Blog Roll

No, a blog roll is not a WWII hair style (Victory Rolls), it's just a list of my blogs and the blogs of other writers I find interesting (see the right-hand column on the web version). I started blogging in 2009 and received a lot better feedback at the start. Now, social media has thrown a pail of cold water on the blog-o-sphere, but things (I hope) are changing. Social media has become a cesspool of political opinions and vented grievances, but that has a use too. I've also become a little disenchanted with academic journals which seem to be more connected to career advancement (I'm retired). So, I will continue blogging. Let me pull my blogs out of the BLOG LIST in the right-hand column (if you are viewing this on the web version) and explain why I have so many.

Maybe it wasn't a great idea to pull out separate topics for different blogs (that doesn't seem to be the preferred choice of bloggers), but reading a jumble of topics seemed tiresome, so I split out the following themes:

• Random Noise (this blog) is mostly just a collection of intellectual curiosities without statistical proof (doesn't that describe most academic journals?). At least none of my writing here has been peer reviewed (censored). In any event, peer review is about to be taken over by Artificial Intelligence (AI) so you can do your own reviews of my writing.
• Facts, Fictions and Forecasts I devote FFF mostly to World-System forecasts, that is, countries of interest in the World-System and the World System itself (the WL20 model). I use techniques similar to the Economy Now app of the Atlanta Federal Reserve but create alternative scenarios similar to those used by the IPCC Emission Scenarios. I also do not limit myself to GDP, Inflation or CO2 emissions but construct forecasts and scenarios of anything I find interesting and have data.
• World-System Conjectures The Conjectures are also mostly statistical analyses of historical systems. Data are mostly drawn from the World Development Indicators, the Maddison Historical Statistics, the historical statistics of individual countries and my dissertation on Germany.
• Random Variation In RV, I write about Dynamic Component Models (DCMs) and other statistics techniques (Hierarchical Linear Models, HLMs). The DCM models are a generalization of Stock and Watson (2012) Diffusion Indexes and uses a modification of the dse program written in the R programming language. Most model code is available here.
• Random Stock Walker a blog devoted to stock market forecasts (I'm not sure the stock market can be forecast but I do test each stock index with a Random Walk Model).
• Economic Bubble Machine A blog devoted to explaining economic bubbles such as the Great Depression (actually, the bubble was the Roaring Twenties).

I have other blogs out there and I usually post interesting blog articles on social media.