Monday, June 04, 2007
stata 10 ships june 25
Just announced! I always dreamed of having a midnight release party for a new edition of Stata, but I don't think this time will work either. Anyway, the headline feature of the upgrade is a full-blown graphics editor, which if they implemented it right could just about make up for all the cool things one can do in R (exemplified blogwise nowhere better than here).
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7 comments:
Very cool -- and there are major improvements on the estimation side for this panel data dork, too -- but the upgrade price is stiff! Yikes!
Well, at least two of your readers HAVE had a midnight Stata release party, complete with party favors and full academic regalia. And people think stats geeks don't know how to have a good time!
Tom,
You can do more advanced panel data analysis in R (which is free). Get this book for reference:
http://books.google.com/books?id=N3WeyHFbHLQC&dq=mixed+effects+s+plus&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=pQbMRDqJo5&sig=XYske0lt0YYLTFNTvAxDhZhqB_E
I am in grad school (now with a 9 month old) and cannot afford upgrading to each new version of SAS or STATA every two years, so I spent time studying R and now I use R for all serious data analysis. I do use SPSS for reading raw data files.
It is the open source version of S and it is developed by a core team of well-regarded statisticians. Econometricians are now getting into R.
John Fox has written a great introduction to R for social scientists. I know a few sociologist bloggers certainly use R.
Charles: I didn't know you've had a Stata midnight release party!
TomV: Thanks for the pointer. I recall the virtues of R being discussed around the time of the Stata 9 release, and ought to take the hint. If nothing else, since I don't want to see what might happen if I told my wife that I'd dropped $2500 on a Stata/MP license for the homestead (the non-academic pricing is insane), it would give me a legal option for home use.
$2500 for Stata? Holy moly. I mean, I _like_ Stata, but do I _like like_ it?
And the graph editor does actually look pretty useful, especially for those days when I can't remember what number represents "diamond" point style in an R plot. (pch=18, for reference)
Alan: LOL. But that's non-academic pricing of technical software for you.
I'd be fascinated to get an inside view of the price discrimination problems. StataCorp's marketers presumably figure that a commercial customer that *needs* Stata 10 won't balk at the price, since it's just a few billable hours' markup gone to StataCorp. OTOH, the stiff upgrade pricing probably will keep us on Stata 9 until a pressing need for Stata 10+ arises.
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