Updates

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

“Kountry” Package for STATA

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