Fall, 2012 Update

Post date: Oct 7, 2012 5:18:27 PM

Recently BurkeyAcademy has grown to over 200 videos, 600 subscribers, and 150,000 video views!  Thanks for all of your support! As you may have noticed, after doing a poll I decided to add some Google ads in June. I decided my policy would be not to put overlay or "preview" commercials on videos related to classes I am currently teaching, and to try to keep the "preview: commercials to a minimum.  In case you are wondering, this is bringing in around $20 per month.  After taxes I expect to keep around half of that, which will help to defray some of my web hosting and other technology expenses for BurkeyAcademy (e.g. Tablet PC, lots of USB headsets). 

I have been doing a poll recently asking about suggestions for future topics.  I am going to try to start doing some on Income Inequality measures, and spatial statistics.  I just found a good Open Source GIS program (MapWindow).  That was the key thing holding me back on doing videos on Spatial Statistics/Econometrics, since I want my videos to use software that ANYONE can have access to, as much as possible. ARCGIS and Matlab are just too expensive for the masses, and my university certainly can't afford them for everyone.  But now I have a solution using MapWindow, GeoDa, and R for just about any kind of Spatial Statistics or Econometrics.  The one limit is with some kinds of Spatial Panel Data Analysis, which is a bit more limited in R, but Gianfranco Piras at WVU is working on a package for R called splm that estimates many models quite well.  I don't think it does the Spatial Durbin model, however.

Some have asked me to make more videos on time series data analysis, or fancy panel data models.  I am sorry, but I must decline here, since I am not an expert in this area.  I am afraid that I would either mislead you, or leave out some important bits if I went deeper into these models.  Keep making suggestions, though!

Thanks for all of your support!