The UFO files

Page 172: Claim in a newspaper article that ‘a man from the government’
visited two young girls in Leeds who reported seeing a UFO landing.

Page 173: Cutting from the Sunday Mirror 17 May 1987 quoting the Admiral Lord Peter Hill-Norton, a former Chief of Defence Staff, who had become a UFO believer on retirement from the MoD.

Pages 189 - 202: This section of the file contains a full copy of BUFORA’s 1986 publication Mystery of the Circles, a pamphlet co-authored by Jenny Randles and Paul Fuller on the crop circle mystery.

Page 214: In May 1985 Ralph Noyes wrote to his successor as head of DS8 (which became Sec(AS) in 1985) asking if MoD had retained copies of “interesting gun-camera clips” taken by RAF aircrew during the 1950s that “suggested the existence of a puzzling phenomenon.”

This is from the Highlights Guide to The UFO files just released to the National Archives by the Ministry of Defence, containing reported sightings of UFOs from 1986-1992.

Read all about the near collision of a passenger jet and UFO in Kent and the pilots of a US Air Force jet being ordered to shoot down a UFO over East Anglia, and make sure you wander through the rest of the excellent National Archives website. Who knows, maybe you end up with a PhD in economic history.

Stata lessons & other resources

A friend asked for a quick list, so here goes:

UCLA's excellent resources to help you learn and use Stata

Another great collection of Stata Resources by Park Hun Myoung, as well as a stata command cheat-card

London School of Economics Stata Resources

Syracuse University's Stata tutorial

Program in Statistics and Methodology by the pol sci's at Ohio State University

Duke Stata tutorials

World Freedom Atlas

The World Freedom Atlas is a “geovisualization tool” for world statistics. The amount of information is impressive - Peter Klein went into the trouble of linking to some of the sources:

It includes the most important variables used by economists including income and purchasing power from the Penn World Table, legal origin from LLSV, economic freedom from the Fraser Institute and the Heritage Foundation, policy constraints from Witold Henisz, the World Bank’s governance indicators, and a host of other variables from Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson; Barro and Lee; Easterly and Levine; Persson and Tabellini; and several others.

The 2008 US Federal Budget

A fantastic visual guide to the US Federal Budget.

Maps of Europe

These maps are great:

1 Linguistic groups in Europe
2 Traditional religious majorities by region in Europe
3.1 Frequency of fair hair in Europe
3.2 Frequency of fair eyes in Europe
3.3 Predominant ethnic groups by region in Europe
4.1 Density of population in Europe
4.2 GDP per capita (PPP) in Europe
4.2 GDP per capita per hour (PPP) in Europe
4.3 Real productivity (GDP per capita per hour per worker)
5.1 Legal age to drink alcohol in Europe
5.2 Ages of consent in Europe
5.3 Abortion laws in Europe
5.4 Smoking bans in Europe
5.5 Legal status of cannabis in Europe
6.1 Children well-being in Europe

Visualise Wikipedia

With WikiMindMap, a really cool webapplet. Mac users should also check out Pathway.

Hat tip lifehacker.

Centre for Economic Performance podcasts

Here. Paul Krugman on globalisation and welfare, John Van Reenen on education and economic growth, and Alan Krueger on terrorism.

Taxes in Europe

An excellent database of taxes in the European Union countries:

The Taxes in Europe database is the European Commission's on-line information tool covering the main taxes in force in the EU Member States. Access is free for all users. The system contains information on around 500 taxes, as provided to the European Commission by the national authorities. The information can be found quickly and easily using the search tool.

The Taxes in Europe database contains, for each individual tax, information on its legal basis, assessment base, main exemptions, applicable rate(s), economic and statistical classification, as well as the revenue generated by it. The information is listed in the form of a downloadable file.

More information here. I only had a quick look, but so far I am impressed. The database is comprehensive, information is displayed clearly and the search function works well too.

Stata 10

...ships June 25.

Apparently, the killer feature is the new graph editor:

With Stata’s new Graph Editor, you can change how your graph looks. You can add. You can remove. You can move. You can modify. Anything. Titles, legends, axes, lines, arrows, markers, annotations.

'You can remove. You can move. Anything'. Well, I'm glad to see they didn't waste resources on their sales pitch.

Apple fans, the best is still ahead: I have a hunch iStata is coming soon in a store near you.

For UK readers: Economic and Labour Market Review

Economic & Labour Market Review (ELMR) is a new monthly statistical journal from the Office of National Statistics:

The Review draws together expert research and analysis to build an up-to-date, comprehensive and unique statistical picture of the UK economy and labour market.

ELMR includes impartial commentary and analysis from its specialist ONS authors, illustrated with tables, charts and diagrams. It provides an independent, cohesive view of the state of the economy and the labour market, and gives an insight into how the statistics behind the analysis are produced and interpreted.

Concise, well written and available online free of charge, the Review provides an excellent overview of the latest UK statistics and is recommended to all readers interested in an up-to-date snapshot of the UK economy.

The Global Peace Index

...was published today.

121 countries have been ranked by their ‘absence of violence’, using metrics that combine both internal and external factors. Most people understand the absence of violence as an indicator of peace. This definition also allows for the measuring of peacefulness within, as well as between, nations.

Developed in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, the GPI boasts an impressive list of endorsers, including our own Joseph Stiglitz.

Personally, given the difficulties involved in defining the term 'peace', I doubt the index is going to be of much use to researchers - but who knows?

A different look at world income inequality and health

This is a fascinating presentation by Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute and founder of Gapminder, a groundbreaking project with the aim to 'bring data to life'. The Trendalyzer free online software, as seen on the presentation, is here.

And to add an interactive element to this, before playing the video have a stab at beating the proverbial monkey and guess which country has the highest child mortality rate of each pair:

1. Sri Lanka or Turkey
2. Poland or South Korea
3. Malaysia or Russia
4. Pakistan or Vietnam
5. Thailand or South Africa

Back to College, for free

I'm late to post today, but I have a good excuse. Lecturefox.com has a series of links to lectures in video, audio or text format from leading universities.

Lecturefox is a free service. You can find high-quality classes from universities all over the world. We collect without exception lectures from official universities, and we have a special interest in lectures from the faculties computer science, mathematics and physics. In the category faculty-mix you can find miscellaneous lectures from other departments like electrical engineering, chemistry, biology, psychology, economics, history and philosophy.

I have to admit it's a bit light on the economics so far, but for narrow-minded economists there are some great stuff on maths & stats, psychology and social trends to feed the mind.

If you are aware of similar resources, I would be grateful if you could post a comment or email me.

Something for your ipod

The London School of Economics holds a number of public lectures and events of interest to economists and social scientists in general.

You can find some of them in mp3 format here.

Acronym finder

A great resource to help you figure out what an acronym stands for.

Measuring worth

How much would a pound buy you in 1850? What was the inflation rate in 1266? What's been happening to the Dow Jones Industrial Average since its inception?

MeasuringWorth answers these, and more, questions.