This week's theme: cuts both ways.
THE DIRTY S-WORD
Another agency falls victim to sequestration.
This year the Census Bureau's budget is has been cut by 11 percent, and the Census Bureau made public a list of key data gathering projects that will be affected as a result. Cuts range from axing the Survey of Business Owners to delaying work on Census 2020...
SPEAKING OF CUTS
R afficionados are eagerly predicting the demise of SPSS and SAS. Bob Muenchen queried Google Scholar for trends in software cited in academic publications and found that SPSS and SAS references peaked in the mid-2000s and tailed off afterward.
That said, I'd like to (gently) suggest that correlation does not imply causality, and clearly neither R nor other statistical programs have filled in the gap left behind by new research published based on SAS or SPSS.
Perhaps (just perhaps) there is another factor at play? A new data source, for example (*Cough.* Census 2000. *Cough.* American Community Survey) that spawned a flurry of academic articles and a subsequent drop-off once all the really cool kids had a chance to publish?
Or maybe SAS and SPSS were being used by financial analysts, and their publication bubble burst when the housing market bubble did?
Still... it's interesting to see the trends in research tools...
(Thanks to Urban Demographics for the link.)
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| Source: R-bloggers |
What, statistically, is the difference between a geek and a nerd?
One nerd crunches the numbers to find out...
BEST CHART OF THE WEEK
The Economist, always good, was positively brilliant this week.
Their chart on alcohol consumption by country was as clever as their infographic on violence against women was stark. Both were close runners-up for this week's chart of the week, edged out by global population change 2013-2050 only because demography is not always so visually appealing...
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| Source: The Economist |
Classroom exercise: making data "real"
Sometimes "common knowledge" isn't knowledge at all
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