Author Archives: mkevane

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About mkevane

Economist at Santa Clara University and Director of Friends of African Village Libraries.

When I turned 10, this is the movie we went to see for my birthday… still scary!

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Monica Das Gupta offers a short introduction to son preference and imbalanced sex ratios

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Yikes.

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Burkina Faso: The CDP party in power finally officially asks Compaoré to implement referendum to change constitution

Le Congrès pour la démocratie et le progrès (CDP) a réuni ses militants pour sa première session du Conseil national samedi à Ouagadougou alors que la classe politique burkinabè est profondément divisée sur des questions telles que le référendum et … Continue reading

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I really am at cutting edge… authenticity comfort zones…

A couple days ago on the blog I remarked on the issue of authenticity in my short review of Tarquin Hall’s Indian detective story. I wish I could say I inspired Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution to then do the … Continue reading

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“Après la nuit” de Basil da Cunha

Hope it comes to Netflix soon… looks interesting.

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France: 70 years ago women get the right to vote

Le 21 avril 1944, les femmes françaises accèdent au droit de vote. Elles ne pourront cependant l’exercer pleinement qu’à partir du 29 avril 1945, date des élections municipales, premier scrutin d’après-guerre. Il y a seulement 70 ans, en vertu de … Continue reading

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Akhil Sharma’s “We Didn’t Like Him” in The New Yorker

I found this quite a good story.  Although told in a very straightforward style, with no verbal pyrotechnics, one senses early on that there is a profound ambiguity in the relationship between narrator and his distant relative Manshu.  A clever … Continue reading

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Use R and WDI to calculate number of missing women

################################################################################## # Code for using World Development Indicators to understand missing women problem # http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators # You have to set your directory below with setwd() ################################################################################## # Preliminaries # This clears any data in memory etc rm(list=ls()) # This set … Continue reading

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Running a regression in R and formatting output

# Thanks to Bill Sundstrom for the mtable formatting code # input data into R data <- read.table(“tenureinsecurity.csv”, header=TRUE, sep=”,”) # Tell R to assume survey1 is dataset from now until detach attach(data) # Run two regressions fit1 <- lm(yield … Continue reading

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Creating bar plots and box plots of variable by several categories (factors) in R

# input data into R readincamp = read.csv(“competitivereadingcamp.csv”) # Tell R to assume readincamp is dataset from now until detach attach(readincamp ) # Summarize data with summarySE command # Source; the excellent http://www.cookbook-r.com/Graphs/Plotting_means_and_error_bars_%28ggplot2%29/ # To do this have to install.packages(“bear”) … Continue reading

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Calculating means by categorical variables (factors) in R

# These are some of the different ways to do the calculation that social scientists probably # do most frequently; Calculate means for different groups or conditions # input data into R (the data is on some reading camps run … Continue reading

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Common R packages for the social sciences

# I find it helpful to have all the packages I use in a single R file rather than # having them in each script # I am sure that will change as i start using ever more packages # … Continue reading

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Setting working directory in R

One of the first things a social scientist does is put data and programs into a folder on their computer.  The reason for having a well-identified folder (and not going to the default temporary folder a program might set up) … Continue reading

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Installing R and RStudio on your computer

(from Guide to R For SCU Economics Students Version 2.2, March 28, 2014 © William A. Sundstrom, 2012, 2013, 2014 licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) To get started, you need to download and install two … Continue reading

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What kind of person are you?

Another high school student who survived reported that a crew member named Park Ji-young, 22, had helped teenagers to get life jackets and escape by urging them to jump into the frigid waters of the Yellow Sea where rescue boats … Continue reading

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My ethical conundrum with Frederic Mishkin

So… I’m like… I want to adopt Mishkin’s new macroeconomics textbook for my MBA macro class this summer and in the fall… Why? Because I reviewed a chapter of the new edition for Pearson and I liked the approach.  Sure … Continue reading

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Music for your weekend… Moon Duo… discovered randomly on emusic.com WTF!!!!!

Posted in Politics | Comments Off on Music for your weekend… Moon Duo… discovered randomly on emusic.com WTF!!!!!

Music for your weekend… Julia Holter… start with Goddess Eyes II then go on to weird stuff… pretty awesome…

Posted in Politics | Comments Off on Music for your weekend… Julia Holter… start with Goddess Eyes II then go on to weird stuff… pretty awesome…

Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Missing Servant

Back to light reading I guess.  Somewhere I had read this was a wonderful book. But it turned out to be a very pedestrian mystery, and I am sorry but like reading Alexander McCall Smith some of the pleasure of … Continue reading

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