'Uncategorized' Category
-
Mar072010
Magic incantations are good
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
-
Feb042010
Review of Simona Piattoni’s Il Clientelismo
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 [...]
-
Feb012010
Berlusconi 2020!
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 [...] -
Jan272010
I fought the law, and the law won (bleg)
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 [...] -
Jan182010
Two things I don’t get
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 [...] -
Dec182009
Slides for this morning’s thesis defence
Parochial interest only, but here they are
-
Dec022009
Why Fini can make himself unpopular
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 [...] -
Nov302009
Leave the country
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.
-
Nov272009
Ideal points for the 16th Camera dei Deputati
More on the impossibility of extracting credible left-right ideal points from parliamentary roll-calls in Italy.
-
Nov022009
Stick a fork in me (I’m done)
I’ve just emailed the final version of my thesis to the department.
I’ve spent most of today listening to my robotic overlord (his name is Alan) read out chunks of my thesis in the vain hope that I would better spot typos or errors that way. The idea — far too good to be my own, [...]