Some people say magic incantations are bad.

But then, you find a code snippet — sorry, incantation — on Hadley Wickham’s web site, and find out how to plot that interaction effect graph you need.

If you want substance, the paper in which the graph features will be uploaded in a week's time, ready for the UK PSA in Edinburgh.

Clientelism, like corruption, is a juicy topic; it is made so by the seemingly-inexorable conflict between protestations of public virtue on the one hand and particularistic exchanges on the other. The topic becomes even more interesting when one tries, as Simona Piattoni does in her book Il clientelismo: L’Italia in prospettiva comparata, to rehabilitate clientelism, and rid the concept of its moral overtones by engaging in rigorous comparative and empirical analysis.

Read the rest here. It came out a bit harsher than I meant.

This interview with Carlo Taormina is fantastic. Key points (all according to Taormina):

• The “processo breve” is a bargaining tool. Offering to remove it from the agenda can be seen as a concession; a concession can win quick approval of a text of “legitimate impediment”.
• The bill on “legitimate impediment” (repeated postponement of trial hearings due to demands of government office) is unconstitutional, and Berlusconi’s circle knows this
• Legitimate impediment might be declared unconstitutional, but by the time that happens, a new constitutional amendment (lodo Alfano-bis) will guarantee prime ministerial immunity
• Once this is all passed, Berlusconi will call early elections in 2011, and then wait for the presidential elections of 2013. Assuming he gets that, he’ll be with us until 2020.

Nice to see someone from the centre-right putting these things down in black and white. [h/t Mattia Guidi]

Two more things:

• Why do legal journals insist on this bizarre referencing style of Article Author (Year), “Title”, Vol(No) Journal ppp ? And more to the point, does anyone have a bibtex (.bst) or biblatex (.bbx) file that will replicate it, with proper block punctuation?
• Wasn’t the Supreme Court’s decision on the Terrorism Order interesting? Partial dissent by Lord Brown, could have hoped for more there. (I like dissent).

1. Why are Italian politicians bending over backwards to say nice things about Craxi when he was, after all, a fugitive from justice?
2. If your one-dimensional model works fine, but your two-dimensional item response model doesn’t converge after a long long run even with informative priors on items over both dimensions, can you do a Gertrude Stein and conclude that there’s no there there?

Parochial interest only, but here they are

Gianfranco Fini has been caught saying things about Berlusconi that Berlusconi doesn’t like. (Let’s leave aside for the moment the question of whether Fini’s comments were correct and/or inflammatory).

Berlusconi, according to the usual unnamed sources, wants Fini to be punished, even to the point of requiring him to step down as President of the Chamber of Deputies.

I think this is unlikely. As far as I can see, no President of the Chamber of Deputies has ever resigned, unless to take up another, better post. Three Presidents of the Senate have resigned (Merzagora, Paratore and De Nicola), but Paratore and De Nicola both resigned in protest; only Merzagora’s resignation is surrounded by question-marks (I’m following Wikipedia here).

Nor is there any provision in the Chamber’s rules of procedure to vote no-confidence in the President of the Chamber.

Neither side wins from a protracted fight. I’m betting this blows over.

Depressing editorial from Pier-Luigi Celli. Celli, a most capable man, is the director of Luiss, the closest thing (with the exception of Bocconi) that Italy has to an ENA; and yet I can’t imagine any Frenchman writing this kind of editorial.

I’ve been scraping voting records for the 16th parliament (lower chamber only). That’s part of my continued (quixotic) interest in trying to get credible ideal point estimates out of situations (western European parliaments) where the assumptions of most estimation techniques (i.e., legislators vote sincerely) are violated.
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I’m not too happy about my upgrade to Karmic Koala. That’s due both to my own stupidity (not backing up as fully as I should have done), and to a number of minor niggles.

For example: whilst wireless worked perfectly, my ethernet didn’t autoconnect. I fixed it by following the steps at Craig Mayhew’s blog, but that shouldn’t be necessary: this was a fresh install after all.

Also, there’s a hardware beep when I shut down. No kidding.

On the plus side, everything is very smooth, perhaps also due to the fact that I’m now running 64 bit. Just don’t ask about Flash and/or Java just yet.

Now I just need to wait until TeXLive 2009 hits the mirrors and I’ll be ready to start work again.