My Exodus from Google Reader

Like many fellow information junkies, I was shocked that Google is killing Reader, then realised that I had not used it very regularly  lately. This is partly because I rely a bit more on twitter these days, partly because last year I began using feedly, a Reader frontend that looks good on my various devices…

Easy Google geocoding in Stata

For the un-initiated: Geocoding is the fine art of converting addresses into geographical coordinates (longitude and latitude). Thanks to Google and some other providers like OpenStreeMap, this is now a relatively painless process. But when one needs more than a few addresses geocoded, one does not rely on pointing-and-clicking. One needs an API, i.e. a software library that makes the service accessible through R, Python or some other programming language.
geocode is a user-written Stata command that gives access to Googles API from within Stata. It takes a variable containing address strings and returns two new variables containing the latitude/longitude information