Ever since I moved to the US in 1996, I've been reading one Romanian daily newspaper or another, with titles changing as their web presence waxed and waned and as my own preferences shifted over time. As it happens, a significant part of my livelihood has come lately from helping some eighty-odd American daily newspapers [...]

If you've got £900 to spare and an inclination to spend a lovely September week at the London School of Tropical Medicine, lucky you. I'd appreciate a first-hand account if you go. StataCorp does what it can, but I'm sure the more the merrier. My own first attempt at contributing happened this May, when I [...]

Of course if you are on the Statalist you already know. Details here. New features include a proper editor with syntax highlighting, full pdf documentation, support for interaction terms typed directly in your estimation expression -- the lack of which used to be a reason to prefer R -- and a full kit of object-oriented [...]

If you collaborate with people who use other statistical software with proprietary data file formats, you will find Stat/Transfer useful for converting between Stata and said software. How to do that using the Stat/Transfer GUI is easy enough to figure out. But you can also run Stat/Transfer from within Stata. If you are on a [...]

Occasionally a need arises to move things between computers. You might, for example, be getting about 20 gigabytes of data per week, use it to re-run your model so your parameter estimates stay up to date, and then you must make room for next week's batch. For this sort of job you probably have a [...]

A couple of days ago I showed how you can use logical operators inside arithmetic expressions. The point of that post was that if you had three variables, called say _var1, _var2 and _var3, then you could build another variable, call it _var4, that counted row-wise their non-zero instances, like so: gen _var4=(_var1!=0)+(_var2!=0)+(_var3!=0) This was [...]

If you were looking up something Stata-related and Google sent you here, you may or may not be in the right place. What I know for sure is that you should definitely join the Statalist. I've benefited lots over the years from lurking there. Here's the latest example: somebody asked yesterday about an easy way to [...]

I came across a data set with some variables in it that recorded actual measurements, so their values could be zero or higher. Then a need arose to quickly look up how many of these variables would have recorded anything -- in effect, separating the yes/no part from the how much -- and adding the [...]

What can a Stata user do with a Samba server? Pretty much the same thing you would do with any computer. My Stata is installed on my Windows PC. Now Samba allows me to store either do-files or data on the remote FreeBSD server and access them easily. Suppose that the remote box were called [...]

Graphs are tricky beasts in every programming environment. There are so many ways in which you might want them that any command for drawing them will have to be laden with options and it will probably run over numerous lines. Stata, from version 8 onward, has done a wonderful job of taking the pain out [...]