STATA access to World Bank data

Talk about bananas!  The World Bank has just published a new version of the wbopendata_module that gives STATA users direct access to a lot of their data!  More information here:

http://data.worldbank.org/news/accessing-world-bank-open-data-in-stata

According to their website:

     1,000 new indicators for a total of 5,300 time series

     Access to the metadata including indicator definitions and other supporting documentation

     Links to maps from within STATA

And it couldn't be easier to get access, just type:

ssc install wbopendata

The help file gives you all the details

Dates and times in R

Nothing looks funnier than a patchy simian. That's why we sighed a great sigh of relief when we spotted this article on the lubridate package in R. It saves a great deal of hair pulling.

http://www.r-statistics.com/2012/03/do-more-with-dates-and-times-in-r-with-lubridate-1-1-0/