Patch work

We are sorry that the blog has been quiet for so long! It isn't because nothing has been happening, but rather because so much as been happening. There will be some nice additions to our website soon, so stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, let's talk about patches for statistical software. In general, we recommend applying the patches that vendors provide for their products, as they usually contain fixes for known bugs and may contain new features or improve the performance of the software.

Three programs for which there are recently released patches include SPSS, HLM and SUDAAN. The latest SPSS patch, which upgrades SPSS version 16 to version 16.0.2, contains many important bug fixes. If you are running SPSS version 16, please be sure to visit the SPSS website, download and install this patch. A patch for HLM upgrades version 6 to version 6.06, and the patch for SUDAAN upgrades version 9 to version 9.0.3. All of these patches can be obtained free of charge from the respective vendors' websites. You can also visit http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stat_pkg.htm for more information and relevant links.

We would also like to mention that an upgrade for Mplus will be available soon. That will make the current version of Mplus version 5.1. From what we hear, this upgrade contains some very nice enhancements to version 5, so you will want to watch for it.

- crw