this week i

completed the first draft of the merge method for monet.frame objects.  hannes liked it so much that he submitted version 0.6 to cran.  and we released some race/ethnicity briefs about the medicaid expansion too.

sometimes forget how easy it is just to feel good.  and, wrapped up in my own work, how well my old friends are doing.

hit the highway..

..to potter county, pennsylvania.


met stash nawrocki at cherry springs.  someone visiting from manhattan once asked him what the public transit was like out there.  "well, you can use your thumb."

explored the sky for a few hours.


drove back down..

 ..to state college.

arrived during graduation week.  locals promised me that the other 51 weeks of the year, photographing yourself riding the stone nittany lion didn't require standing in line for half an hour.  not sure if i believe them.

performed my out-of-the-box hour-long why use r lecture then ran an afternoon workshop at penn state's social science research institute for their big data week.  pre-workshop, i created this flowchart to get everyone to the same starting point.  hokay actually, jenn made that from this.

garner mentions once in a while.

dug up one of my favorite old posts, "it really is hard to anticipate just how silly users can be."

find pay-for-performance for our educators a deal with the devil.  our society has had no luck forcing physicians to accept pay-for-performance schemes, why is education any different?  if anything, success in medical care is easier to evaluate than success in pedagogy.  both disciplines have huge factors outside of the practitioners' control: overburdened or disinterested parents in one case, non-compliant patients in the other.  but at least with medical care, there are a few measurable outcomes - "did the patient outlive expectations?" - compared to - "did the child become a happy, productive, successful member of society fifteen years later, and can that success be attributed to the hundred hours they spent in your classroom during a single year?"  if teacher measurement isn't just a smokescreen to squeeze money, then let doctors go first.  oh and look bill gates subtly agrees.

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