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…
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…