Publications by jackman
malapportionment in the U.S. Senate
The 40 Republican senators currently in the U.S. senate represent 36% of the U.S population. See the graph below (click on the thumbnail for PDF). This is something I’ve been meaning to compute for a while now, mapping the cumulative distribution of senators’ ideal points onto the cumulative distribution of state population (each state coun...
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tooltips in R graphics; nytR package
At Doug Rivers’ suggestion, I started investigating tooltips as a way to label points in R graphs. An example appears at the top of my blog, where I plot the ideal points (revealed preferences) of the (current) 111th U.S. House of Representatives against Obama vote share in their district in 2008 (SVG). I’m using the RSVGTipsDevice package i...
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subsetting a matrix/array in R
From the R-devel svn log. Nice addition… r50896 | falcon | 2010-01-05 12:05:31 -0800 (Tue, 05 Jan 2010) | 7 lines Changed paths: M /trunk/NEWS M /trunk/src/include/Defn.h M /trunk/src/library/base/man/Extract.Rd M /trunk/src/main/subassign.c M /trunk/src/main/subscript.c M /trunk/src/main/subset.c M /trunk/tests/Makefile.c...
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sequential ideal point estimates
Out of curiosity, I produced a “sequential” set of ideal point estimate for the (current) 111th U.S. Senate, plotting the results in the graph attached below (click on the thumbnail); as is conventional, red is Republican and blue is Democratic. The analysis uses all 373 non-unanimous roll calls in the 111th Senate thus far. Each senator st...
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principal components and image reconstruction
Jeff Lewis at UCLA told me he teaches principal components with an image reconstruction example. This got me inspired to try it myself. A snapshot appears below, showing how the image quality improves quickly with a relatively small number of principal components. A full, Sweaved write up is here, making use of the biOps package in R. Related ...
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Stata Fail
From a recent mailing from Stata (highlighting by me): Funnily enough, there is a Daniel Rubin, a bio-informatics person here at Stanford. Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: simon jackman's blog » R. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning...
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Senators’ ideal points against Obama vote
I added another plot to the output generated by my overnight ideal point scripts: a scatterplot of estimated Senate ideal points against Obama vote share in their state (color coded by party, local linear regression overlays by party, labels for some big residuals). I suppose I’m surprised by the way that the loess curve for the Democrats flatt...
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Health Care Reform vote
A little bit of churn relative to the House’s 1st shot at this but otherwise a remarkably similar vote, with an estimated cutpoint almost at the same place; see some raw R output, below the fold, after the thumbnail… y is the vote to take up the Senate amendments; yEarly is the previous go at this by the House: table(y,yEarly,exclude=NULL) ...
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JAGS 2.0
Is out. On sourceforge. Along with a new rjags. Thanks Martyn. I’m looking forward to working my way through some of the improvements, which include block-updating of parameters in GLMs more use of R’s d/p/q family of functions for densities improvements to dnormmix for normal mixtures dmstate, for Markov switching models (far out!). Re...
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countrycode R package
I am digging this countrycode package in R I just found, written by a UM grad student Vincent Arel-Bundock. Very nice. Thanks! countrycode("2","cown","iso3c") [1] "USA" It would be better if the package could handle failed matches a little more gracefully: e.g., > countrycode(c(2,730,818),"cown","iso3c") [1] "USA" when the user was expect...
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