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.
Isn’t it pretty? The bare bones:
effectdf
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Why are Italian politicians bending over backwards to say nice things about Craxi when he was, after all, a fugitive from justice?
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
More on the impossibility of extracting credible left-right ideal points from parliamentary roll-calls in Italy.
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 [...]