AI and Coding: One (Cautionary) Datum

While just an initial observation (and just one datum, to boot) that will likely prompt a discussion on the Stata Forum, the "anecdotes" I'm hearing lean decidedly in the direction that various popular AI providers are simply "not there" yet to permit folks to reasonably rely on AI for Stata coding suggestions/solutions. My own periodic (and episodic) "tests" (on ChatGPT and Claude), just for curiosity's sake, have mostly yielded "mixed" (and oddly inconsistent over time) results. When it comes to coding, those insufficiently "tooled up" may not be able to reliably discern between "accurate" and "hallucinated" suggestions from AI.

Evidence of American Legal Scholarship's "Inward Turn"

Many scholars, especially international law scholars, bemoan American legal scholarship's "inward turn"--that is, an increased disengagement with foreign legal systems and foreign law over time. In a recent paper, America's New Legal Isolationism: An Empirical Analysis, Jens Dammann (Texas) documents this trend with data drawn from Westlaw. Indeed, the figure below (focusing on 1995-2023) illustrates a palpable decline since 2011 in the number of articles published in student-edited law reviews that "reference at least one foreign legal system."

While the paper's main purpose is to descriptively document this trend, the discussion also explores a range of potential explanations, including the United States' economic dominance in the post-financial crisis era and a resurgence of political isolationism in the United States.

"Bayesians v. Frequentists": A Case for the Former

While I have neither the time nor interest in wading into a "Bayesian v. Frequentist: Holy War" debate, I nonetheless wanted to pass along an informative and balanced description (click here) of leading reasons to consider Bayesian strategies from Andrew Gelman (Columbia--statistics). While Andrew certainly has a point of view (and various priors), his helpful post succeeds in its goal of identifying and briefly describing various leading reasons to consider Bayesian strategies.

Basic Primer on Stata Graphics

While the graphics functions in Stata remain among the more cumbersome and nettlesome, helpful external resources exist for those interested in a quick primer.

Among the more helpful remains Maarten Buis (Konstanz) workshop (click here). To get the most out of the site requires that users access (in Stata) the 1978 "training" auto data set. To do so, simply enter the following command to grab the data: sysuse auto

With the training auto data set, users can follow along and practice generating graphs ranging from the more basic (e.g., line, scatter, and bar graphs) to the more complex (e.g., twoway, stacking, and predicted probability graphs).