Year: 2013 (Page 1 of 6)

Statistics unplugged

2013-12-27 / Luis

How much does statistical software help and how much it interferes when teaching statistical concepts? Software used in the practice of statistics (say R, SAS, Stata, etc) brings to the party a mental model that it’s often alien to students, while being highly optimized for practitioners. It is possible to introduce a minimum of distraction while focusing on teaching concepts, although it requires careful choice of a subset of functionality. Almost invariably some students get stuck with the software and everything goes downhill from there; the student moved from struggling with a concept to struggling with syntax (Do I use a parenthesis here?).

I am a big fan of Tim Bell’s Computer Science Unplugged, a program for teaching Computer Science’s ideas at primary and secondary school without using computers (see example videos).
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Using Processing and R together (in OS X)

2013-12-20 / Luis

I wanted to develop a small experiment with a front end using the Processing language and the backend calculations in R; the reason why will be another post. This post explained the steps assuming that one already has R and Processing installed:

Install the Rserve package. This has to be done from source (e.g. using R CMD INSTALL packagename).
Download Rserve jar files and include them in the Processing sketch.
Run your code

Excel, fanaticism and R

2013-12-17 / Luis

This week I’ve been feeling tired of excessive fanaticism (or zealotry) of open source software (OSS) and R in general. I do use a fair amount of OSS and pushed for the adoption of R in our courses; in fact, I do think OSS is a Good Thing^TM. I do not like, however, constant yabbering on why using exclusively OSS in science is a good idea and the reduction of science to repeatability^‡ and computability (both of which I covered in my previous post). I also dislike the snobbery of ‘you shall use R and not Excel at all, because the latter is evil’ (going back ages).
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Gratuitous picture: I smiled when I saw the sign with the rightful place for forestry (Photo: Luis).

Should I reject a manuscript because the analyses weren’t done using open source software?

2013-12-15 / Luis

“Should I reject a manuscript because the analyses weren’t done using open software?” I overheard a couple of young researchers discussing. Initially I thought it was a joke but, to my surprise, it was not funny at all.

There is an unsettling, underlying idea in that question: the value of a scientific work can be reduced to its computability. If I, the reader, cannot replicate the computation the work is of little, if any, value. Even further, my verification has to have no software cost involved, because if that is not the case we are limiting the possibility of computation to only those who can afford it. Therefore, the almost unavoidable conclusion is that we should force the use of open software in science.

If one were to invent scientific journals today

2013-12-15 / Luis

While taking a shower I was daydreaming about what would happen if one were to invent journals today, with a very low cost of publication and no physical limits to the size of a publication. My shower answer was that there would be little chance for a model like traditional printed journals.

One could create a central repository (a bit like the arXiv) taking submissions of text format of the article + figures, which are automatically translated to a decent-looking web format and a printable version. This would be the canonical version of the article and would get assigned a unique identifier. The submitters would get to update their article any number of times, creating versions (pretty much like software). This way they could fix any issues without breaking references from other articles.
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