UAL 915. No upgrade. 8D, aisle seat on an A320. Not a disaster… Although it is the 2nd time I’ve done that flight in 8 days.
Light chop for much of the way after Denver, some mountain wave was coming off the Rockies as well.
Flying the Modesto 3 STAR, we entered a hold at CEDES along with a whole bunch of other aircraft, since SFO couldn’t do parallel ops on the 28s. Ch9 was up, and I was dismayed to hear that we could be out here for 30mins (I’m drafting this while we’re in the hold). We got a clearance pretty shortly after that, probably only 8 mins in the hold all up; a jink to the south-west, thence MEHTA and final approach up the Bay.
On final we were requested to go as slow as possible, which our pilots reported as 140 KTS. Landed on 28R.
Flightaware track, zoomed in the hold and approach.
The Coburn amendment to cut political science funding from the NSF was defeated yesterday. There were some interesting breaks across party lines on this one: McCaskill (D-MO) voted to kill, but the Republican MO senator voted the other way. A similar pattern in Nebraska. Evan Bayh voted to kill NSF funding of polisci.
Ironically, I am at NSF and can’t do an analysis of the vote from behind the firewall etc (blogging my iPhone right now).
Trips to DC usually start with a pre-dawn wakeup in California, screaming up the 101 to SFO ahead of the morning rush, mixing it up with perfumed/cologned business types in the security line, and discovering that you’re 12th on an upgrade list 80 names long, with 2 seats remaining in 1st class, making you wonder what the hell is 1K good for when SFO is your home market.
Not today. I took the late flight, 3.50pm departure. A morning of work in Palo Alto, ran a seminar at Stanford at noon, lunch with a colleague, then 2pm ride to airport. Got the upgrade, seat 2D on a 757. Seatguru is right about the equipment box under the seat in front, but its not a deal-breaker. Takeoff from 28R and a sharp right back onto the usual east-bound departure route over the Bay, Oakland (the SFO8 DP, with a 110 degree turn from the runway heading to 030, and I was on the right-hand side of the plane).
Lovely late afternoon views of the Sierra, with some snow cover starting to appear, Half Dome marking Yosemite Valley about two valleys to our south.
There is no in-seat power in the United 757s (hasn’t been for ages, at least in the 757s I’ve been getting out of SFO), and no channel 9 on this flight. The pilots did pipe through WFAN coverage of the last game of the World Series once we got, say, about an hour from Dulles, on ch9. Uneventful approach and landing, rolled out, no reverse thrust.
Some slides from a talk I gave at a conference sponsored by the American Political Science Association on “Democracy Audits and Governmental Indicators” at the University of California, Berkeley, October 30-31, 2009. The graphic below shows the estimates of country-level democracy for the year 2000 (with marginal 95% credible intervals) that Shawn Treier and I estimated using the Polity IV indicators (a better quality version appears in the slides).
Plus an early attempt at cross-national measurement of regime type (complete with uncertainty bounds), a nice parting gift from our host, Henry Brady.
I’m speaking at a conference at Berkeley sponsored by the American Political Science Association on “Democracy Audits and Governmental Indicators”. In getting some remarks together — on the the reliability of country-level measures of democracy etc — I wanted to compare the performance of measures of democracy against things like GRE scores, legislative ideal points.
ETS has a background document providing some technical data on GRE scores. The standard deviation of GRE-V scores issued in the 2003-08 period is 121 points, while the GRE-Q scores have a standard deviation of over 150 points. The standard errors of measurement are pretty small, relative to this cross-subject variation in the scores, and surprisingly uniform over the range of scores.
Usually you get a U-shape relationship between standard errors of measurement (or — if you are a Bayesian — standard deviations of marginal posterior densities of latent scores) and the scores; we have greater uncertainty about test subjects in the tails of the ability distribution, since the test items tend to be less informative about those subjects (as they rack up a lop-sided pattern of right/wrong answers).
The administered-by-computer, adaptive, version of the GREs helps smooth out that U-shape, with the computer administering items that have “cut-points” close to the running estimate of the subject’s ability.
To look at this I plotted the “conditional standard errors of measurement” for the GREs (as reported by the ETS) against scores; see below.
There is something of an inverted U, which is weird. We’re actually getting less precision in the middle of the scales than in the tails. The other thing is that we’ve got standard errors of measurement that are about 20%-35% of the between-subject score variation, which tails away to about 5-15% in the upper tails.
I wish those standard errors of measurement were smaller, and that is really only a function of the length of the test, given that ETS has near-perfect knowledge of the item parameters. So, does the GRE need to be longer?
The men — Dennis O’Connell, properties manager; James Csollany, carpenter; John Goodson and John Cardinale, electricians; and Kenneth Beltrone, carpenter — were identified on Carnegie’s tax return for the 2007-8 season as being the hall’s leading five earners after its top executive, Clive Gillinson. Their annual compensation ranged from Mr. O’Connell’s $422,599 (with an additional $107,445 in benefits and deferred compensation) to Mr. Goodson’s $327,257 (with $76,459 in benefits and deferred compensation), the return showed.
