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Archive for 2012

Building complicated expressions the easy way

7 February 2012 1 comment

Have you every wanted to make an “easy” calculation–say, after fitting a model–and gotten lost because you just weren’t sure where to find the degrees of freedom of the residual or the standard error of the coefficient? Have you ever been in the midst of constructing an “easy” calculation and was suddenly unsure just what e(df_r) really was? I have a solution.

It’s called Stata’s expression builder. You can get to it from the display dialog (Data->Other Utilities->Hand Calculator) Read more…

Categories: Statistics Tags: ,

The next leap second will be on June 30th, maybe

18 January 2012 2 comments

Leap seconds are the extra seconds inserted every so often to keep precise atomic clocks better synchronized with the rotation of the Earth. Scheduled for June 30th is the extra second 23:59:60 inserted between 23:59:59 and 00:00:00. Or maybe not.

Tomorrow or Friday a vote may be held at the International Telecommuncation Union (ITU) meeting in Geneva to abolish the leap second from the definition of UTC (Coordinated Universial Time). Which would mean StataCorp would not have to post an update to Stata to keep the %tC format working correctly. Read more…

Categories: Data Management Tags: ,