I wrote about precision here and here, but they were pretty technical.

“Great,” coworkers inside StataCorp said to me, “but couldn’t you explain these issues in a way that doesn’t get lost in the details of how computers store binary and maybe, just maybe, write about floats and doubles from a user’s perspective instead of programmer’s perspective?”

“Mmmm,” I said clearly.

Later, when I tried, I liked the result. It contains new material, too. What follows is what I now wish I had written first. I’d would have still written the other two postings, but as technical appendices. Read more…

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…

Multiple-key merges arise when more than one variable is required to uniquely identify the observations in your data. In Merging data, part 1, I discussed single-key merges such as

        . merge 1:1 personid using ...

In that discussion, each observation in the dataset could be uniquely identified on the basis of a single variable. In panel or longitudinal datasets, there are multiple observations on each person or thing and to uniquely identify the observations, we need at least two key variables, such as 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…

Merging concerns combining datasets on the same observations to produce a result with more variables. We will call the datasets one.dta and two.dta.

When it comes to combining datasets, the alternative to merging is appending, which is combining datasets on the same variables to produce a result with more observations. Appending datasets is not the subject for today. But just to fix ideas, appending looks like this: Read more…

When most people first think about software designed to run on multiple cores such as Stata/MP, they think to themselves, two cores, twice as fast; four cores, four times as fast. They appreciate that reality will somehow intrude so that two cores won’t really be twice as fast as one, but they imagine the intrusion is something like friction and nothing that an intelligently placed drop of oil can’t improve.

In fact, something inherent intrudes. In any process to accomplish something—even physical processes—some parts may be able to to be performed in parallel, but there are invariably parts that just have to be performed one after the other. Anyone who cooks knows that you sometimes add some ingredients, cook a bit, and then add others, and cook some more. So it is, too, with calculating x_t = f(x_t-1) for t=1 to 100 and t₀=1. Depending on the form of f(), sometimes there’s no alternative to calculating x₁ = f(x₀), then calculating x₂ = f(x₁), and so on. Read more…

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.

And if you’re interested in geocoding to obtain latitudes and longitudes from human-readable addresses or locations, see Adam Ozimek’s “Computers are taking our jobs: Stata nerds only edition” over at Modeled Behavior and see the related Stata Journal article “Stata utilities for geocoding and generating travel time and travel distance information” by Adam Ozimek and Daniel Miles.

See this video, by Vi Hart:

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…

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