StataCorp invites you to stop by our booth, 404, at JSM 2011, July 31 – August 3, in Miami Beach, FL. StataCorp staff and developers will be on hand to answer any questions you have about Stata, from statistics to programming to licensing. You can also register to win a copy of quad-core Stata/MP.

StataCorp is also presenting three continuing education technology workshops at JSM 2011: Read more…

Between now and the end of the year, the annual Stata Conference in the United States will take place along with five other Stata meetings in countries around the world.

Stata conferences and meetings feature talks by both Stata users and Stata developers and provide an opportunity to help shape the future of Stata development by interacting with and providing feedback directly to StataCorp personnel.

The talks range from longer presentations by invited speakers to shorter talks demonstrating the use of Stata in a variety of fields. Some talks are statistical in nature while others focus on data management, graphics, or programming in Stata. New enhancements to Stata created both by users and by StataCorp are often featured in talks.

The full schedule of upcoming meetings is Read more…

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…

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…

David Drukker and I just got back from the Italian Stata Users Group meeting in Bologna, arranged by TStat, the Stata distributor for Italy. It was wonderful, in part because of the beauty of Bologna, and the tasty food. The scientific committee and TStat did great jobs of selecting papers and organizing a smooth, interesting meeting.

The first day of the meeting had talks by users and StataCorp. There was good variety, with topics like investigating disease clustering, classification of prehistoric artifacts, small-area analysis, and the careful interpretation of marginal effects. This year, all the talks were in English — and it was once again amazing to see how well people can present in a second (or third) language. If you would like to see the slides which accompanied the talks, you can find them at http://www.stata.com/meeting/italy10/abstracts.html.

Recently, I have been thinking about how to interpret results from nonlinear models, so I found Maarten Buis’s talk on “Extracting effects from non-linear models” and David’s talk on “Estimating partial effects using margins in Stata 11” really useful. Both Maarten and David have thought carefully about this problem and each of them presented great introductions and easy to apply solutions. What is interesting is they favor different solutions. Maarten leaned more towards estimating and interpreting ratios that did not vary with the covariates. David recommended using the potential outcome framework which can be implemented using the margins command. The similarities and differences in these two talks made them even more informative.

As is typical for the Italian meetings, the second day had two training sessions, one given by David on programming your own estimation command in Stata (starting from the basics of Stata programming), and one given by Laura Antolini from the Università di Milano Bicocca on competing risks in survival analysis. Both courses were booked full.

I was a Stata user for 15 years before I started working at Stata, and the most fun parts of the meeting are the same now as when I was a user: the wishes and grumbles followed by the conference dinner. The wishes and grumbles session is always interesting; it shows the wide variety of approaches to using Stata. The conference dinner is always fun, because of the conversation over excellent food. In Italy, of course, the food is beyond excellent; strolling through Bologna on marble sidewalks under colonnades while talking statistics, programming and Stata made the evening, if in a intellectual fashion.

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…

The 2011 Mexican Stata Users Group meeting has been scheduled for May 12, 2011.

The Mexican Stata Users Group meeting is a one-day international conference about the use of Stata in a wide breadth of fields and environments, mixing theory and practice. The bulk of the conference is made up of selected submitted presentations. Together with the keynote address and a featured presentation by a member of StataCorp’s technical staff, these sessions provide fertile ground for learning about statistics and Stata. All users are encouraged to submit abstracts for possible presentations.

For the full meeting details, submission guidelines, and registration information, please see www.stata.com/meeting/mexico11/.

Scientific committee:

Alfonso Miranda (chair)
Institute of Education, University of London
Email: [email protected]

Armando Sánchez Vargas
Institute for Economic Research, National Autonomous University of Mexico
Email: [email protected]

Graciela Teruel Belismelis
Economics Department, Iberoamerican University
Email: [email protected]

Logistics organizer:

MultiON Consulting SA de CV, distributor of Stata in Mexico and Central America
Victoria Leon
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +52 (55) 5559 4050 x 160

StataCorp will have a booth in the exhibit hall at the American Public Health Association’s Annual Meeting & Exposition.

APHA’s 2010 meeting will be in Denver, Colorado, from November 6 through 10. For more information, visit www.apha.org/meetings/highlights/.

Stata representatives, including Roberto G. Gutierrez, Director of Statistics, will be available at the Stata booth to answer your questions about all things Stata. Stop by booth #1603 to visit with the people who develop and support the software and to get 20% off your purchase of Stata Press books and Stata Journal subscriptions.

Also make plans to attend our brief seminar, “Stata 11: Statistical Software for the Health Sciences”, led by Roberto G. Gutierrez. The workshop will be held Monday, November 8, at 4:00 PM in the APHA Exhibitor Theatre, booth #2093.