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Re: st: managing updates of stata


From   Richard Williams <[email protected]>
To   [email protected]
Subject   Re: st: managing updates of stata
Date   Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:39:00 -0500

At 01:05 PM 3/1/2011, Argyn Kuketayev wrote:
Hello

can you elaborate on this?

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 12:10 PM, Richard Williams
<[email protected]> wrote:
> for some reason, the current Stata even with version control is not
> reproducing your results.

why would this happen? because of random seeds?

If you aren't setting the seeds yourself, then you may not be able to exactly reproduce your results five minutes later. So especially if exact replication is critical, set the seed yourself.

I might be most worried if some user-written routine was mission-critical for my work. You can't count on users to be as fastidious about backward compatibility as StataCorp is. So I might save copies of such routines.

If I got substantially different results 2 years later, I would wonder if (a) something was done wrong the first time, or (b) something is wrong with my replication. Especially if I was using a bread and butter routine like -regress-.

The wildly paranoid might make copies of their Stata program directories and their c:\ado directory. When I got a new computer, I just copied my old program directories for Stata 7 through Stata 10. As far as I can tell, those programs work fine. Unlike some software, Stata doesn't seem to scatter a zillion files all over your hard disk.


-------------------------------------------
Richard Williams, Notre Dame Dept of Sociology
OFFICE: (574)631-6668, (574)631-6463
HOME:   (574)289-5227
EMAIL:  [email protected]
WWW:    http://www.nd.edu/~rwilliam

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