You can now download a copy of my upcoming conference paper with Scott Huffmon and Adolphus Belk, “The Truth is Never Black and White: An Examination of Race-Related Interviewer Effects in the Contemporary South,” at the usual place. Both Scott’s and Adolphus’ contributions immensely improved this version over the previous iteration; of course, any remaining problems are clearly my fault alone, since I’m the only untenured co-author!

I finally have packaged up a very rough port of my epcp routine from Stata to R as part of a package unimaginatively called cnlmisc; you can download it here. In addition to the diagnostics that the Stata routine provides, the glm method includes a bunch of R-square-like measures from various sources (including Greene and Long).

The only part I’m sure works at the moment is the epcp for glm objects (including survey’s and Zelig’s wrappers thereof); the others that are coded (for polr and VGAM) are probably half-working or totally broken, and some wrappers aren’t there yet at all. The error bounds suggested by Herron aren’t there either. The print routines need a lot of work too; eventually it will have a nice toLatex() wrapper as well. But it beats having it sit on my hard drive gathering dust; plus I may eventually get motivated to write a JSS piece or something based on it.

epcp for Stata is still available at my site. For more information on the measure, see Michael C. Herron (1999), “Postestimation Uncertainty in Limited Dependent Variable Models” Political Analysis 8(1): 83–98 or Moshe Ben-Akiva and Steven Lerman (1985), Discrete Choice Analysis, MIT Press.

Dr. Crazy on research at regional state universities:

[T]he way in which that often plays out at my institution (and I suspect at many other institutions) is that research is this unspeakable thing which is nevertheless “required.” And since it is unspeakable – i.e., that professors even within the same department don’t really talk about it seriously with their colleagues, that we look at research as a thing we get done in spite of the “real” demands of our jobs – research becomes something that we think of as a distraction or as something that doesn’t demand a high level of achievement. Instead, we see the research “requirement” much in the way that students see “requirements” that aren’t meaningful – and we just do the bare minimum to pass. Further, we pass this way of thinking about research on to our students, who see a research paper as something to be “gotten through” as opposed to something that can be personally and intellectually rewarding. We perpetuate a culture of mediocrity.