Blog
I blog semi-regularly about stuff. My blog entries—93 in total since I started this website in 2014—typically focus on some professional development stuff for an intended audience of undergraduate or graduate students in my discipline. Topics vary, but most focus on political science or parlor tricks in R or R Markdown that I think are worth sharing with the general public the extent to which they may help someone with their own research. To date, categories on my blog (and number of blog posts in that category) include Github (2), Jekyll (3), LaTeX (1), Linux (1), Political Science (31), R (50), R Markdown (14), RuPaul’s Drag Race (3), Site News (1), and Teaching (20).
A full listing of my blog posts follows.
- You Can (and Definitely Shouldn't) Do Basic Statistics in Excel
Category: Teaching R 15 Nov 2024 - Make Simple Cross-Sectional Data with World Bank Data (from {WDI})
Category: Teaching R 25 Oct 2024 - Inequality, Rebellion, and a Reconsideration of an Old Analysis (i.e. Students: You Can Do This, and Do This Better)
Category: Teaching R 23 Oct 2024 - 'Absolute Gains or Relative Gains' Kind of Misses the Point
Category: Teaching Political Science 11 Oct 2024 - Assorted Tips for Student Theses (in My Department and Perhaps Yours)
Category: Teaching 24 May 2024 - What the Probit Link is Trying to Tell You (and How You Can Help It)
Category: R Teaching 09 Feb 2024 - Linear Model Diagnostics by IR Example
Category: R Political Science 11 Jan 2024 - Taming the Poisson Model: A Tutorial
Category: R Political Science 28 Dec 2023 - Correlating Democracy and Per Capita Income: A Simple Introduction to an Old Finding
Category: R Political Science 27 Sep 2023 - A Third Academic R Markdown Article/Manuscript Template
Category: R Markdown 11 May 2023 - How to Adjust for Economic Indicators for Inflation (and Index Them)
Category: R 19 Jan 2023 - Log, Log, Log (i.e. What Logarithmic Transformations Do to Your OLS Model Summary)
Category: R 10 Jan 2023 - Automating a Workflow with {steveproj}, {stevetemplates}, and {targets}
Category: R 13 Sep 2022 - A (Partial) Analysis of RuPaul's Lip Sync Songs from RuPaul's Drag Race
Category: R RuPaul's Drag Race 16 May 2022 - Print References/Reading List/Bibliography in Your Syllabus (With Some Style) in R Markdown and {stevemisc}
Category: R 13 Jan 2022 - How to Calculate Tau-b (τb) Using Alliance Data in R
Category: Political Science R 11 Nov 2021 - Rationalist Explanations for War: A Quick-and-Dirty Primer
Category: Political Science 08 Sep 2021 - How to (Meticulously) Convert Participant-Level Dispute Data to Dyadic Dispute-Year Data in R
Category: R Political Science 25 May 2021 - Handle Your Academic Projects/Papers in Rstudio with Make and {steveproj}
Category: R R Markdown 15 Mar 2021 - Grab World Bank Data in R with {WDI}
Category: R 25 Feb 2021 - How Should You Think About Your Priors for a Bayesian Analysis?
Category: R 08 Feb 2021 - A Quick Tutorial on Merging Data with the *_join() Family of Functions in {dplyr}
Category: R 22 Jan 2021 - A Quick Tutorial on Various State (Country) Classification Systems
Category: R 15 Jan 2021 - Clever Uses of Relational (SQL) Databases to Store Your Wider Data (with Some Assistance from {dplyr} and {purrr})
Category: R 17 Nov 2020 - Permutations and Inference with an Application to the Gender Pay Gap in the General Social Survey
Category: R Political Science 24 Oct 2020 - Another Academic R Markdown Article/Manuscript Template
Category: R Markdown 11 Sep 2020 - An R Markdown Template for a Non-Academic Résumé
Category: R Markdown 01 Sep 2020 - Some Parlor Tricks with Survey-Type Analyses in R
Category: R 21 Aug 2020 - A ggplot Calendar for Your Semester
Category: R Markdown R 15 Aug 2020 - An Illustration of Decision Trees and Random Forests with an Application to the 2016 Trump Vote
Category: R Political Science 01 Aug 2020 - An Aside on Jackie Cox's ''Firework'' Lip-Sync
Category: RuPaul's Drag Race 27 May 2020 - A Better Way to Include Random Effects for Mixed Effects Models in a Stargazer Table
Category: R 15 May 2020 - Revisiting Reinhart and Rogoff, Ten Years Later
Category: R Political Science 20 Apr 2020 - Summarizing Ordinal Models with Simulation from a Multivariate Normal Distribution
Category: R Political Science Teaching 13 Apr 2020 - How to Make the Most of Regression: Standardization and Post-Estimation Simulation
Category: R Political Science Teaching 07 Apr 2020 - The COVID-19 Initial Unemployment Claims Spike in Context
Category: R 26 Mar 2020 - What Do We Know About British Attitudes Toward Immigration? A Pedagogical Exercise of Sample Inference and Regression
Category: R Political Science Teaching 23 Mar 2020 - The Normal Distribution, Central Limit Theorem, and Inference from a Sample
Category: R Political Science Teaching 16 Mar 2020 - The Dow Jones' No Good, Very Bad Day in Context
Category: R 12 Mar 2020 - Bootstrap Your Standard Errors in R, the Tidy Way
Category: R 07 Mar 2020 - Comparing the Read/Save Times for RDS, {qs}, and {fst} Formats (or: All Hail {qs})
Category: R 18 Feb 2020 - Visualizing Random Measurement Error in R
Category: R 08 Feb 2020 - Graphing the Manufacturing Trends Under the Trump Presidency, in R
Category: R 31 Jan 2020 - Illustrate Some Correlation Limitations and Fallacies in R
Category: R 28 Jan 2020 - Create and Extend Strategic (International) Rivalry Data in R
Category: R Political Science 18 Oct 2019 - An Illustration of Instrumental Variables and a Two-Stage Least Squares (2SLS) Regression
Category: R 11 Sep 2019 - An R Markdown Template for Beamer Presentations
Category: R Markdown 17 Aug 2019 - The Political Ideology of Terrorism in the United States: The 1970s
Category: Political Science 09 Aug 2019 - How Bad America's Gun Violence/Mass Shooting Problem Is, Automated with R Code
Category: R Political Science 03 Aug 2019 - What Explains Union Density? A Replication of an Old Article with the {brms} Package
Category: R Political Science 02 Aug 2019 - Two Helpful R Markdown/Jekyll Tips for an Easier Blogging Experience
Category: R Markdown Jekyll 01 Aug 2019 - An R Markdown Approach to Academic Workflow for the Social Sciences
Category: R Markdown 23 Jul 2019 - Notes to Self: Configuring New Linux (Ubuntu) Installations for Your Workflow
Category: R Linux 09 Jul 2019 - An R Markdown Template for Memos
Category: R Markdown 17 Jun 2019 - An Empirical Analysis of RuPaul's Drag Race Contestants
Category: R RuPaul's Drag Race 17 Feb 2019 - Create Country-Year and (Non)-Directed Dyad-Year Data With Just a Few Lines in R
Category: R Political Science 28 Jan 2019 - How Should You Store/Load Your Bigger Data Sets? An Experiment With Six Waves of World Values Survey Data
Category: R 22 Jan 2019 - A Jekyll Template for Course Websites
Category: Jekyll Github 13 Aug 2018 - Mixed Effects Modeling Tips: Use a Fast Optimizer, but Perform Optimizer Checks
Category: R 28 Jun 2018 - Make Your Presentations Fun in Xaringan
Category: R Markdown 03 Feb 2018 - Outgroup Intolerance and Support for Democracy: An Analysis of White Americans in the World Values Survey Data
Category: Political Science 18 Aug 2017 - How Serious Are Americans About Democracy? An Exploratory Analysis of the AmericasBarometer Data
Category: Political Science 18 Jul 2017 - Set Up Google Scholar to Find Class Readings on Your Syllabus
Category: Teaching 13 Jul 2017 - Quickly Create Peace Years for BTSCS Models with sbtscs in {stevemisc}
Category: R 26 Jun 2017 - NATO Countries Spend Just Fine on Defense, and Other Observations
Category: Political Science 30 May 2017 - Age, Income, Partisanship, Racial Attitudes and the Trump Vote in 2016
Category: Political Science 27 Apr 2017 - The Kids May Be All Right: Millennials and Democratic Support
Category: Political Science 10 Dec 2016 - Donald Trump, Controversial Topics, and Public Opinion
Category: Political Science 05 Dec 2016 - What's the Matter with Wisconsin? Probably Not Vote Hacking
Category: Political Science 24 Nov 2016 - Automatically Do (Just About) Everything in Your Syllabus with R Markdown
Category: R Markdown 05 Jul 2016 - American Values, Democracy, and the 'Strong Leader' Problem
Category: Political Science 30 May 2016 - Put Your Laptops Away, Kids (Vol. 2)
Category: Teaching 11 May 2016 - Everybody Writes: A Web Content Approach for Students
Category: Teaching 06 May 2016 - The Educational Power of Discomfort
Category: Teaching 03 May 2016 - Fun with Attendance and Grades (i.e. Students Should Attend Class)
Category: Teaching 02 May 2016 - Make Your Academic CV Look Pretty in R Markdown
Category: R Markdown 05 Mar 2016 - An R Markdown Template for Academic Manuscripts
Category: R Markdown 10 Feb 2016 - At The Monkey Cage: Putin, Trump, and Citizen Preferences for 'Strong Leaders'
Category: Political Science 24 Dec 2015 - Assorted Tips for Students on Writing Research Papers
Category: Teaching 12 Dec 2015 - What Can Survey Data Tell Us About Public Opinion and the Gun Control Debate?
Category: Political Science 07 Dec 2015 - Create your Academic Website in Jekyll and Host it on Github
Category: Jekyll Github 16 Aug 2015 - Streamlining the Syllabus in LaTeX with advdate and datetime
Category: LaTeX 08 Aug 2015 - Syncing Word Values Survey Country Codes with CoW Codes
Category: R 29 Jun 2015 - Dos and Dont's of Writing for Students
Category: Teaching 13 Jun 2015 - Some #PSFrustrations from an IR Perspective
Category: Political Science 30 Apr 2015 - Moving from Beamer to R Markdown
Category: R Markdown 12 Feb 2015 - (Quasi)-automating the Inclusion of Random Effects in R's Stargazer Package
Category: R 07 Feb 2015 - How to Do a Literature Review
Category: Teaching 12 Nov 2014 - Taking Good Notes
Category: Teaching 12 Sep 2014 - Reading a Regression Table: A Guide for Students
Category: Teaching 13 Aug 2014 - A Beginner’s Guide to Using R
Category: R 09 Aug 2014 - Why Conservative Politicians Don’t Like Political Science
Category: Political Science 05 Jun 2014 - Hello world!
Category: Site News 28 May 2014