Python 3

Python 3 has been released: http://www.python.org. It will be interesting how well it is received by the majority of Python programmer.

Automatic table making using Stata

Definitive guidelines:

1. http://repec.org/bocode/e/estout/
2. http://ideas.repec.org/c/boc/bocode/s456977.html
   

LaTeX to other format

Here is a solution: http://pastcounts.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/converting-latex-to-openoffice/

Here is another one: http://nileshbansal.blogspot.com/2007/12/latex-to-openofficeword.html

And this one: http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/

A summary: http://www.tug.org/utilities/texconv/textopc.html

For equations: http://latexinword.sourceforge.net/

Cool Fortran blog

Here is a cool Fortran-related blog: http://www.fesb.hr/~psarajce/limeblog.html

AD Model Builder

The ADMB team seems to be open-sourcing their nonlinear statistical library, AD Model Builder. I took a quick look at the document and have mixed feeling. On the one hand, the software is strong in modeling capability; on the other hand, it works at very low level and use C++ as the modeling language. Unless it can solve important problems that other packages such as Stata, R, aML can not, I don't see a C++ based modeling environment gains popularity among social sciencites any time soon.

Anyway, it is another fun toy to play with.

http://admb-project.org/

Buffer tab in Emacs

I follow instructions in this post (http://amitp.blogspot.com/2007/04/emacs-buffer-tabs.html) to get a nice-looking and functional buffer tab in Emacs. Looks good:

There is still no cure model facitility in R

I remember a while ago I posted a message to R mailing list asking about the cure model (long-term survivor model) using R, somebody pointed me to: http://post.queensu.ca/~pengp/software.html

But the author does not provide source code and there is no Linux binary. These are the same options when I was in graduate school in the early 2000s. By contrast, now Stata has "strsmix" and "strsnmix" to do both mixture version and non mixture version of the cure model, both are very well documented.

SciViews-K does not work with the new KomodoEdit

I just updated my installation of KomodoEdit from 4 to 5, and SciViews-K stopped working. This is a bit frustration, but I have not been using it much anyway. It would be nice if the author can fix the problem soon.

Stata equavalence to Zelig

The R package Zelig can generate meaningful results such as predicted value, expected value, first difference, etc. from a wide variety of statistical procedures via simulation or bootstrapping. The Stata module "prvalue" and "prgen" seem to do at least a subset of what Zelig can do. Interestingly, the authors did not mention Gary King's work on Zelig and "Clarify".

However, it does not seem to work with mixed effect models.