Hi folks,

This is not exactly a communications/IT question, but since this is a scholarly community of computationally and statistically savvy folks, I thought I'd try.  Does anyone know of a package for the R statistical computing environment that can run regression models with clustered standard errors?  I'm relatively new to R and am looking for R's equivalent of the Stata "vce(cluster clustvar)" option.  Thanks,

Adam

--
Adam M. Kleinbaum
Assistant Professor
Tuck School of Business
Dartmouth College
603.646.6447

Please consider submitting a letter of interest and chapter(s) for the
project described below. I¹ll be at the Eastern Sociological Society meeting
in Philadelphia today and tomorrow but I would love to talk to you tonight
or over the next few days if you have existing work you would like to adapt,
or new ideas connected with ways in which instantaneous communications has
begun to stimulate calls for reform in Egypt and elsewhere.

~ Adrienne Redd

Call for chapters for Resilient Nation-States of the Middle East, (2011)
Nimble Books, LLC

Adrienne Redd, Ph.D.
Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers: The Fate of the Nation in a Global World,
(2010) Nimble Books, LLC.
www.fallenwallsfallentowers.com
adrienne@redd.com
215-778-3784

Submission of chapters April 2, 2011.
Letter of interest requested by February 28, 2011.

Resilient Nation-States of the Middle East, (2011) Nimble Books, LLC will
draw on the examples of Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Libya and other
countries of East Africa that have the potential to transform into resilient
constitutional democracies.
The book will advance an optimistic picture of how Middle Eastern
nation-states can i) transform their governments; ii) build coalitions,
define political platforms, and mount elections from competing parties; iii)
contend with multiculturalism in the emergent republics; iv) define what
role religion should play in their new constitutions; v) define what role
the army should play in the transitional arrangements; vi) protect
populations from the upheavals of the global economy; vii) and continue to
integrate protection and reform into the new political structures and
covenants.

Nimble Books (publisher of Fallen Walls and Fallen Towers (2010))
anticipates releasing the hard cover book four weeks after final copy is
received.

Outline of Chapters:

1. The dynastic dictatorships and monarchies of Egypt, Libya, Bahrain,
   Jordan etc. have become too fragile to survive protest and necessary reform.
   Stable, resilient nation-states are possible for a number of Middle Eastern
   countries; the book offers a prescription for how to do this.

2. Chapter two outlines the transition from dictatorship to republic.  This
   chapter will be finished closest to publication, interpreting the most
   recent events in the Middle East, emphasizing prescription, however, not
   prediction.

3. Chapter three details dos and don¹ts of coalition-building among varied,
   competing and diverse interests. These include the need for avoiding ³winner
   takes all² in emergent democracies of the Middle East. Minority voices and
   populations must beheard and protected and the nation-states that emerge
   must contends with dissent and offer redress of grievances.

4. The fourth chapter considers how competing political interests and
   parties can define platforms in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, etc. Who are the key
   factions and players in any given country and what compromises can address
   the competing demands of various interests.

5. Chapter five is a literature review outline of existing scholarship on so
   called durable totalitarian states (or dynastic dictatorships) with the main
   point being why inherited repressive states will be unable to maintain a
   white-knuckle grip on power.

6. The rigidity of the extremely repressive state is ³brittle² and no amount
   of power can indefinitely survive public protest; ultimately people
   experience such anguish that they become radicalized and will suffer even
   death stand rather than submit to subjugation.

7. Chapter seven presents an overview of the post-colonial aftermath and the
   post economic ³liberalization² aftermath in several of the countries
   examined.

8. Chapter eight explains how to end corruption and improve economic
   productivity in the Middle East: including a benign propaganda campaign,
   like that conducted for Benjamin Franklin for productivity and sobriety
   through Poor Richard¹s Almanac. Also central will are reforms in education
   and rights of women and targeted economic development programs subsidized by
   other interdependent economic partners of the world.

9. How industrialized countries of the world can promote development in the
   new republics, and how wealth pillaged by the oligarchs can be re-acquired
   and transfused into the young democracies.

10. Why the military of Egypt and other countries must be left intact, at
    least initially, and can be used for justice and stability, both economic
    and moral. This is a realm in which the US military can be supportive; on
    the other hand, the people of these nations know that the US military has
    been deeply intertwined with Middle Eastern militaries for decades with
    results that have benefited U.S. national security at the expense of
    political reform.

11. How to design constitutions for ³resilient² Middle Eastern
    nation-states. What the best models for constitutions for postcolonial
    countries that cope with power-sharing, dissent, secession, crisis). This
    chapter relies on the idea that the constitution as an ³operating system²
    that copes with power-sharing by diverse groups, multiculturalism, and
    peaceful change through discourse, not force. How to offer a ³blueprint for
    action² that avoids the trap of having the U.S. again support dictators that
    privilege the elite and work only for their own (oil). There should be very
    little intervention by the U.S. other than providing a scaffolding and
    getting out of the way, militarily and otherwise.

12. The penultimate chapter concerns Israel, recapping of what led up to the
    treaty signed by Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, and what is necessary for
    more peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors. Despots have stayed
    in power by holding up the threat of Islamic take-over, while distracting
    their populations with hatred of the U.S. and Israel. What are the
    substantive interests of emergent polities with regard to other countries of
    their region?

13. The conclusion will summarize how a critical base of countries of the
    Middle East is ready for transition, followed by elections,
    constitution-writing, and stable republics.

Scholarly sources should give only the author¹s name and a year date so that
the flow of the narrative is not interrupted, as below:

Thomas P.M. Barnett (2004) ,former professor of warfare analysis published
an article in Esquire advancing a geographical analysis of the globe¹s most
unstable  places  and categorizing some nation-states as the ³disconnected
gap,² (comprised of the Middle East, much of Africa, and other poor and
unstable countries) in contrast to the ³operating core,² (comprised of the
U.S., U.K., Europe, China and others that play by ³the rules²).

With the book cited above being:

Barnett, Thomas P. M. 2004. The Pentagon¹s New Map: War and Peace in the
Twenty-first Century. New York: Putnam Publishing Group, Inc.

Resilient Nation States of the Middle East will hybridize scholarly and
popular tone, advancing serious ideas grounded in existing research and
writing, without footnotes or endnotes in the individual chapters. Citations
will be collected in a final section of cited and bibliographic sources like
this:

Annan, Kofi. 2000/2004. ³The role of the state in the age of globalisation.²
The Globalization Reader, eds. John Boli and Frank Lechner, 2nd ed. Hoboken:
Wiley-Blackwell.

This approach impels us to collaborate and integrate the ideas of the
collaborative project.