Secondly, statistics aficionado Stijn Ruiter writes on his blog ‘Your Sixth Degree’ about the advanced use of statistics. In his post on the presidential elections and the so-called Bradley-effect, he does however show that without asking the right question, advanced statstics does bring you nowhere. The election of Barack Obama denies this Bradley-effect, which “basically refers to the idea that a black American would not get elected because in the election booth voters would decide against what they said in the polls.” However, research should perhaps have a more detailed starting point: “The Bradley effect hypothesis is rather general, and as it is generally described (as above), it does not really specify who the voters are and what characteristics they (should) have. It only specifies whom to choose from, a black candidate or a white candidate. But there are two sides to the voting equation, namely voters and candidates. […] So, the question becomes who votes for whom.” ((Also see Gary King’s note on a paper investgating the (decline) of the Bradley effect.))

Such a detailed perspective was also taken up in an article on the educational achievement of migrants’ children, which I described myself a while ago. “The authors of the article — recently published in American Sociological Review — were able to take into account influences from both (characteristics of) country of origin, country of destination, and the migrant community in the country of origin.” Doing so, has led to some interesting findings, which would remain unclear if not this level of detail was maintained. “Counter-intuitively, immigrant children from countries with lower levels of economic development have better scholastic performance than comparable children who emigrate from countries with higher levels of economic development.”

Also focused on educational attainment of migrants’ children, in relation with integration in the host society, Fëanor on ‘Just a Mon’ discusses a ‘natural experiment’. This natural experiment entails that after Indonesian independence thousands Moluccans were allowed to settle in various Dutch municipalities. The socio-economic backgrounds of these people were rather similar, which allowed the the researchers to compare their children on educational achievement, and cross-tabulate this with measures of integration. They found that “children from Moluccan fathers and native mothers have a higher educational attainment than children from ethnic homogeneous Moluccan couples or children from a Moluccan mother and a native father.”

Finally, a `natural experiment’ is nice, but what about the holy grail of scientific rigourness: a real experiment? Often difficult to achieve in the social sciences, but it has been done. Ed Yong on ‘Not exactly Rocket Science’ discusses an experimental test of the ‘broken windows theory’, “which suggests that signs of petty crimes, like broken windows, serve as a trigger for yet more criminal behaviour”. The science-published article describes how simple experiments were conducted, such as measuring ‘littering’ when a wall was severely tainted by graffiti, or when it was completely painted over. A very interesting article, and Ed Yong gives a thorough summary. “All in all, the suite of experiments, all in a realistic setting, provide powerful evidence that the Broken Windows Theory is valid and all of Keiser’s results were statistically significant”

That’s it for today. No more entries for this first edition of the Curving Normality blog carnival. I would like to thank all those having submitted their entries. It was very nice to read all your blogs and to tie it all together in this editorial. The next edition will be published on the first day of 2009, so please submit your next article in the comments below as soon as it’s ready!

It is very easy to set this up in combination with BibDesk. Assuming you have Bibdesk installed and MobileMe working, just follow these steps:

• Activate your MobileMe iDisk Sync. You’ll find this setting in the MobileMe preferences, under the iDisk tab
• Go to BibDesk
• Activate AutoFile if you haven’t alreadu (from the settings)
• Do one of the following:
• If you set up BibDesk to autofile your documents in a fixed location, change this location to a folder on your iDisk
• If you set up BibDesk to autofile your documents in a location `relative to each document’, do nothing.
• Move your BibDesk library to your references folder on your iDisk
• In BibDesk: select all your references and then select from the the ‘Publication’ pull-down menu to ‘AutoFile Linked Files’.

That’s it, you’re done! Allways remember to make a backup of your files before you try this, but it is a rather simple and safe procedure. BibDesk will function as it always did, and as fast as it did because your iDisk is synced to your hard drive. Documents are now automatically synced to the web moments after you added them to BibDesk and available for future reference wherever you are.

Was this helpfull, and did it work for you as described? Please let me know in the comments below.

Most academics will recognize the problem: how to properly manage the abundance of articles, book chapters, and papers that our work is based on. How do we store them, and more importantly, how do we retrieve them after a while? Personally, I very much like to write on the papers I read, indicating and coding important sections. This generally means printing, while I also want to bring the papers I read along, facing me with the impossibility of lugging hundreds of articles around. So what to do? Some papers I only use for quick reference I don’t print, but those meant for close reading, I did. I’ve always been looking for a method to read digitally while allowing me to take notes.

Until recently, that is. I think that I may have found a good combination of two software packages that allow me to orderly store my loads of articles, and to read and annotate them digitally. Ladies and gentlemen: I present you BibDesk and Skim!

Bibdesk

BibDesk is a little piece of software meant for bibliography management focused on the BibTex format. It is thereby specifically focused on integration with LaTeX, but that happens to the way I prefer to write my papers. However, even if you don’t work with LaTeX, it is still suited to work with. It automatically stores files to a given location and shows the bibliographic information in a nice overview. It also allows the user to search in repositories as PubMed and Web of Science, including the ability to download the references to articles of interest. In the sidebar a preview of the article is shown.
I’ve been able to find only a single drawback to BibDesk: it allows the user to create folders and store articles in these folders, thereby keeping your bibliography in an orerly fashion. However, it is not possible to create such folders within folders. Thereby, it is not possible to create a folder for a specific topic or paper you’re presently working on, including some sub-topics.

 

Skim

When it comes to reading the nicely stored papers in BibDesk, it works together in an integrated manner with Skim. Skim allows you to read papers stored in .PDF and, more importantly, to take notes! Just clicking in the text creates a yellow field in which some text can be typed. These fields can be adjusted in size, color, and position. Many more different types of markers are available as well, such as underlining text (just select and click the icon), arrows, and boxes / circles. Also, you can make longer notes which just have an ‘anchor’ in the text which reveal the note when clicked on. Again, these anchors can have a variety of icons. All in all, this allows the user to develop his or her own coding-system. Most interestingly, in the right-sidebar a list of all comments is shown, which can be searched independently of the text. When in full-screen reading mode, this sidebar can be called forward by simply moving the mouse-pointer to the right edge of the screen.

The integration between the storing in BibDesk and the reading in Skim is strong. Skim can easily be called forward from within BibDesk. Both being very light-weight software packages, this works very fast and smoothly. Moreover, the notes you make in Skim can be directly read from within BibDesk. It is also possible to export your notes exclusively, thereby allowing the usage of these notes in other software.

What we thus have here is a system that allows the easy on-screen reading of papers, while taking notes in the actual paper itself. It surely requires some getting used to, but soon it seems to work nicely and speedily. I can surely see how Skim would into my workflow.

 

Both BibDesk and Skim are freeware and open-source, a software philosophy I gladly adhere to. Designed for MacOSX, they both run perfectly on my operating system of choice. The only drawback is that since both are far ahead of the competition, some compatibility issues might arise. This is especially clear when using Skim: it stores the comments in an ‘additional pocket’ to the actual .PDF files, a feature not yet supported by all file systems. So, for instance, when e-mailing the .PDF or when storing it on an old USB-disk, the comments may be lost. It is however possible to export a .PDF document with the comments stored inside, so that other people still can read your thoughts. But then again, all software has some compatibility issues.

To conclude, I must say that I’m already looking forward to go reading again using BibDesk and Skim. To all mac-based researchers I would like to suggest to give it a try. Please report back your own experiences!

UPDATE: I wrote a how-to on syncing your BibDesk library to your MobileMe iDisk.