Political Science 205

Winter 2009

Course Info

• Syllabus
• Instructor: Heather Stoll
• Office: 3715 Ellison Hall
• Office hours: 2:00-4:00 p.m. TH or by appointment
• Class meeting time: T TH 4:00-5:20 p.m.
• Class location: 3843 Ellison T, 3814 Ellison TH

Announcements

• 13 Mar: The sample answer to Assignment 5's (2d) has been posted to the website. Also, I have added a legend to the graph of predicted civil war deaths as a function of ethnic fractionalization for democracies and dictatorships (holding duration constant) that we created in class. This graph is available as a PDF below. The code for creating this graph, with a brief explanation of the component parts of the "legend" command, can be found in the "Dummy Variable Regression R Code" from 5 and 10 March, also available from the website.
• 3 Mar: Heather will hold office hours from 2-4 pm on Tuesday, March 10 instead of on Thursday, March 12.
• 3 Mar: Assignment 5 has been posted to the website. It is due on Thursday, 12 March.
• 19 Feb: The due date for Assignment 4 has been pushed back to Tuesday, 3 March.
• 18 Feb: The final project has been posted to the website. Please take a look at the Epstein and Mershon article for class on Thursday, 19 February.
• 13 Feb: Assignment 4 has been posted to the website and is tentatively due Thursday, 26 February.
• 4 Feb: Assignment 3 has been posted to the website and is tentatively due Thursay, 12 February. I will hold office hours from 2-4 pm on Tuesday, 10 February instead of on Thursday the 12th.
• 22 Jan: The due date for Assignment 2 has been pushed back to the Tuesday following the original due date (i.e., to 3 February).
• 7 Jan: I will hold an extra hour of office hours prior to class next Tuesday the 13th in light of the first assignment's pending due date.
• 5 Jan: Welcome to the PS 205 website!

Assignments

• Final Project (Due Monday, 23 March)
• Assignment 5 (Due Thursday, 12 March)
• Assignment 4 (Due Tuesday, 3 March)
• Assignment 3 (Due Thursday, 12 February)
• Assignment 2 (Due Tuesday, 3 February)
• Assignment 1 (Due Thursday, 15 January)

Data

• Data, Assignment 5
• Data1, Assignment 3
• Data2, Assignment 3
• Data3, Assignment 3
• Data4, Assignment 3
• Data, Assignment 2

Lecture and Supplemental Materials

• Assignment 5 (2d) Answer Key
• Diagnostics R Code (10 and 12 Mar)
• Graph with Legend Created Using Dummy Regression R Code from 5 and 10 March
• Dummy Regression R Code (5 and 10 Mar) -- Includes Example of Adding Legend to Graph
• Multivariate Linear Regression R Code (3 and 5 Mar)
• Bivariate Linear Regression R Code (19 and 26 Feb)
• Distributions and Sampling R Code (29 Jan)
• Descriptive Statistics R Code (27 Jan)

Useful Links

• Hours and other information about the Ellison computer lab can be found here.
• Help with R: From the R Project home page, click on "Documentation/Manuals" in the far left-side frame. Particularly useful will be the "Introduction to R", which you can either read on-line or download as a PDF file. One R cheat sheet can be found here and another one can be found here. These are great to print out and post next to your computer. Here is a helpful tutorial that contains many examples.
• Help with STATA: The official STATA website contains useful information about STATA. Particularly, check out the FAQs . You might also want to look at the UCLA Academic Technology Services STATA Resources website : it contains many useful tutorials and FAQs. Keep in mind, though, that these tutorials may be based on a different version of STATA than the version that you are using.
• Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
• UCSB Social Science Survey Center and Benton Survey Research Lab