Speaking Stata: How to Repeat Yourself without going Mad

How to Protect Yourself without Perfect Shredding

Erasing old data and keys is an important capability of honest parties in cryptographic protocols. It is useful in many settings, including proactive security in the presence of a mobile adversary, adaptive security in the presence of an adaptive adversary, forward security, and intrusion resilience. Some of these settings, such as achieving proactive security, is provably impossible without so...

Speaking Stata: Graphing distributions

Graphing univariate distributions is central to both statistical graphics, in general, and Stata’s graphics, in particular. Now that Stata 8 is out, a review of official and user-written commands is timely. The emphasis here is on going beyond what is obviously and readily available, with pointers to minor and major trickery and various user-written commands. For plotting histogram-like display...

How to change the world without ruining it or yourself.

How to Avoid Yourself

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Speaking Stata: Problems with tables, Part I

Tables in some form or another are part and parcel of data management and analysis. The main general-purpose tabulation commands, tabulate, table, and tabstat, are reviewed and compared. When these do not provide a tabulation solution, one key strategy is to prepare the material for tabulation as a set of variables, after which the table itself can be presented with tabdisp or list. This is the...