Recently, I’ve been using Stata’s -shp2dta- command to convert some shapefiles to stata format, grabbing Lat/Lon data and merging into another dataset. There were several compressed shapefiles I wanted to download contained in a directory from the web. I could manually download each file and uncompress each one but that would be time consuming. Also, [...]

I rented a movie from Blockbuster the other day (Clash of the Titans, which I’d give 3 stars) and I was reminded of this image below that I originally saw on the web here. Click the image to see the full version. I also overheard the following conversation by a couple of teens in the [...]

Pop Economics has developed the hilarious* video below that takes a jab at the gold bugs. The video isn’t exactly of Oscar winning quality but it’s short and worth a quick view. * hilarious for an economist == somewhat amusing for the other 99.8% of the population

Today the Stata Corp. blog outlined a new feature introduced to Stata 11.1 that allows one to connect to an ODBC database without setting up a DSN. This is a nice addition and simplifies the process of loading ODBC data for those one-off projects. The blog post explains how to connect to database running on [...]

Although MySQL is normally thought of as the relational database management system that many websites are built on, I’ve found it to be pretty useful for many non-web tasks. Some advantages to using MySQL is that it’s cross platform so I can use it on my Linux and Windows computers and the availability of the [...]