One of my undergraduates, Cameron Percy, is quite an accomplished pilot. He (very kindly!) took me for an hour long Bay Tour yesterday out of KPAO in a nice Cessna 182, equipped with a very fancy Garmin G1000 glass cockpit. We had great weather and Cameron flew lots of right turns for my benefit. I took a lot of photos…

Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald on one of the more interesting features of Australian politics right now; Coalition dominance federally, but profound weakness in the states and territories. Makes one wonder whatever happened to party id?

so you’re on a road trip, you’re in a diner for a bite, you notice the crowd and staff, well, “skew young”. Lady in her late 30s(!) punches up 80s classic on jukebox. Cool enough. 20 year old waiter says “awesome, my mother digs this song…”. Look away…

Booxter is such an awesome product. Barcode scanning via my iSight, or via this very nifty bluetooth barcode scanner. Then export to html (or bibtex, or xml, or…). So now, you can see all my stat books too, from Achen to Zivot.

ok, so you’ve got 2 kids, ages 4 and 2, and so you’ll be awake at 5.45am on a Sunday morning from time to time. So far so good. We hustle some breakfast and coffee and decide to head over to the coast to check out the beach. In the SF Bay area, this time of year, early in the morning (and sometimes all day), its actually foggy and cool at the coast, as it was this morning: at the water’s edge, around about 9am, no sunshine, I’d say high 50s air temp. And our kids: hit the sand and they run away, me in an insufficiently rigorous pursuit, and within 2 mins they’re both soaking wet, having launched themselves into waist-deep tidal pools. Never mind that they can’t swim, which means I got soaking wet rescuing the 2 year old who was headed for Japan. Car keys and digital camera in my pockets, which didn’t quite get wet, but damned close and wouldn’t have that made for an interesting outing. We stripped them off on the beach, changed them into the “emergency” dry clothes, and bundled them into the car as their adrenaline rushes wore off and cold, unimaginable hunger and fatigue set in. All before 9.30am. Back home well before 11am. Yippee.

Naras sent through these pictures from useR! L-to-R: John Chambers, Trevor Hastie, Lynda Hastie, and Balasubramanian Narasimhan (Naras). I’m on the right in the lower photo.

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very happy to see more noise on this issue… Huge sectors of the Australian economy are today exposed to competition/globalization, so why does Qantas enjoy such a privileged position…?

Bush weekly approval, combining over 1,100 published national polls, from a recent paper with Neal Beck and Howard Rosenthal.

Polimetrix wants survey items sent to them in a very specific form, as anyone working on the CCES will tell you (CCES = the Congressional election study being run by Polimetrix this year). I came up with some rough and ready LaTeX hacks to write items in the preferred Polimetrix way. These are as “rough as guts”, but since the output seemed to have met with approval from Mike Nardis at PMX, here ya go… (see below the fold).

There is lots of room for improvement, including getting the Polimetrix “point counter” working automatically, but frankly, LaTeX is NOT the way to do this. Writing items to conform to the PMX spec should be done via a Web-based interface so one could see the survey one is supposedly building, with the formatting being done “on the fly” for the user in a transparent way, and indeed, creating the survey script itself, with points/timings built-in. This can’t be that hard…

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Sunshine Hillygus forwards this from Irfan Nooruddin (who found it where…?):