

Straddling the worlds of p-values and Yosemite Decimal System ratings, as I do, and being given to a predilection for imposing my geekiness on others, I fairly squeaked with joy when I found today a rock-climbing illustration of a statistical concept. It is (tum ta tum!) the scree test. It's a graphical way of deciding which factors to retain following a principal components analysis. You plot your eigenvalues on a line plot, which ends up looking at the left like the steep mountains we climbers so enjoy surmounting, and on the right like the more gently sloping (but still arduous to traverse) scree fields (piles of jagged rocks just right for ankle-twisting) you typically find at the base of a big, juicy rock face. You then dump the factors that form the scree field because they're, well, scree, and nobody likes it.

Pictured here is the one person in the world I can think of who'd be likely (p <.05) to be just as excited about this as I am.

Methods: Make Stata Do-Files Faster with a Spreadsheet

Say you've got a long list of feeling thermometer results in a data set like the National Election Study and you want to run Chi squares on all of them with your favorite independent variable. A Stata Do-file makes it easy, but composing your Do-file in a spreadsheet program makes it even easier. NES runs its similar variables all together, so in NES 2004's post-election study, the 45 (!) feeling thermometers are in variables V045043 to V045088. One way to get results is to type your first command ...

tabulate V045043 V043116, chi2

... then copy and paste it a bunch of times ...

tabulate V045043 V043116, chi2
tabulate V045043 V043116, chi2
tabulate V045043 V043116, chi2

... then go through with the arrow keys and delete key to increase the first variable by one another bunch of times -- say, 45 in all.

Or, you could let a spreadsheet (such as the free, open-source, completely Microsoft Excel-compatible OpenOffice Calc) do the work for you.

1. Fire up a blank sheet and type your command in Column 1, your dependent variable in Column 2, your independent variable in Column 3, and ",chi2" in Column 4.
2. Highlight the dependent variable you just typed and use the drag arrow (or whatever that thing's called) at the bottom right of the cell to generate a list of variables as long as you want that increases by one in each row.
3. Finish by copying each of the other three elements, highlighting the empty cells where they're needed, and pasting.
4. Highlight the whole thing and paste it into Stata's .do file editor, or your favorite text editor, and you're done. Stata doesn't care about the extra spaces.

Be careful that some "helpful" auto-capitalization feature doesn't capitalize your tabulate command, because that will mess things up.

Something similar would probably work to generate SPSS syntax, too, but I haven't tried it yet.

LibraryThing | Catalog your books online

I'm hoping LibraryThing will be a better way to keep track of my political science books. You type in the ISBN, and it quickly sucks down the bibliographic information from the Library of Congress (first try) or Amazon.com. It's much faster and far less kludgy than that bane of my existence, the terrifically horrible EndNote.

EndNote note: One of my main complaints with EndNote has been the lack of a "reference autocomplete" function -- that is, a facility for searching your EndNote library for incomplete entries, then filling them in using the external libraries EndNote offers. I talked with the EndNote sales rep at the recent American Political Science Association annual meeting about this, and his response was essentially, "No soup for you!"

LibraryThing | Catalog your books online:

Save your favorite PocketMod

PocketMod lets you create a your own pocket-size organizer using a Flash applet. You can customize it to your heart's content. But what happens when you settle on a design you like? You can't save your layout -- unless you're one of those smart people who uses a Macintosh. Then you just hit "Save as PDF" when the print dialog comes up, and voila! (not "viola) you've got your permanent copy for endless reprinting.

Note that it seems important to go into Page Setup, select "Page Attributes," and format your document for printing on a laser printer. I just select the HP Laserjet 4100 I have in my office. If you don't do this, the bottom of the page seems to get cropped off.

Link:
PocketMod: The Free Disposable Personal Organizer

Unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science

A fine piece in First Monday looks at how open source and open science are converging. Among other things, the article explains one of the many reasons the business of academic journal publishing can be so frustrating for scholars. As in other concentrated industries, business models do not allow for meeting some customer demands (such as for more open and easy access to scholarship), even though desired services or products could be delivered for a vanishingly minimal additional cost.

Unacknowledged convergence of open source, open access, and open science:

The great increase in journal subscription prices over the last two decades, largely as a result of corporate concentration in scholarly publishing, has led to what economists would term the "dead–weight burden of monopoly," in which "some people’s desires will remain unsatisfied even though they could have been fulfilled at virtually no additional cost"

Assorted Stanford Photos

I've been tooling around Stanford University and Palo Alto on my bike after the day's Summer Institute in Political Psychology lectures let out, and taking photos galore with my new camera. Here's a slideshow featuring photos with nothing more in common than that they were taken in California.

Warning: The slideshow features photos of a pickup truck festooned all over (hood, doors, roof) with anti-Bush stickers. Some of them are profane.

Mount Tam Climbing

Took some of my SIPP colleagues on a climbing trip to Mount Tam in Marin County.

More details later. Until then, here's a slideshow.

Caption: (Left to right) Alex, Matt, Theo and Nathan at the base of the crag.

San Francisco Unedited

It's a whirlwind of activities here at Stanford, where I'm attending the Summer Institute in Political Psychology. The time to edit photos has not presented itself, so here is a slideshow of 159 photos (!) in all their unedited and in some cases rather quite duplicative glory.

The photos are from my pack-everything-into-a-day San Francisco adventure, wherein I had dim sum in Chinatown, rented a bike and rode across the Golden Gate Bridge, ate a crab sandwich on Fisherman's Wharf, visited the Apple Store near Union Square (natch), had a lovely bowl of French onion soup at Cafe Claude down some alley nearby, then collapsed in my humorously tiny room at the amazingly clean and safe, $59 a night Grant Plaza Hotel just a block from the Chinatown arch on Grant.
More bulletins as time permits, meaning not often.

Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes - New York Times

My thesis reader, Dr. John Hibbing, made the New York Times today. It's not often you see the word "dizygotic" in APSR.

Some Politics May Be Etched in the Genes - New York Times:

Political scientists have long held that people's upbringing and experience determine their political views. A child raised on peace protests and Bush-loathing generally tracks left as an adult, unless derailed by some powerful life experience. One reared on tax protests and a hatred of Kennedys usually lists to the right.

But on the basis of a new study, a team of political scientists is arguing that people's gut-level reaction to issues like the death penalty, taxes and abortion is strongly influenced by genetic inheritance. The new research builds on a series of studies that indicate that people's general approach to social issues - more conservative or more progressive - is influenced by genes.

...

In the study, three political scientists - Dr. John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska, Dr. John R. Alford of Rice University and Dr. Carolyn L. Funk of Virginia Commonwealth - combed survey data from two large continuing studies including more than 8,000 sets of twins.

Polaroid-o-nize johnfulwider dot com?

Here's what my front-page photographs would look like if I used the free Polaroid-o-nize service to, you guessed it, make the photographs look like old school instant photos.

The service lets you select the angle of tilt and the caption, among other things. I could alternate the tilt for variety so today's tilts to the left, tomorrow's (or, at my blogging pace, next month's) tilts to the right.

The pictures seem pretty blurry and pixellated, which I can completely understand. The server load to accept image uploads of varying sizes and then send a modified image back must be astonishing.

Valued five readers, consider your feedback solicited.

Blue Mounds Blue Skies

The summer Minnesotaclimbing.com gathering drew more than 70 people this year, including an impressive Nebraska contingent: Doug, Jake, Tim, Jami, Javal, Shannon, Mark and ... and ... that guy whose name I can't remember right now! Anyone who was there knows the title of this entry is ... well ... optimistic. But that's water under the bridge. Next time we face climb on dry sandstone, we'll look back to the wet and mossy Sioux quartzite and think everything else is just a piece of cake.

Here's a slideshow.

Firewire Network Transfers

Found on Lifehacker:

After stringing a firewire cable between my two machines, adding internal IPs, and mapping the mac drive on my PC desktop, my transfers are 20-50x faster over firewire than they ever were over the network. What used to take hours now takes seconds.

Transfering files between two computers on your network FAST!:

Get Help with Priceline Hotels at Betterbidding.com

A while back I used Betterbidding.com to help me make the best bid on Priceline Hotels and ended up getting about $99 $75 a night for a Club Quarters room in Chicago when the conference rate at the nearby (four blocks away) Palmer House Hilton was over $160 $169 a night. I saved $282.

The users and especially the site manager there will bend over backwards to help you find the best rate, even going so far as to post a detailed multi-step bidding strategy to take advantage of some quirks of Priceline bidding. Basically, a rejected bid is not the end.

Here's a link to the discussion thread on the forum for the Chicago trip, which includes the bidding strategy they posted for me.

Florida Wedding Odyssey, Day Three: The Big Event

I've been writing journalistic and academic articles for a decade, yet words fail me to describe James and Laura's wedding. It was perfect for them and for their guests. I hope you, dear five readers, will join me in wishing them all the best.

Here, as you can imagine, is a slideshow. Credit for the photos goes to my dad Randy, who had the presence of mind not to drop his camera in the sand on the day of his cousin's wedding.

Update: Fixed the captions on two photos. Laura's dad is Ben, not Ken.

Florida Wedding Odyssey, Day Two

A beautiful rehearsal dinner capped Day Two of the Florida Wedding Odyssey (so called for its four-day length and multiple events, each requiring a separate outfit). My cousin James and his fiancee Laura looked great and James' parents, Rick and Deb, redeemed my opinion of country clubs by finding one with really quite good food. I ended the evening buried underneath a dogpile of little kids, which suited me just fine.

Here's a slideshow.

Florida Wedding Odyssey, Day One

We're down here in Florida attending my cousin James' four-day wedding. Today was the BBQ, tomorrow's the rehearsal dinner, Sunday's the wedding and Monday's the brunch. First stop as always was The Crab Trap, which overlooks a lake containing actual gen-u-wine gators. You'd think there'd be alligator on the menu, but instead you have to settle for Three Crab Soup, which is just about the tastiest thing you could imagine.

Somehow I managed not to get a good shot of the bride and groom, so look for a shot of James and Laura later.

Here's a slideshow of some photos from The Crab Trap and the BBQ.

Best. Birthday. Ever.

My youth is passing into history as the yawning abyss of 30 rolls forebodingly toward me from just over the horizon. Nevertheless, I maintain the ability to act like a total goofball, with the always-essential assistance of Jami, who bought me the birthday-cake hat.

Many thanks to the many friends who made my party at The Watering Hole such great fun. To the many other friends who didn't hear about the party because it was put together at the last minute -- sorry. I'll make it up to you with another party mid-summer, and probably yet another when everybody gets back to Lincoln this fall from points far and away.

Look for a slideshow of photos soon. Here's a slideshow of photos.

Comments Back Open

After a long hiatus, comments are now open again. WordPress 1.5, my blogging software, appears to now have fairly bulletproof comment spam management built in. If all goes well, there will be no more ads telling you to sprout horns and pop a Levitra (no prescription required).

Shelf Road 2005: 60 Degrees, Then 60 Inches

This year's Shelf Road trip went great on Day 1, with 60-degree-plus temperatures and bright sun-shiny conditions. Then the freak snowstorm (which wasn't really 60 inches, more like 16 -- which is still nuts!) hit, and Day 2 got canceled. Consequently, not a lot of photos to share. Someone needs to remember to buy Mother Nature another round of drinks before next year's Canon City conclave.

Thanks for the Mountains

Credit for the pretty mountains header image goes to "pguler," whoever he or she is. Found the image on Digital Westex Image Gallery.

Ack! What Happened to the Orange and Green?

Gentle five readers, you may be looking with trepidation upon johnfulwider dot com sans its gorgeous Orange and Green color scheme. Never fear, it shall make its return in somewhat different, but still shockingly handsome, form once my long-overdue upgrade to WordPress 1.5 is complete.

Red Rock Canyon and First Flatiron

Chris, Devin, Jon and I took a great early-season climbing trip to Colorado the weekend of March 4.

Day One was some challenging slab climbing in a new area near Garden of the Gods called Red Rock Canyon Open Space. I led three 5.9's, which felt like 5.10's owing to the almost complete lack of hand- and footholds. Jon, our calendar boy for this update, took more than 30 minutes to lead a 5.10b and cried like a little girl most of the time. We all had a great time doing the running dyno start to a small jug on the last route of the day.

Day Two featured my first climb of the First Flatiron, a 1000-foot face that took us eight pitches. Free soloists were passing us constantly, but we stayed roped up. It got a tad chilly on the summit ridge, with sustained wind speeds of 30mph+. I'd do it again with a lot less gear on a much warmer day.

Here's a slideshow.

Colorado Climbing and Snowshoeing

We went to Colorado after Christmas for our annual snowshoeing trip and managed to get some outdoor climbing in as well, owing to the fantastic 45-degree weather. I got to use the Black Diamond nut set I opened just days earlier, which made me giddy as a schoolgirl ... umm, that is, happy as a clam.

Here's a slideshow.