odfWeave

The idea underlying Sweave is very appealing: you can compose a complete research paper with equations, tables, figures without manual intervention (copy, paste, adjust margin, etc.).

The package "odfWeave" extends this idea from LaTeX to OpenOffice. I just gave it a test-drive, and it rocks!

demogR

As a demographer, it is really exciting to find a toolkit designed for demographic analysis: http://cran.stat.ucla.edu/

This is a short paper explaining the usage of it: http://www.jstatsoft.org/v22/i10/paper

How to "reshape" a data set in R

Here is a helpful post explaining how to do "reshape" a data, a convenient feature in Stata, using R: http://www.statmethods.net/management/reshape.html

Zelig

Gary King's crew is doing some really nice work with Zelig. The first goal is to standardize statistical analysis syntax in R, which is very important. It also has the ability to analyze multiply imputed data, to simulate posterior distribution, etc.

Keep up the good work, it looks really promising.

The "per thousand" symbol

In OpenOffice, the "per thousand" symbol can be input as equation or special character. The special character version can usually be found under the "general punctuation" in most fonts.

Online mindmapping using mind42.com

Looks promising. Here is a snapshot:

Here is how I choose between Stata, Mplus and aML

in dealing with a specific research question:

1. Use Stata (or R) for routine statistical analysis, they are getting better and better;
2. Use Mplus for multilevel Cox regression; the results can be compared with that from Stata or R;
3. Use aML to handle multiple clock situation (i.e. APC model).
   

Have some fun with GreenFoot

A agent-based simulation environment and a good teaching tool for java programming: http://www.greenfoot.org/index.html