Tag Archives: Python

Python for Political Scientists, Spring 2013 Recap

Posted on May 6, 2013 by

This spring Josh Cutler‘s Python course was back by popular demand. (This time it was known as “Computational Political Economy” but I like the less formal title.) I participated this time around as a teaching assistant rather than student, and … Continue reading →

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The Political Economy of Scrabble: Currency, Innovation, and Norms

Posted on January 28, 2013 by

In Scrabble, there is a finite amount of resources (letter tiles) that players use to create value (points) for themselves. Similarly, in the real world matter cannot be created so much of human effort is rearranging the particles that exist into … Continue reading →

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Simulating the NLDS: Can the Giants Win?

Posted on October 11, 2012 by

In Allen Downey’s new book, Think Bayes, he relates the “Boston Bruins” problem. The problem is to estimate the Bruins’ probability of winning the 2010-2011 NHL championship after two wins and two losses. I will briefly describe Downey’s approach, and … Continue reading →

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Wednesday Nerd Fun: Python for iOS

Posted on July 11, 2012 by

This one is short and sweet. Would you like to be able to write Python code on an iOS device? Now you can, with this app. I have spent some time playing around with the app this week, and it … Continue reading →

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Getting Started with Prediction

Posted on June 22, 2012 by

From historians to financial analysts, researchers of all stripes are interested in prediction. Prediction asks the question, “given what I know so far, what do I expect will come next?” In the current political season, presidential election forecasts abound. This … Continue reading →

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Schelling’s Model of Segregation (Python)

Posted on May 14, 2012 by

Over the weekend I implemented a version of the agent-based model from Thomas Schelling’s 1971 paper in Python. Schelling’s story about segregation is simple: there are two colors of agents, happiness is based on whether two or more of your … Continue reading →

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A Model of Conflict: Iwo Jima

Posted on April 20, 2012 by

This blog has discussed conflict statistics before, as well as some of the widely acknowledged problems with adapting “physics models” to the social sciences. To provide some context to that debate, I thought I would share an example that I … Continue reading →

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Ethical Programming

Posted on March 30, 2012 by

Don’t let anyone tell you that as a programmer you don’t have to make moral or ethical decisions. Every time you decide that making users feel stupid is better than fixing your code, you’re making an ethical decision. – Joel … Continue reading →

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PyCon 2012 Video Round-Up

Posted on March 23, 2012 by

The videos from PyCon 2012 are posted. Here are the ones I plan to watch, along with their summaries: Checking Mathematical Proofs Written in TeX ProofCheck is a set of Python scripts which parse and check mathematics written using TeX. Its … Continue reading →

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Meta-Blogging Pt. 3: Social Media and Page Views

Posted on March 6, 2012 by

In this post I continue the series begun here by asking, How do comments/tweets/likes correlate with page views? To answer this question I continue to use Anton Strezhnev’s scrape of The Monkey Cage (TMC), which was described in the introductory post. … Continue reading →

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