Have a message. State it. Write nothing else.

Those are the first instructions to Demographic Research authors on their submission pages. I've heard variations on this theme before, but nothing as clearly stated as this. You might say that the Demographic Research editors had a message, stated it clearly, and wrote nothing else.

I started using this advice to reframe several papers that I have hanging around. What I have found in my first week using this advice is that the organization of papers has become easier. My writing becomes crisper. My papers are shorter. And I find them to be more compelling.

I noticed improvement in a couple of ...

Over the weekend, jeremy posted about beckieball, a "new sport sweeping the country." The purpose was to show how selection on characteristics affects the correlation between characteristics upon selection. This, as commenter Stuart Buck pointed out, is an example of Berkson's Paradox, though it relates to jeremy's post about height and nba.

Although he left several other exercises to the reader, I thought I would do a simpler one: recreate the code that he used to make his example. I did this a) because it was a semi-useful way to shake the cobwebs from egg nog and yuletides, and b) because I think that it will come ...