Drawing maps using Stata

Don't need expensive specialized GIS anymore, just Stata.

http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/graphics/tmap.html

A good cross-platform text editor

I use both Linux and Windows and have been searching for a good cross-platform text editor for a long time. Now this small piece software called "MadEdit" seems to be very promising. It is cross-platform, unicode enabled, free, and open source. Check it out at:

http://madedit.sourceforge.net/

A good new book on Monte Carlo methods

Title: Simulation and Monte Carlo: With applications in finance and MCMC
Author: J. S. Dagpunar
Publisher: Wiley

This new book seems really cool and I will try to remember to buy it next time I visit US.

http://as.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470854952.html

Maple, a good tool to teach maximum likelihood method

The new Maple has very convenient tool built-in to demonstrate the process of maximum likelihood estimation in an intuitive way. Unlike software like Stata, SAS, or Matlab, where the computation is done numerically under the surface, Maple solves the problem analytically with the whole process showing up on the screen. This way, students can clearly see what is happening: how to get log likelihood function, how to solve it , what the Hessian matrix looks like, etc.

Very good teaching tool.

Multiple imputation with growth modeling

Several days ago, a new user-contributed Stata module "MIM" appears in the Stata software repository. This module can automate the process of combing estimates from multiply imputed data sets and calculating confidence intervals for a wide array of Stata estimation commands, including "XTMIXED". This means that the complete process of imputation, estimation, and post-estimation can be done without leaving Stata.

Multiple imputation with longitudinal data

Have been working with Sarah on revising our comparative paper. One problem we need to solve in this revision is the presence of large amount of missing values. I use "ICE", a user contributed module in Stata to do the imputation. Unfortunately, the built-in estimation procedures does not include "XTMIXED" or "GLLAMM". I have to import the imputed data sets into Mplus and do the estimation there.

A list of survey data that measure well-being

Here is a list of (US) survey data that measure well-being: http://www.nber.org/~kling/surveys/

Latent Growth Model and Repeated Measurement

I had a brief conversation with Linda Adair on the past Wednesday about the issues of catch-up growth. She mentioned that she would have done the analysis differently, had she known the method of latent growth modeling methodology in the 1990s. The idea of standardizing the measurement and calculating the difference score does not make much sense.

I am thinking about doing a Monte Carlo simulation to demonstrate the relationship between two sets of relationships: that revealed by latent growth model, and that revealed by standardized difference scores.

Inequality dropped

Alas, since the mechanism of inequality-obesity has not been fully developed in the literature, and it will be too ambitious for us to tackle this issue in this small project, have to drop it for now.

Will get it back, soon.