Thanks to Kit Baum, the US county boundary map files have been updated. The
new uscounty_fips.dta file contains the coordinates of the county centroids,
so that labels can be attached to county maps.
Also, there were two small problems with the previous map file:
1. The longitudinal coordinates for Alaska's Aleutian Islands (
http://www.inforain.org/maparchive/bsai.gif ) start off negative and become
positive, causing the western end of the Aleutian Islands to appear to be
off the east coast of the US.
2. The boundary data for the Hawaii Islands also included the "Northwestern
Hawaiian Islands (NWHI), a remote chain of small islands and atolls that
stretches for more than 1,000 nautical miles (nm) northwest of the main
Hawaiian Islands" (
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/02hawaii/welcome.html ). This
caused the map of the Hawaiian Islands to be very small.
In both cases, the offending islands were deleted.
Since the files are ancillary, one must first -net desc usmaps2- followed by
-net get usmaps2, replace-. The do-file gives several examples of using the
boundary files.
Scott
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