Kai Arzheimer

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-05-30

kai — Sun, 30 May 2010 22:28:00 +0000

can't attend the #PVV (#wilders party) pre-election rally tomorrow night because I can't get "security clearance". bother. possibly the firs #

Technorati Tags: tweets, twitter

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-05-30

kai — Sun, 30 May 2010 22:28:00 +0000

can't attend the #PVV (#wilders party) pre-election rally tomorrow night because I can't get "security clearance". bother. possibly the firs #

Technorati Tags: tweets, twitter

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-05-23

kai — Sun, 23 May 2010 22:28:00 +0000

sna #

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Which of my students are most likely to gang up against me?

kai — Wed, 19 May 2010 20:30:53 +0000

I’m teaching a lecture course on Political Sociology at the moment, and because everyone is so excited about social capital and social network analysis these days, I decided to run a little online experiment with and on my students. The audience is large (at the beginning of this term, about 220 students had registered for this lecture series) and quite diverse, with some students still in their first year, others in their second, third or fourth and even a bunch of veterans who have spent most of their adult lives in university education.

Who knows whom in a large group of learners?

Fortunately, I had a list of full names plus email addresses for everyone who had signalled interest in the lecture before the beginning of term, so I created a short questionnaire in limesurvey and asked them a very simple question: whom do you know in this group? Given the significant overcoverage of my list – in reality, there are probably not more than 120 students who regularly turn up for the lecture – the response rate was somewhere in the high 70s. If you want to collect network data with limesurvey, the “array with flexible labels” question type is your friend, but keying in 220 names plus unique ids would have been a major pain. Thankfully, one can program the question with a single placeholder name, then export it as a CSV file. Next, simply load the file into Emacs and insert the complete list, then re-import it in limesurvey.

Getting a data matrix from Stata into Pajek is not necessarily a fun exercise, so I decided to give the networkx module for Python a go, which is simply superb. Networkx has data types for representing social networks, so you can read in a rectangular data matrix (again as CSV), construct the network in Python and export the whole lot to Pajek with a few lines of code:

#Some boring stuff omitted #create network Lecture=nx.DiGraph() #Initialise for i in range(1,221): Lecture.add_node(i, stdg="0") for line in netreader: sender = int(line[-1]) #Sender-ID at the very end edges=line[6:216] #Degree-scheme Lecture.node[sender]['stdg']=line[-8] #Edges for index in range(len(edges)): if edges[index] == '2': Lecture.add_edge(sender,int(filter(str.isdigit,repr(knoten[index]))),weight=2) elif edges[index] == '3': Lecture.add_edge(sender,int(filter(str.isdigit,repr(knoten[index]))),weight=3) nx.write_pajek(Lecture,'file.net')

As it turns out, a lecture hall rebellion seems not very likely. About one third of all relationships are not reciprocated, and about a quarter of my students do not know a single other person in the room (at least not by name), so levels of social capital are pretty low. There is, however, a small group of 10 mostly older students who are form a tightly-knit core, and who know many of the suckers in the periphery. I need to keep an eye on these guys.

260 reciprocated ties within the same group

Finally, the second graph also shows that those relatively few students who are enrolled in our new BA programs (red, dark blue) are pretty much isolated within the larger group, which is still dominated by students enrolled in the old five year programs (MA yellow, State Examination green) that are phased out. Divide et impera.

Technorati Tags: limesurvey, networkx, pajek, political sociology, python, sna, social capital, social network analysis, social networks, stata, survey data

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-05-09

kai — Sun, 09 May 2010 22:28:00 +0000

BBC: "there could be a legal challenge" because of the inconsistencies re the queues. Is the UK to Europe what Florida is to the US? #ge2010 #
"A %0 per cent swing would leave them all in the same place". Well done, BBC #ge2010 #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-05-09

kai — Sun, 09 May 2010 22:28:00 +0000

BBC: "there could be a legal challenge" because of the inconsistencies re the queues. Is the UK to Europe what Florida is to the US? #ge2010 #
"A %0 per cent swing would leave them all in the same place". Well done, BBC #ge2010 #

Technorati Tags: tweets, twitter

Is this Political Science gone mad? Tactical voting and the tabloids

kai — Tue, 04 May 2010 19:39:08 +0000

Being a political scientist is not considered an exciting occupation by people who have a life, and as party conversation topics go, electoral systems are pretty lousy. But with LibDem support somewhere in the high 20s (if the polls are to be believed), normal people start to wonder why 26% of the vote should give them 12% of the seats, while 28% of the vote for Labour would amount to just under 40% of the seats (you can fiddle with the numbers at the wonderful BBC’s election pages).

: Image via Wikipedia

So it is perhaps unsurprising that the hitherto pretty arcane idea of tactical voting (voting against your favourite party to support them) is now making headlines in the tabloids: Enter the Mirror’s guide to tactical voting for Labour and LibDem supporters. The information looks valid and may well be part of Labours last-ditch strategy to save what might be saved.

Technorati Tags: 2010, general election, guide, libdems, mirror, tactical voting, uk

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-25

kai — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 22:28:00 +0000

Did they just turn down Gordon's microphone? #leadersdebate #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-25

kai — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 22:28:00 +0000

Did they just turn down Gordon's microphone? #leadersdebate #

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Journos: Back to stats 101!

kai — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 20:33:55 +0000

The other day, a (rather clever) student told me that she has no real need for all these stats classes, because she will be a journalist. I told her that the world would be a better place if all journalists underwent compulsory numeracy classes. Here is the proof from my favourite newspaper. How long does it take you to spot the glitch?

Young people in the East Midlands were the most down-to-earth of those surveyed, expecting an annual salary of £33,468 by the time they reached their mid-thirties. However, even this figure is still around £4,000 higher than the average.

Two-thirds of respondents also thought they would own a house by the time they were 25. In reality, only 14% of homeowners are aged 25 or under.

With the rising cost of higher education hitting students hard, recent figures suggest young people will be left with more than £20,000 of debt by the end of their courses. But the poll shows today’s school children do not realise how out of pocket they will actually be: the average expected figure was just half the reality.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/mar/30/teenagers-expect-earnings-51000

Technorati Tags: fun, guardian, income, numeracy, property, stats, survey, teenagers

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