RE: st: Problem with xi (Stata 11)

["Nick Cox" <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

Precision problems really shouldn't bite with binary variables. If
computers, or programs, get confused between 0 and 1, all is lost! 

I'd recommend that you explore this with Stata tech support. 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

Walter Garcia-Fontes

It seems a problem that I'm only able to reproduce in my machine, from
a fresh started stata and entering the following commands:

webuse set http://puna.upf.edu
webuse data/data
xi i.COUNTRY
ta COUNTRY  _ICOUNTRY_56, nol

   Country |
      code |      COUNTRY==56
   3-digit |         0          1 |     Total
-----------+----------------------+----------
        40 |     4,927          0 |     4,927 
        56 |       265      8,592 |     8,857 
       203 |     5,932          0 |     5,932 
       208 |     4,532          0 |     4,532 
       233 |     4,865          0 |     4,865 
       246 |     4,714          0 |     4,714 
       250 |     4,716          0 |     4,716 
       276 |     4,891          0 |     4,891 
       300 |     4,873          0 |     4,873 
       348 |     4,490          0 |     4,490 
       372 |     4,444        141 |     4,585 
       380 |    21,773          0 |    21,773 
-----------+----------------------+----------
     Total |    70,422      8,733 |    79,155 

I get this both in updated Stata 10 and Stata 11. 

My machine is a Dell Precision 690 running Ubuntu Gnu-Linux 10.04. 

I tried it also at a Sun server running Solaris and I can't reproduce
under Stata 10 (no Stata 11 there yet). 

So it seems some combination of a particular machine precision and the
xi command. 

tab COUNTRY, gen(_ICOUNTRY) 

works perfectly on the other hand. 


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