Econometrics Toolbox for Matlab

The Econometrics Toolbox for Matlab has just been updated. This is a quite comprehensive applied econometrics toolkit and I found it to be very useful.

Difference in differences

The DID estimator is a useful tool to obtain a more fine-grained estimate of famine exposure on a variety of health and demographic outcomes, as long as the famine severity measure is good. However, in my case (fecundity), the provincial-level excess famine mortality level does not see to work well. I suspect that the provincial-level mortality measure is too crude and may not be able to adequately reflect individual's nutritional status.

Making Simple R Package

This post explains how to create a simple R package that contains R and FORTRAN source code.

The "apsrtable" is getting better

Now we have both "memisc" and "apsrtable" for producing publication-ready tables from model results.

BUGS language: strength and weakness

Here is an informative introduction to the strength and weakness of the BUGS language in conducting Bayesian data analysis. Since my analysis often utilize large data (tens of thousands, even millions), BUGS may not be a viable option in many cases. I hope the soon-to-come new version of JAGS can overcome some of the weaknesses mentioned in Gelman's post.

Stata 11

Got my Stata 11 today, was a little disappointed because the new program editor feature is not available on Linux platform.

I like the new multiple imputation feature though.

Measuring the length of time to run a function

This post describes how to time the run time of a R function.

r-sig-mixed-models FAQ

This is good info.

Google and Apple...

I like this guy's arguments.

Here comes Linux's iPad clones

Linux-based IPad clone will soon emerge and will dominate the market, based on this post.

Solidot

Here is an interesting news site (Chinese language).

Dell Mini Tablet

This Android-based tablet from Dell looks interesting.

Another table making package for R

This looks very promising.

Google public data explorer

This looks interesting.

OpenBUGS has a new home

Looks like OpenBUGS now has a new home! And now the command line tools can actually run on my Linux box.

Microsoft' digital journal

If it is true, then it is much more appealing to Apple's Ipad.

Statistics books with code

I like all statistics books with computer codes, like this one.

GLMM revisted

A short while ago, I reported some discrepancies between the results produced by "lme4" and other R packages as well as Stata. Today I upgraded to the most recent version of "lme4a" and re-ran my model. The error of false convergence disappeared and the new results are very much in line with other packages.

I am glad that the problem eventually got sorted out.

For this version, the adaptive GH quadrature has not been implemented yet; so the only option to estimate a GLMM is laplace transformation.

AUCTeX

Glad to find out that AUCTeX has a new version out . Now the default PDF viewer has been changed from xpdf to evince.

Several screenshots

After some tweaking, I finally got Eclipse+StatET working the way I want. The first figure shows a running R session; the second figure shows the maximized running R session. The following shortcut keys are very helpful:

1. Ctrl + A: select what you to run;
2. Ctrl + R + R: run the selected program then go to the R console;
3. Ctrl + M: maximize the R console;
4. Ctril + T + 0: run Sweave of pgfSweave.

I like the way Eclipse organize the project and windows. 

Creating Beamer Handouts with Notes

This post provides some very helpful information. Unfortunately, the package is not designed to incorporate author's notes into the printed outline; instead, it is designed to print blank outline pages so the audience can jot down their own notes there.