Monday, 21 August 2006

Not a conspiracy theory

Every time I feel like I’m making progress in turning “the damn strategic voting chapter” into a final paper worthy of submission, I stumble across a new bug in Zelig. I’d theorize that Gary King doesn’t want me to publish anything, but I’m afraid I’m far too insignificant a microbe in the whole political science universe to be squashed so deliberately.

If I were better organized, I’d spend the time I’m waiting for the bugs to be fixed writing up the changes I’ve made already—most notably, tossing the interviewer measure of sophistication in favor of an item-response theory model. That would probably cover the real reason I don’t seem to be able to publish anything—well, besides my lack of a research budget, RAs, and course releases for research, and a computer on my desk at work that probably was the cheapest thing Dell marketed to its education customers three years ago.