Re: st: Small Stata for teaching

[Keith Dear <keith.dear@anu.edu.au>]

Paulo,
I too had a frustrating experience with Small Stata recently. A 
student could not -insheet- his dataset, and it was hard to see why 
not: no declared limit was being breached (34 variables; 42 rows; 
only 13kb) and my installation (Intercooled 9.2) accepted it without a murmur.

See -help limits- (it took us half a day to find this). There is an 
additional restriction in Small Stata: the maximum WIDTH of the data 
cannot exceed 200 bytes. His data included a str150 comment field: 
omit that and it worked fine (the width then was still 164: he had 
some other strings).

The error message explained "Stata can trade off width and length", 
but with this is evidently true only up to a point, the point for 
Small Stata being a width of just 200 bytes.

-h datatypes- gives the widths of the various types of variable. You 
can find the width of a dataset (once loaded!) using -describe- which 
returns r(width) and, I now see, r(widthmax) which I suppose for 
Small Stata would show 200 (for me, r(widthmax) is 24576 and -h 
limits- says 24564, CEFGW).

kd


At 02:07 AM 15/08/2007, you wrote:

> Dear Statalisters,
>
> I am sure some of you have taught statistics/econometrics courses 
> using Stata and recommended that students buy Small Stata.
> The advertised limitations for Small Stata do not seem too 
> restrictive: a maximum of 99 variables, 39 right-hand variables, 
> 1000 observations and a matsize of 40.
> The course I am teaching is on economic forecasting. I am using the book
> "Elements of Forecasting" by F. Diebold and contrary to the examples 
> on the book (which are on Eviews) I decided to use Stata. 
> Unfortunately, I am finding out that the students can not replicate 
> some of the examples on the book because of the restrictions on 
> Small Stata. For example, they are unable to estimate an ARMAX with 
> 12 seasonal variables using 400 observations. From the general 
> description of Small Stata it never crossed my mind that they 
> couldn't do it. This has been a frustrating experience as I am never 
> sure what exactly are the limitations of Small Stata. I definitely 
> would expect it to be able to run most "textbook examples" and I 
> naively assumed that to be true.
> For the next time that I teach the course I have to decide if I 
> change the book or the software. I would like to know about your experiences
> with Small Stata and if this also happens with other textbooks.
>
>
> Paulo Guimaraes
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Dr Keith B.G. Dear
Senior Fellow in Biostatistics
National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health
Australian National University
Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia
Tel: 02 612 54865, Fax: 02 612 50740
http://nceph.anu.edu.au/Staff_Students/staff_pages/dear.php
CRICOS provider #00120C

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