I just want to take a moment to plug Statalist. I’m a member and I hope to convince you to join Statalist, too, but even if I don’t succeed, you need to know about the web-based Statalist Archives because they’re a great resource for finding answers to questions about Stata, and you don’t have to join Statalist to access them.

Statalist’s Archives are found at http://www.stata.com/statalist/archive/, or you can click on “Statalist archives” on the right of this blog page, under Links.

Once at the Archives page, you can click on a year and month to get an idea of the flavor of Statalist. More importantly, you can search the archives. The search is Powered by Google and works well for highly specific, directed inquiries. For generic searches such as random numbers or survival analysis, however, I prefer to go to Advanced Search and ask that the results be sorted by date instead of relevance. It’s usually the most recent postings that are the most interesting, and by-date results are listed in just that order.

Anyway, the next time you are puzzling over something in Stata, I suggest that Read more…

When Stata first started back in 1985, communicating with users–well, back then they were potential users because we didn’t have any users yet–was nearly impossible.

From the beginning, we were very modern. Back in 1985, there were competing packages, but no one (not even me) expected personal computers to replace the mainframe. Back then, about the best that could be said about the available statistical packages is that they worked (sometimes) for some problems. What made Stata different was our belief and attitude that personal computers could actually be better than the mainframe for some problems. That in itself was a radical idea! In the mainstream, mainframe computer world, there was a popular saying: Little computers for little minds.

And we’ve stayed modern since then. Stata was (in 1999) the first statistical package to have online updating and an automated, modern, Internet way to handle user-written code. Modern Statas not only have that, but can use datasets directly off the web. But we have fallen behind! It’s 2010, and StataCorp doesn’t have a corporate blog!

Well, we do now.

Well, that may not be the most exciting announcement we’ve ever made. But our blog will be authored by the same people who develop Stata, support Stata, and yes, sell Stata. It will be useful, and it might be more entertaining than you suspect. If it is, that will be because of the people writing it.