May 2012
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More fun with the Failed States Index (and the State Fragility Index)

So the other day’s experiment with the Failed States Index and the Polity Data didn’t yield the linear trend I had originally expected. After all, the two measure fundamentally distinct things. But perhaps there’s another dataset which will match linearly. The same people who made polity also put out a dataset called the State Fragility [...]

Analyzing the Failed States Index (with Polity IV)

So, I decided to sit down and have a little fun with that Failed States Index data I put together. To start, I expect that the dataset will be pretty linearly correlated with the polity IV data. This makes sense–true democracies aren’t failed states, and failed states tend not to be democratic. To test this, [...]

Using R for Stata to CSV Conversion

I recently found myself in the unpleasant situation of needing to read a Stata .dta file, but not having Stata readily available to me. Normally, I’d fire up a text editor and deconstruct the file, except Stata saves its data in a proprietary Binary format, meaning it garbles some of the content of the file. [...]

Wargaming The Battle of Prokhorovka

I took a class this semester called “Wargaming.” It was a project course in which teams of five were instructed to devise an agent-based model which reenacted an historical battle. The teams were all split between Computer Science undergrads and International Affairs grads, in hopes of training us for the kind of cross-talk between the [...]

Statistical Analysis with R, a Review

[To all of the R-bloggers out there who recognize this, I apologize. To those that don't, This is at least the 5th review of this book to go on the feed. The author is linking to the others here.]

Long Version: I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. I’m pretty handy when it comes [...]