Thanks to Kit Baum, the -circular- package on SSC
has been updated. This package for circular statistics
(for variables measured on the circle as outcome space,
such as compass directions, times of day, etc.) requires
Stata 8. -circular- now supersedes the rather old
-circstat-, except that copies of -circstat- will remain
accessible for anybody interested who is using Stata 7
or earlier. A lot has been added to this package,
even since I gave a talk in Berlin about it a month
ago, and other developments will also appear soon.
(For all that not many Stata users appear interested
in circular statistics, this is its author's favourite
package.)
The package description obtained by
. ssc desc circular
is fairly terse, partly because the package
is centred on a helpfile circular.hlp. That is
. help circular
or better
. whelp circular
fires up an introduction with links to the
individual help files in the package (and
indeed beyond it).
A tip which is more general is that a
command like
. ssc type circular.hlp
can be executed without installing the
package (so long as, naturally, you have
an up-to-date net-aware Stata). This
tip has other applications, such as
comparing .ado files on SSC with those
elsewhere. So
. ssc type venndiag.ado
for example would let you peek at a file (the opening lines giving
a version and a date are usually crucial here).
*
* For searches and help try:
* http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/findit.html
* http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
* http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
