JaeWeb

first class in econometrics

A very useful article, published in a peer-reviewed journal, hence true science: A first lesson in econometrics.

Add comment September 5th, 2007

laffer curve

I guess I’ll be a successful lecturer in research methods if I can get my students not to do this!

Add comment July 17th, 2007

jasss and wordpress

Today a new issue of the Journal of Artifical Societies and Social Simulation was published. I am not a huge fan of the journal as it is too much part of the group of social science that is totally converted to using social simulation as method of social research. In particular circumstances computer simulations can be very illuminating for particular issues and it is definitely a very cool tool to use, but it is not the revolution of social science as some presume and it is often far less useful than empirical methods. For this reason, I usually appreciate papers that use similar techniques that are presented at major political science conferences or get published in major political science journal more than those that are really aimed at the relatively small group of researchers already totally into this area. But, nonetheless, usually when there is a new issue of this journal there are a few articles I do want to read, and this issue is no exception. This log entry is mostly for me to remember which ones I wanted to read:

• Luis R. Izquierdo and J. Gary Polhill, Is Your Model Susceptible to Floating-Point Errors? - this is nicely in line with some things I have been reading recently in this book.
• Michael Barber, Philippe Blanchard, Eva Buchinger, Bruno Cessac and Ludwig Streit, Expectation-Driven Interaction: a Model Based on Luhmann’s Contingency Approach - not sure what this is about but it sounds kind of a little bit interesting. Interesting number of authors, by the way. In most natural sciences it is very common to have large numbers of authors but in political science not at all. I think this is a big mistake - working in larger group you can be much more innovative and self-critical than when working by yourself. I, at least, would much prefer such a working team and miss the team-based work I did in various research projects in Leiden.
• Paul Guyot and Shinichi Honiden, Agent-Based Participatory Simulations: Merging Multi-Agent Systems and Role-Playing Games - interesting probably for both it’s relation to my dissertation research (which implements an agent-based model) and my involvement in Cantr, a roleplaying game I have often wondered couldn’t be used for some academic research especially on diffusion of attitudes over social networks (in Cantr I have access to the entire network and everything that is communicated between characters).
• The Spatial Dimension and Social Simulations: A Review of Three Books - interesting since my simulations are very spatial in nature and also some of the econometrics work I am interested in is focused on spatial dimensions.

Contrary to most previous posts, lately I have been thinking very little about computer and programming, but rather about my research. Especially a potential paper I might be writing with a friend on spatial econometrics, building on the work by Jude Hays and Rob Franzese, has drawn my attention lately and got me very excited. No idea yet whether our basic idea will work out well enough to create a publishable paper, though, but I think that should be clear fairly soon.

This post is the first one I write directly into WordPress instead of pmWiki, and I must say, it’s a very irritating process. Links I copy from other sites are copied with format included, thus what is a big font title on the other site is immediately assumed to be a big font title in the middle of my post. Very irritating! Links are added through a dialog screen instead of just a simple syntax like in pmWiki and are all assumed to be ‘open in same window’ unless you select otherwise. Why is the default to drive people away from your site? And it’s difficult to write after a link without extending it - it assumes it’s all part of the link heading. It’s totally like working in MS Word or something - there is a reason I avoid Microsoft software at times!

I’m quite happy with my renewed discovery of last FM - see the list of music here on the right. To have it included on my site is kind of cool. Mostly I’ve been listening to the radio created by the singer-songwriter tag, which has a lot of cool music.

In the area of gadgets, two cool items I just stumbled on are the dancing robot for your iPod and the headphones with glasses with video screens - nice alternative for my reading while walking to work, isn’t it?

Add comment November 5th, 2006