Sadistics
When I was in College, I hated the statistics classes #1) - because the teacher was dreadfully dull (obviously not wanting to teach an entry-level class) and #2) - I couldn't see a real practical application for this. My major was Physical Oceanography with a minor in Biology and although there is an obvious need for statistics in a lot of Biological research, my focus was more on the instrumentation and measurement, not the actual squishy bits.
Along came W. Edwards Deming (
here and
here) whose books on business statistics I devoured (I had a business at the time and suddenly saw a lot of value in statistics -- plus, Deming was a great writer).
I was following a statical byway last night and ran into
this online book that referenced
this online statistical application.
Many Statistical Applications sell for huge amounts of cash (they are not as popular as word processors so there is no economy of scale in their creation) but
The R Project looks really good at first glance.
Introduction to R
R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R.
R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, ...) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The S language is often the vehicle of choice for research in statistical methodology, and R provides an Open Source route to participation in that activity.
One of R's strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced, including mathematical symbols and formulae where needed. Great care has been taken over the defaults for the minor design choices in graphics, but the user retains full control.
R is available as Free Software under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License in source code form. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms and similar systems (including FreeBSD and Linux), Windows and MacOS.
Looks good!
Posted by DaveH at August 23, 2007 9:31 PM