Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
In the interest of publishing null findings: I tried estimating US state IQs from the mean cognitive ability for users in the OKCupid dataset. However, this did not work out. This was a far shot to begin with due to massive self-selection and somewhat non-random sampling. Actually, what I really wanted was another way to…
Continue ReadingI am doing an S factor study of US counties in the usual way. For that reason, I need some kind of county-level cognitive ability estimate. I know that this is possible to create using the Add Health database, but that the data are not sharable. However, it may be possible to do some tricks,…
Continue ReadingThis is a post in the on-going series about stuff in my package: kirkegaard [I’m not egocentric but since there is no central theme about the functions in the package other than I made and use them, there is nothing else to call it.] I figure it should be easy to find someone who wrote…
Continue ReadingI forgot to post this blog post at the time of publication as I usually do. However, here it is. As explored in some previous posts, John Fuerst and I have spent about 1.25 years (!) producing a massive article: published version runs 119 pages; 25k words without the references; 159k characters incl. spaces. We…
Continue ReadingIn the comments on this SlateStarCodex post, someone is questioning my claim that sharing the chorion (what is that?) is unimportant: Emil: Uterine environment stuff is not important. We know this because of this study http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-015-9745-3 and because ordinary siblings are about as similar as DZ twins who did share the uterus at the same…
Continue ReadingNon-Shared Environment Doesn’t Just Mean Schools And Peers Scott Alexander has a new post out summarizing the interpretations of what constitutes non-shared environment in the ACE model estimates from standard (MZ-DZ) twin studies. I’m happy that he wrote that up because I had been thinking of writing up the same points, but he is a…
Continue ReadingQuick recap of the main object types in R from Advanced R: homogeneous heterogeneous 1-d atomic vector list 2-d matrix data.frame n-d array ??? So, objects can either store only data of the same type or of any type, and they can have 1, 2 or any number of dimensions. Note that there is a…
Continue ReadingOn-going series of posts about functions in my R package (https://github.com/Deleetdk/kirkegaard ). Suppose you have a list or a simple vector (lists are vectors) with some data. However, some of it is missing or bad in various ways: NA, NULL, NaN, Inf (or -Inf). Usually, we want to get rid of these datapoints, but it…
Continue ReadingWhen one has a continuous variable and then cuts it into bins (discretization) and correlates it with some other variable, the observed correlation is biased downwards to some extent. The extent depends on the cut-off value(s) used and the number of bins. Normally, one would use polychoric-type methods (better called latent correlation estimation methods) to…
Continue ReadingThis is actually an older post, but by accident I posted it on the Danish language sister blog. @KirkegaardEmil Really? https://t.co/kWjEyvhGYD — JayMan (@JayMan471) September 4, 2015 I don’t know what study that is, however, I do have numbers for the performance of Yugoslavians in Denmark and Norway. There are both numbers for persons from…
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