I gave a one hour presentation at the 5th annual international symposium at Colorado State University. The topic of my talk was a global assessment of democracy with a deep dive into the U.S. case. We examined global trends in democratization and democratic backsliding as well as trends in the U.S.
There was a special focus on media, Congress, parties, voters, and states. Below is code that replicates some of the figures I generated with publicly available data.
I recently hosted a workshop introducing students at Colorado State University to R, the tidyverse, and the V-Dem data set. We had a two hour workshop in which the students got familiar with R Studio, learned the basic functionality of R and the tidyverse, and started examining democracy indicators. It was a fast-paced workshop aimed and giving students some familiarity with coding and sparking interest and maybe even excitement about learning more.
In this post I'll explain how to quickly install R on Ubuntu-based operating systems and make sure that R packages are installed with all necessary dependencies. There are two ways to do this. A fast way and the right way. The fast way is using Ubuntu's repositories to install R. However, the R version in the repositories might not be the most up to date one. With a couple extra steps, we can make sure that we have the most recent version of R available.
When I was a graduate student, I immensely benefitted from a friend's guide to Linux for social scientists. Unfortunately, that post is not available anymore. This is an attempt at recreating the guide in the hope that it helps other social scientists who want to try out Linux-based operating systems.
In this guide I will first talk a bit about early configurations of your Pop!_OS system and then dive into the social science config.
Updating packages on my Ubuntu based Pop OS operating system recently I got an error message about the end of life of org.freedesktop.Platform 20.08
Looking for updates… Info: org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default//20.08 is end-of-life, with reason: org.freedesktop.Platform 20.08 is no longer receiving fixes and security updates. Please update to a supported runtime version. Solving this is pretty straightforward and can be done in three steps.
First, check your list of flatpak packages
In order to be able to access CSU resources off campus or ssh into my work desktop I need to install the GlobalProtect VPN. The installation of the VPN client is pretty straightforward. In this post I'm keeping notes on how to install the CLI version of the client.
First things first, we need to download the university's VPN package here.
This should download a file called PanGPLinux-6.0.0-c18.tgz. We need to unpack this file.
In every course that I teach I make it a point to stress the importance of a good literature and reference management system (LRMS) for students and researchers. I'd argue that there are few tools that have an equal impact in making your life easier at a university. A good LRMS will help you organize your literature, read your articles, and write term papers or manuscripts. It's always surprising to me that even in M.