The Control Vector

| Gabriel |

(To be sung to the tune of “The Irish Rover“)

On the fourth of July two thousand and six
We plotted density, kernel
We had a parsimonious theory of cliques
To place in the grand flagship journal
In a flurry of chalk, we saw why the nodes so flock
It worked well as community detector
Then we worked out the specs, it had twenty-seven x
We’d specified the Control Vector

We had quadratic of time spent looking for work
We had dummy sets for SIC,
We had three million county-level fixed effects,
We’d a linear spline for distance from Rome
Homicides per hundred thousand!
We had eight million versions of former English colony
All dumped into the Control Vector

There was MLE (iteration four thousand three),
There was Poisson in lieu of a log
There were R libraries that never would work
And instruments nobody believed
There was the psych subject pool, they were drunk as a rule
And Huber-White to solve all problems
And the OECD, if that you can believe
Was the source for half the Control Vector

We were in review round seven when the funding ran out
And the department’s budget was cut
And all our FTE were reduced down to three
Just meself and some deadweight old nuts
Then the server crashed, what can you do with that?
The hard drives were turned right over
Hard crash on the ground, and no backup to be found
That was the last of the Control Vector