The 2011 Stata Conference will be held on July 14 and 15 at the University of Chicago’s Gleacher Center. I’ve enjoyed meeting many enthusiastic Stata users at previous Stata Conferences, and I’m looking forward to seeing both familiar and new faces this year in Chicago.
The organizing committee recently posted a call for presentations on Statalist. That posting is included below. Read more…
Excuse me, but I’m going to toot Stata’s horn.
I got an email from Nicholas Cox (an Editor of the Stata Journal) yesterday. He said he was writing something for the Stata Journal and wanted the details on how we calculated a^b. He was focusing on examples such as (-8)^(1/3), where Stata produces a missing value rather than -2, and he wanted to know if our calculation of that was exp((1/3)*ln(-8)). He didn’t say where he was going, but I answered his question.
I have rather a lot to say about this.
Nick’s supposition was correct, in this particular case, and for most values of a and b, Stata calculates a^b as exp(b*ln(a)). In the case of a=-8 and b=1/3, ln(-8)==., and thus (-8)^(1/3)==.. Read more…
Most software stores dates and times numerically, as durations from some sentinel date, but they differ on the sentinel date and on the units in which the duration is stored. Stata stores dates as the number of days since 01jan1960, and datetimes as the number of milliseconds since 01jan1960 00:00:00.000. January 3, 2011 is stored as 18,630, and 2pm on January 3 is stored as 1,609,682,400,000. Other packages use different choices for bases and units.
It sometimes happens that you need to process in Stata data imported from other software and end up with a numerical variable recording a date or datetime in the other software’s encoding. It is usually possible to adjust the numeric date or datetime values to the sentinel date and units that Stata uses. Below are conversion rules for SAS, SPSS, R, Excel, and Open Office. Read more…