stata 10 graphics: first impression review

(percentage runs and percentage wins for mlb teams. the vertical distance from the regression line can be thought of as the extent to which a team is over/underachieving in terms of wins given its runs scored/runs against)

I made a toy graph this morning, firstly to celebrate the Yankees underachievement given that we are at the halfway point of the season, but secondly to try out Stata's new graphics.* It has changed the graphics menus all around to take advantage of its now allowing child dialogs, although in my opinion it ends up overusing them. If I had a choice between the Stata 10 and Stata 9 menus, I'd probably choose the Stata 9 menus, making this feel not exactly like an upgrade, but that could reflect more my familiarity with Stata 9. The big upgrade, anyway, is the Graphics Editor, but it ended up being not intuitive enough that it clear I would have to do more to figure it out than the simple playing I was hoping for. So the graph above doesn't even end up using it.

In a nutshell: The graphics editor was billed as the big reason for somebody who doesn't have reason to use the new statistical features of Stata 10 to upgrade. My first impression is that it's not enough. I've become pretty used to importing graphs into Illustrator or even just Office and editing them there anyway. I'll let you know if my opinion changes.

* My belief is that you cannot honestly be a liberal and root for the Yankees in any kind of serious way. I'm not kidding. At most you can be one of those untrustworthy liberals, the sort who espouses basic liberal values but then goes and cares more about the fate of pets than children in poverty.

the boy detective at work

I love the folks at Stata, but right there in the Stata manual:

As always, Stata is 100% compatible with the previous releases...

If only this was true. Instead, when Stata goes to a new version, my collaborator and I have to go through and figure out what parts of our programs have been broken by changes. I've spent the last two hours trying to figure out a bug that has been caused by a change to their -asmprobit- command (alternative-specific multinomial probit, which to my knowledge has never actually been used by a sociologist, and I actually think that's just as well). Whatever the problem is here, it is so ridiculously subtle it is putting my boy detective skills to the test.

I've got a lead, but I don't think I'm going to get this solved before I have to leave to meet people for this Boston Harbor Islands adventure today. Ugh. I'm already pushing it time-wise (if you are wondering why I'm writing a blog post then, it's that I'm waiting on Stata to execute something).

Apropos of nothing, last night I heard Kiss's song "Beth." I've always wondered: do you think the guy is really not going home to his beloved because his band needs to practice? Or, do you think that's just an excuse he's using because he's really out tomcatting around? He is a guy in a metal band, after all.

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).