Misc Links

• Lisa sends along this set of instructions for doing a wide-long reshape in R. Useful and I’m passing it along for the benefit of R users, but the relative intuition and simplicity of “reshape wide stub, i(i) j(j)” is why I still do my mise en place in Stata whenever I use R. Ideally though, as my grad student Brooks likes to remind me, we really should be doing this kind of data mise en place in a dedicated database and use the Stata and R ODBC commands/functions to read it in.
• “The days change at night, change in an instant.”
• Anyone interested in replicating this paper should be paying close attention to this pending natural experiment. In particular I hope the administrators of this survey are smart enough to oversample California in the next wave. I’d consider doing the replication myself but I’m too busy installing a new set of deadbolts and adopting a dog from a pit bull rescue center.
• In Vermont, a state government push to get 100% broadband penetration is using horses to wire remote areas that are off the supply curve beaten path. I see this as a nice illustration both of cluster economies and of the different logics used by markets (market clearing price) and states (fairness, which often cashes out as universal access) in the provision of resources. (h/t Slashdot)
• Yglesias discusses some poll results showing that voters in most of the states that recently elected Republican governors now would have elected the Democrats. There are no poll results for California, the only state that switched to the Democrats last November. Repeat after me: REGRESSION TO THE MEAN. I don’t doubt that some of this is substantive backlash to overreach on the part of politically ignorant swing voters who didn’t really understand the GOP platform, but really, you’ve still got to keep in mind REGRESSION TO THE MEAN.
• Speaking of Yglesias, the ThinkProgress redesign only allows commenting from Facebook users, which is both a pain for those of us who don’t wish to bear the awesome responsibility of adjudicating friend requests and a nice illustration of how network externalities can become coercive as you reach the right side of the s-curve.