October 2012 – The Quantitative Peace

Updates

Posted on October 23, 2012 by Michael Flynn — No Comments ↓

Just a couple of links, comments, etc. Six seismologists in Italy have recently been convicted and sentenced to six years in prison (each) for issuing a "falsely reassuring statement" prior to the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy (BBC Article). The seismologists have been charged with manslaughter over the deaths of over 300 people in the quake, and have also been barred from holding public office ever again in the future. Yesterday's BBC Global News Podcast (Monday, October 22 AM) has some additional details on the situation behind this particular event—apparently there were a series of smaller quakes in the preceding Continue reading Updates→

Comments

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Michael Flynn — No Comments ↓

So as not to appear rude, I wanted to note that we seem to be having problems on our end posting/replying to comments in the comments section. Apologies to the few individuals who do leave comments, and I hope this hiccup does not discourage future feedback.

“Kountry” Package for STATA

Posted on October 20, 2012 by Michael Flynn — 1 Comment ↓

I may be late to the ball on this one, but in discussing a project that we're working on, fellow QP blogger Michael Allen recently pointed me to the "kountry" package for STATA. The package was created by Rafal Raciborski for the purposes of facilitating the creation of country codes and switching between codes provided by different sources (e.g. COW, IMF, etc.). The cite for the STATA Journal piece corresponding to the package is below: Raciborski, R. 2008. kountry: A Stata utility for merging cross-country data from multiple sources. Stata Journal 8: 390-400 Anyone that has worked with country codes knows Continue reading “Kountry” Package for STATA→