Skype 2.1 for Linux requires PulseAudio
This is a quick update to earlier posts on Skype for interview audio. Skype on Linux remains a compelling alternative for recording interviews, especially given the high quality of the audio produced.
Skype 2.1 for Linux requires PulseAudio as as sound manager. Unfortunately this means that the crucial sound settings are scattered all over the map. Unfortunately the promising “PulseAudio Device Chooser” applet does not permit you to choose the current source of sound that the operating system (and therefore your applications) is paying attention to. For that, you’ll have to adjust the system sound preferences. Under the Input tab, select the appropriate device and adjust the gain.
Further bad news: I haven’t yet found an automatic switch that toggles back and forth to the headset microphone when you plug a headset in.
Further bad news: Skype doesn’t contain any settings to override PulseAudio in the GUI preferences / configuration. You’re stuck with PulseAudio for the time being.
Open Thread: Reactions to Lessig’s Endorsement of Khazei
Alan Khazei has many credentials to recommend him for the Senate but is a dark horse candidate for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. The Democratic primary will, in all likelihood, decide the identity of the next Senator from Massachusetts, at least for the remainder of what would have been Kennedy’s term.
Larry Lessig’s recent BlipTV short endorsing Khazei describes the race in the following terms:
- a rich man,
- a calculating insider,
- a populist pol,
… and then [cue inspirational theme music] … - a visionary leader and social entrepreneur, the only one who is up to the billing of Successor to Teddy.
A look at the four campaign websites reveals marked similarity on the issues they perceive voters care about: health care, jobs, recovery, and two wars.
Do you buy Lessig’s characterization of the race? Is Khazei the only visionary in the race? Is vision the essential qualification for the Senate?
Does the United States Senate even matter anymore in the formulation of American foreign policy?
Export Trade Clusters
This post, as with the prior ones on trade clusters, aims to help visualize patterns of trade in the OECD from 50 years of partner trade statistics. The data is rich, meaning we should be able to develop rich intuition by exploring it visually.
These slides follow the method laid out in Jong-Eun Lee, “Two Maps for the World’s Trade Integration,” Applied Economics Letters, 11:4 (2004). All computations were performed in R.
Equations in your dissertation
What do you use to edit equations for your dissertation? OpenOffice has a LaTeX equation editor plugin that takes latex input. You can enter in LaTeX equations, and then choose the resolution and file format in which you’d like a graphic inserted into your paper. Fantastic! Even better, its name is OOolatex. Who can resist enjoying that name?
What is the current MS Word solution to this problem? I’d be interested to know how others manage.
Visualizing Dyadic Trade Flows
I gave a talk at the Fletcher School today on my work on dyadic trade flows (slides).
In a nutshell, the talk argues that cartograms and dendrograms can give students and practitioners a better understanding of the patterns of trade among partner contries, both for teaching and for research. We have thousands of observations of dyadic relationships in panel datasets. Most often these datasets are presented as aggregates: total annual world trade, top exporters in world trade, top exporters, top exporters in an industry sector, top exporters to a political union (such as the EU), top exporters within a geographic area, etc. What these statistics ignore is the information in the dyadic trade flows: who trades with whom?
What I offer is a way to crunch down the total number of country dyads into manageable graphics that can appear on a single slide. We can look directly at the dyadic patterns of trade using hierarchic clustering (dendrograms). We can compare partner trade flows across countries and time periods using cartograms. The techniques are not new; what is new is the presentation of rich international trade datasets in relatively complete format that can be digested by inspection, rather than with complex and poorly understood statistical techniques. Complete annual sets of cartograms and dendrograms give scholars the power to explore the distribution of dyadic trade and discover hypotheses that are worth testing more carefully, either with quantitative or qualitative methods.
One of the reasons trade courses have focused so much on models, theorems, and policy of international trade is that it is hard to describe trade patterns in any meaningful and comparable terms. My slides suggest how to do exactly that: present changes to global trade patterns in a succinct, visual format that enables rich comparisons across time and space.
Coding Qualitative Data: Web Solution
Professor Stuart Schulman of University of Massachusetts (formerly University of Pittsburgh) designed a web server to provide qualitative data analysis (QDA) via web for social science datasets. The solution is called QDAP, currently housed at UMass but also at Pitt.
Bravo! Free, multi-user, qualitative data analysis for anyone with a web browser. They have clearly stated data warehouse privacy disclosures as part of the user agreement, and a tutorial for new users.
Thank you, Dr. Shulman.
From the About Us page:
The original QDAP lab was founded in the fall of 2005 by Dr. Stuart Shulman at the University of Pittsburgh. QDAP-UMass, founded in September of 2008 when Dr. Shulman moved to the Department of Political Science at UMass Amherst, trains and employs personnel able to code text from a wide variety of sources. Original material for content analysis might include in-depth interviews, open-ended survey answers, field notes, transcripts from focus groups or Web logs (blogs), e-mails, Web site content, results from database searches (such as LexisNexis™), congressional testimony or other historical texts, and a host of other unstructured but digitized text data sets. QDAP-UMass employs both UMass Amherst and University of Pittsburgh students, as well as professional staff trained in using ATLAS.ti (www.atlasti.com) as well as the Coding Analysis Toolkit, invented by Dr. Shulman. QDAP-UMass will continue to develop and make available online tools to improve the accuracy, reliability, and validity of coding projects.
Skype sound configuration under Linux 9.10
Disclalimer: The settings under Ubuntu 9 are markedly different from my earlier post. I’ll try to post an update here with different instructions. The naming convention under Ubuntu 9.10 Koala’s sound mixer appear to be far more straightforward.
Manual gain settings still did better than the default.
–UPDATE
60 minutes covers cyberwar
Steve Kroft of 60 minutes covers cyberwar from the perspective of computer network operations and critical infrastructure. It is a welcome change from the usual fare of robotic weapons, web defacement, and online chat group flame wars. The video and transcript are available at 60 minutes. Well worth the watch.
Unilateral trade clusters using raw import flows
This set of dendrograms, again, is based on raw partner import flows from OECD. The dendrograms show complete linkages (all countries in a cluster exceed the threshold value for mutual trade flows), but the dyad is measured by the greater of the two trade flows.
This gallery shows an annual series of dendrograms using that dataset back to 1993.
Bilateral import clusters using raw trade flows
As promised, here are a new round of dendrograms using OECD trade data as a reciprocal distance measure among countries reporting. In trade, relationships matter, and these dendrograms show which relationships matter the most. Clusters are drawn by complete linkages, using the lesser of the two pairwise trade flows (greater notional distance).
The important thing about these dendrograms, relative to the ones posted the last few days, is that they take the raw trade flows themselves–not normalized for population, or total imports, or GDP–as the unit of analysis. This is actually a much more useful picture of trade than the normalized flows, because is suggests which relationships ought to draw the most water in trade politics.
The cluster algorithm isn’t a perfect way to capture the data; a few outliers can skew the presentation of the data somewhat. But it is the only good way I have seen to present cross sections of country-dyad data at a glance. It’s a very useful tool for presentation of descriptive statistics on international trade.
