Well, after doing all the recoding I needed to produce binary “correct/incorrect” scores for all the respondents, I ran the IRT model on the 1992 NES, and my computer at work (not exactly shabby – a 1.15 GHz AMD Athlon XP with 1 GB of RAM) ran out of memory when it tried to save the respondent abilities after about 30 minutes of pegging the CPU and eating up my memory and swap. I guess I had more respondents this time than when I did the Dutch model for my dissertation.

The moral of this story: rerun the model with a bit more thinning on my faster AMD64 box at home.

Update: It works much faster (and without killing my computer) when the data matrix is actually set up correctly. Go figure.

As Kurt Angle would say, “It’s true, It’s true”; I’m joining James Joyner’s Outside the Beltway as a contributor, along with Robert Prather (who was a co-blogger here for a while) and Alex Knapp of Heretical Ideas.

Going forward, most of the academic and personal blogging will stay here at Signifying Nothing, but my political blogging will (for the most part) be appearing at OTB. It should be fun and I’m looking forward to it.