Blog envy and article envy

I learned at St. Mary’s Catholic School that envy was a sin. Good thing I am going to mass on Thursday, because I am suffering from a good deal of envy lately.

First there is blog envy.

If you have not checked out The Berkeley Blog, I highly recommend it, starting with this post on the Geography of Inequality.  Although the fact that it is written by “175 professors and scholars” and mine is written by one person who can occasionally muster up a facsimile of scholarship on a good day assuages my green pallor somewhat – still – their blog is better than mine and I am envious.

Then, there is article envy. I wanted to write an article on power analysis for mixed models. This is something more people should write about because I have looked at what some of my clients have had recommended for power analyses and they were – what’s another word for “stupid”? Not my clients. They were the opposite of stupid because they immediately recognized that even if they weren’t sure how to do a power analysis for a mixed model that it was probably not the exact same whether you were doing an independent t-test or a hierarchical linear model with correlated data and two levels of nesting. So, they came to me for a second opinion.

There should be a lot more written about power analysis for multilevel models. Bethany Bell and some other people wrote a really, really good paper with the title “Dancing the Sample Size Limbo with Mixed Models: How Low Can You Go?” I am even envious of the title.

James Coraggio and a whole bucket of co-authors from the University of South Florida wrote a macro I wish I had written,  GLMM_SIM: A SAS ® Macro for Evaluating the  Statistical Integrity of General Linear Mixed Models. I tried running their macro and did not really get the results I expected but I am pretty certain that is not due to any defect in their macro nearly as much as to the fact that I spent about two minutes and thirty-two seconds on it before I got called away to try to meet some deadline.  I’m sure I’ll get back to it in the next week or so. I have macro envy.

The one thing all of those have in common, I noticed, is they are all written by more than one person.

Great! Now, I have clone envy.