This isn’t technically my 300th blog post, but the 300th page I’ve constructed on my blog (so e.g. it includes when I’ve made a page for a class). I’ve posted a spreadsheet of the titles and dates of the posts over time (and updating it I noticed I was at 300).

I typically get around 200~300 views per day. Most of these are probably bots, but unless say over 90% are bots this website gets way more views than the cumulative views of all my academic papers combined. Here is a screen shot of the stats wordpress gives to me. My downtick in 2019 I thought was going to spiral into very few views, but it is still holding on.

I kind of have three different types of blog posts. One are example code snippets/data analysis. Often these are things I have done multiple times, so I want to create a record for me to more easily search up later. For example making a hexbin map in ggplot, or a margins plot in Stata. I wrote a recent post because I was talking with a friend about crime weights, and I wanted an example of using regression in python and an error bar plot for my library. (Quite a few birds with that stone.)

Two are questions I repeatedly encounter by students. For example, I made a list of demographic variables I use in the census, and where to find or scrape crime generator variables. Consistently my most popular post is testing the equality of two regression coefficients.

The third are just more generic opinion pieces. For example my notes on (the now late) David Bayley’s writing on the police potential to reduce crime, or Jane Jacob’s take on neighborhoods, or that I don’t think latent trajectories are real things.

Some are multiple of these categories put together, particularly opinion pieces with example code snippets to illustrate the points I am making. Like a simulation of why I like to model individual delinquency items, or how to balance false positives in bail decisions.

On Public Good Criminology

None of these per se fit in the example framework of typical peer review output. So despite no peer review, I think things like deriving optimal treatment allocation with network spillovers, or that conformal predictions intervals for synthetic control estimates are much smaller than permutation tests are a substantive contribution to share!

So that brings me to the public good point. Most criminologists have a default of only valuing a closed peer review system. Despite my blog posts not being peer reviewed (ditto for the pre-prints I post at first), I hope folks can take the time to judge for themselves whether they are valuable or not. We would be much better off as a group if we did things like share code, share class preps, or failed projects by default.

Some of these posts I might write up if we had a short journal for our field akin to Economics Letters, but even that is a lot of work for very little value added to be frank. (If I had infinite time I also might turn my notes on Poisson/Negative Binomial regression into a little Sage green book.) Being a private sector data scientist now without the tenure boot on my neck, I don’t really have any need or desire to go through that process.

If all you value are getting the opinions of a handful of other academics than by all means keep your work close to the chest and only publish in peer reviewed journals. If you want to provide a public good though, your work actually needs to be public.