Starting with the 19th book review (Mao biography), I have decided to add a grade and, to counterbalance what can often seem like negative reviews, one interesting fact learned from each book. I aim for a B- average. The Sellout by Paul Beatty – Wow, what a novel. My wife bought it for me for […]
In responding to recent comments on a paper, I went looking for information on how prevalent Twitter is across the world. Based on my work using geolocated images from Twitter, I had a sense that it tracks population and per capita GDP closely. But I have not had the time to investigate the relationship more […]
[Most recent update: 11.21.2019.] The purpose of this post is to catalogue advice from the internet about how to achieve tenure at a research university. When I was a PhD student, one method of calming my anxiety was to read advice from professors to PhD students; The Professor is In, Fabio Rojas, and Chris Blattman are particularly helpful. Now […]
That headline misleads slightly: the 30L backpack is a good everyday bag if photography is part of your everyday. If your everyday involves traditional office work and commuting, I suggest looking elsewhere for a bag. That is what I did, and I own happily the Nomatic Backpack. The internet world is in love with all […]
TL;DR: Just use generic style files for new projects. Overleaf is the best tool I have found for collaborating on Latex documents. It is cloud-based, has a ton of templates, nice text editing features that go beyond TexShop and other desktop editors I know, and the rich text editor (using a GUI, like a word processor) […]
I am grateful for many things; one of those things is living in LA. Another thing is that I am reasonably close to my job, by LA standards: 9 miles as the crow flows. I learned quickly what any Angelino will tell you: wow, traffic. While I have been fortunate not to have a Michael […]
The chart below replicates the data presented in my earlier post about Twitter but ranked by accounts per million inhabitants. Antarctica, of course, does not really have the greatest number of accounts per capita. In this sample, however, Twitter identified 4 tweets from there, and Antarctica has a population of 0, as do the 2nd […]
How many followers does the average Twitter user have? How many accounts does the average Twitter account follow? How many times has the average account tweeted? What about the median? These questions seem simple, but it is not easy to find answers to them. Twitter only discloses how many monthly active users exist, and other […]
The study of collective action can benefit greatly from big data. Collective action is the study of how large numbers of individuals engage each other to accomplish a common task; big data illuminate how large numbers of individuals engage each other over time. Yet these data have yet to show how they can improve our […]
As far as I am aware, there are no contemporary machine-coded events data if you do not want to use GDELT.* Phil Schrodt and his colleagues are working on a GDELT replacement that promises to reduce event duplication and provide better geospatial resolution. Once that project, Phoenix, goes live, it will create real-time data based on 542 […]
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