Jim Hufford, Esq. had his first Stata lesson: “This is going to be awesome when I understand what all those little letters and things mean.”
Along those lines—awesome—Jim may want to see these nice Stata scatterplots from the “wannabe economists of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva” at Rigotnomics.
If you want to graph data onto maps using Stata—and see another awesome graph—see Mitch Abdon’s “Fun with maps in Stata” over at the Stata Daily.
This link was passed on to me by my friend Marcello. I’ve been bold enough to make up words such as eigenaxis and eigenpoint, but it takes real courage to suggest redefining π, even when you’re right!
After seeing the video, you can go here and here to learn more about what is being proposed.
Don’t click on comments until you’ve seen the video. Ms. Hart does a better job presenting the proposal than any of us can.
Last time, I showed you a way to graph and to think about matrices. This time, I want to apply the technique to eigenvalues and eigenvectors. The point is to give you a picture that will guide your intuition, just as it was previously.
Before I go on, several people asked after reading part 1 for the code I used to generate the graphs. Here it is, both for part 1 and part 2: matrixcode.zip. Read more…
I want to show you a way of picturing and thinking about matrices. The topic for today is the square matrix, which we will call A. I’m going to show you a way of graphing square matrices, although we will have to limit ourselves to the 2 x 2 case. That will be, as they say, without loss of generality. The technique I’m about to show you could be used with 3 x 3 matrices if you had a better 3-dimensional monitor, and as will be revealed, it could be used on 3 x 2 and 2 x 3 matrices, too. If you had more imagination, we could use the technique on 4 x 4, 5 x 5, and even higher-dimensional matrices. Read more…
In my previous posting last week, I explained how computers store binary floating-point numbers, how Stata’s %21x display format displays with fidelity those binary floating-point numbers, how %21x can help you uncover bugs, and how %21x can help you understand behaviors that are not bugs even though they are surpising to us base-10 thinkers. The point is, it is sometimes useful to think in binary, and with %21x, thinking in binary is not difficult.
This week, I want to discuss double versus float precision. Read more…
%21x is a Stata display format, just as are %f, %g, %9.2f, %td, and so on. You could put %21x on any variable in your dataset, but that is not its purpose. Rather, %21x is for use with Stata’s display command for those wanting to better understand the accuracy of the calculations they make. We use %21x frequently in developing Stata. Read more…
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…
As everyone knows, I am a big proponent of Statalist, and not just for selfish reasons, although those reasons play a role. Nearly every member of the technical staff at StataCorp — me included — are members of Statalist. Even when we don’t participate in a particular thread, we do pay attention. The discussions on Statalist play an important role concerning Stata’s development.
Statalist is a discussion group, not just a question-and-answer forum. Nonetheless, new members often use it to obtain answers to questions and that works because those questions sometimes become gist for subsequent discussions. In those cases, the questioners not only get answers, they get much more. Read more…
I gave a 1.5 hour talk on Mata at the 2010 UK Stata Users Group Meeting in September. The slides are available in pdf form here. The talk was well received, which of course pleased me. If you’re interested in Mata, I predict you will find the slides useful even if you didn’t attend the meeting. Read more…