Interesting problem of JGR

JGR works well with Linux except for one thing: it seems to use lots of CPU time (See the first figure above).

The way to solve this problem is surprisingly simple: simply click the "About" box once, and the problem is solved (See the second figure above).

I do hope the author can fix this bug in their next release though.

CLHNS

The Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey released two new waves of data: 2002 and 2005. This data looks very interesting. Maybe I should come back to my sequential mixture model paper and give it another serious try.

Auto-mounting external hard drive

My Ubuntu has been working well auto-mounting my external hard drives until yesterday. I suddenly got "you do not have the privilege to mount this drive". What I did was to issue this command:

gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

and get rid of the last line regarding the external drive, which was left there probably by accident. Now the system works perfectly again.

A list of important reference on son preference

Ben-Porath, Y., and F. Welch. 1976. “Do Sex Preferences Really Matter?.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 90:285-307.

Publication

My paper with Sarah "Does Son Preference Influence Children's Growth in Height? A Comparative Study of Chinese and Filipino Children" has been accepted for publication by Population Studies. It is a very good journal, very helpful reviewers, and I am very pleased. Here is the working paper version (will be updated soon): http://ebi.ccpr.ucla.edu:8080/pwp/ListPaper.do?state=listWorkingPaperDetails&ParentCategory=309

Desktop broken

Damn my desktop was broken today. It's about three and half years old and running both Windows and Ubuntu. Now neither system works anymore. Looks like hardware failure, most likely to be hard drive problem. I need to get a cheap replacement real soon.

JGR

JGR has become a real competitor as a R GUI front. The Linux version works better than the Windows versions: runs faster, and looks prettier (with native look and feel of GTK). And its object browser is a very helpful tool that is not available in other GUI fronts.

Predict, simulate, and graph aML results

The multilevel and multiprocess software aML is quite amazing. It handles a much greater number of models than most other packages, and it is fast to reach convergence given suitable starting values. However, it does not have lots of facilities for results presentation.

I have used this software for several of my own research. I think it will be highly desirable to streamline the communication between aML and Stata or R. I can think of the following steps:

1. Estimate a mode in aML;
2. Extract point estimates and variance/covariance from the output file using Python;
3. Transfer the extracted results to R;
4. Predict, simulate, and graph the results with Zelig or other facilities built into R.