I had the good fortune to participate in a conversation about how policies can create positive outcomes for racial integration. The American University Center for Latin American and Latino Studies hosted the event that included nationally renowned scholars and policymakers from the District. I was invited to talk and took the opportunity to provide a context for the DC area.

Black Middle Class
Percent of blacks who have a BA or higher in 20 largest metropolitan areas

I emphasized three major points in my talk. First, race and class are not synonymous in the DC area. A higher percentage of blacks in the DC area have college degrees than any other metropolitan ...

On Twitter, Phil Cohen asked how he might make a plot showing overlapping distributions:

I think that he was on the right track using transparency, but I am not sure that the color was exactly right. The plot reminded me of what Mike Bostock (my generation's Edward Tufte) did to make a population pyramid.

Phil was also working with another disadvantage: he's using Microsoft Excel. Excel (all Microsoft Office products actually), renders the alpha channel terribly ...

R presents more of a challenge to Stata on many fronts, one of which is basic data management.

I often find myself calculating the value of one observation given the value of an adjacent value. For example, to assess a lagged effect, I would take the value of the preceding interval. Stata makes this really easy, R not so much.

Here's what we would do in Stata:

set obs 1000
gen i = _n
gen val = round(runiform()*10)
gen lag = val[_n-1]

The last command throws the warning, (1 missing value generated) because the first observation has no lagged observation. The first 10 observations ...

Example of location bar with lock indicating secure HTTPS connection

I have set up HTTPS on my website (see the closed lock in the address bar?). Webfaction hosts my websites and I set up the TSL certificates I did it using free security certificates from Let's Encrypt. I have done it several times now, but I continue to forget how to do it the next time that I try to set it up. The following are notes to myself that I hope might be helpful to someone else as well. (Note that these instructions work only for websites hosted on Webfaction.)

I participated in a panel yesterday to discuss the book Trespassers?: Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia by my friend and colleague, Willow Lung-Amam. I have written out a summary of my comments on this very important and timely book below.

Cover of *Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia by Willow Lung-Amam

I want to congratulate Dr. Lung-Amam on the great accomplishment that this book represents. People who want to understand race in its contemporary context should read this book. I intend to assign it to my students for this very purpose.

The way that Lung-Amam scales different levels of geography was impressive. She connects factors as large as the geopolitics of global capital and migration flows to those ...

I did it! I finally updated my website from my state-of-the-art-in-2007 website to this new, shiny version. All of the same content from my old website should be on this one, including this here blog and my CV as well as additional content including descriptions of my projects, class webpages, and a page with tools that I use. In addition, I have made the interactive website of neighborhood trajectories from my paper with Siri Warkentien part of the main website as well (and hope to be adding new interactive content in the future).

Dora & Boots, "I Did It!" animated GIF

The redesign has been a work in progress for several years now, though that ...

I have been using the exam class by Philip Hirschhorn in LaTeX to write out homework and tests for my class, The Epidemiology of Everyday Life. It allows me to write out problems with the ease of mathematical notation in LaTeX, provide solutions that can be turned on and off with a single line of code, and to easily tally points on various pages. If you haven't used it and teach a stats-based course, I would definitely recommend checking it out.

I ran into a problem, however, because I am a procrastinating perfectionist. I have had a desired to have all of my teaching handouts to have a similar look. ...

I really like using LaTeX for writing, both articles and for teaching. I find that it eliminates many of the hassles of using Word. I started trying to figure out how to write my own packages this past year and ran into many problems. One of those problems was figuring out a way to keep the .sty packages in a directory that I could easily access and that would be convenient for my workflow rather than what the LaTeX directory structure enforced.

The LaTeX search path includes two environment variables: TEXMFHOME and TEXMFLOCAL that determine where you would store .sty files to be recognized by LaTeX.1 If you follow ...

I hope that you will forgive the shameless self-promotion, but I recently published a paper in Sociological Science (yay open access!) that examined neighborhood racial change in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston metropolitan neighborhoods with an amazingly talented colleague, Siri Warkentien.

We find mixed results related to future racial integration. On the negative side we find that recent estimates overestimate the stability of long-term racial integration. Previous studies don't really examine the pace of neighborhood change, which reveals many integrated neighborhoods are in fact resegregating.

On a more positive note, we find that some neighborhoods really do maintain multiethnic segregation over many decades. We call those neighborhoods "quadrivial ...