/Research_Notes

This year at our office we are again helping contribute to the great March Madness economic productivity drain. However, we are also toying with the idea of switching to a Fibonacci sequence of bracket scoring and using multiplier scoring to weight up more risky selections (particularly in later rounds). 

In prior years, we did this whole thing on paper / manually, and so to keep things simple we followed a standard scoring (pts per round) regime which was the standard espn/yahoo format (e.g., 1-2-4-8-16-32 points across the 6 rounds) .  
This year most people in our office seem supportive of a scoring scheme that incentivizes risk-taking.  So, there are essentially two changes to our scoring scheme.
First, we are changing to a 2-3-5-8-13-21 progression. With the more traditional 1-2-4-8-16-32 system, the championship game is worth 32x as much as any first-round game (which in effect makes the first round games almost mostly useless). With Fibonacci scoring, the last round game is worth …

School discipline and behavioral research and evaluation, including my own, consistently battles the critique that we arent considering (or measuring) the presence/dynamics/frequency/quality of parental interactions with teachers and parental participation at school. Part of this is clearly about measuring the influence of how families/homelife/parents shape behavior while at school (and sometimes this is treated as a scapegoat for teachers' limited ability to thwart discipline issues at school). However, a second piece of this is the often understudied nature of parental-teacher communication in improving student behavioral and other outcomes. This second line of inquiry spurs myriad questions about how and about the exact mechanism through which increased parental involvement/communication would ameliorate student discipline issues. In some evaluations, we have tried to answer these questions by proxying parental involvement/interest with a set of student, parent, and staff surv…

Working with long IDs in Stata (and also more about -markstat-)




In this example, I discuss some potential issues with using long IDs in Stata and how to avoid them. The problems presented below are separate from precision issues with large numeric values (that is, large in terms of number of places, including precise decimal representations). I previously discussed precision issues that are alleviated by using double or string format at this link.
Long IDs and -levelsof-First, let’s create some fake data for this session:. clear . input campus campus 1. 11990 2. 119902041 3. 243905112 4. 243905129 5. 243905131 6. 244903001 7. 00244903041 8. end . g x = cond(_n<4, 1, 0, .) . desc Contains data obs: 7 vars: 2 size: 112 ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────…

Two Stata-related problems/issues I've been working on involve building weaved, literate documents via -markstat- (from SSC) and post-processing Stata graphs via 小飞机翻墙 android commands.

gr_edit commands are not documented but are helpful for adding elements across many graphs that you'd otherwise have to add manually (or by creating a graph recording). The biggest downside to gr_edit commands (or applying graph recordings) is that it's a slow process when you have many hundreds/thousands of graphs to edit.

In the code example below, I made you a holiday tree with 100k lights. I know, this is very thoughtful of me. You are welcome.

Update (Dec 25): First here's a new version of a holiday tree using -tw scatter-/-tw bar-. I like this version much better than the approach I had originally included when I first put up this post. These previous attempts using -scatteri- and gr_edit are still included below :

**************! clear set obs 2000 g z = 10 g obs = _n g zero = 0 g …