The University of Bristol Email Charter I really like the University of Bristol’s new email charter. But, I think it could be made a little more clear and actionable, especially since it can build off of previous work and thought about making emails clearer, shorter, and fewer in number. Below, I’ll go through the points listed in the original charter and try to make them clearer. I’ll also try to add some actions that add some teeth to the points.

I’m really excited to announce that my longstanding package to work the with US Census Bureau API, cenpy, has gotten some long-needed love and attention. The new method of working with the data is really slick (if I do say so myself). Check it out in this gist! If you like it, hate it, or want to improve it, hit me up over on the project or on my twitter.

One thing I find so difficult to accept is crunch time. Not that I can’t cope or even succeed in crunch, per se. But, rather, I’m beginning to find it very peculiar that folks respond to difficult times through the faith in their ephemerality… as if this specific difficult phase is going to pass is somehow heartening. Sometimes, when my job is at its worst, I hear this a lot.

When comparing a multilevel model to a fixed-level model, it’s important to consider how things are parameterized. For instance, let’s say you’re conducting comparisons between a no-pooling model and a partial pooling variance components model. In this case, we have: $$ y= \Delta u + \epsilon$$ as the specification, where $\Delta$ is the dummy variable matrix, $y$ is the outcome of interest, and $\epsilon$ is the usual homoeskedastic error term for the responses.

The Geometer’s Angle What John O’Loughlin talks about in his recent presidential address in Political Geography strikes me as substantially similar to many of the things I’ve read from him on the field. Indeed, it reminds me of the same track I got from him as a PhD applicant seeking to work in quantitative political geography. I’ll never forget; right at the time of (what I thought and still feel is) great ground-breaking work in political science focusing directly on the new understandings possible from aggregate electoral data [1,2,3] he suggested that electoral analysis needed to go beyond this.