[R] [OT] Open source statistical analysis in the news

[Douglas Bates]

A student pointed out to me the article
       http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,51106,00.html
describing recent testimony by Patrick Ball, the deputy director of
the science and human rights program at the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, at the war crimes trial of Slobodan
Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president.

Mr. Ball testified on a statistical analysis of the patterns of
Albanian deaths and displacement in Kosovo that casts doubt upon
Mr. Milosevic's claim that it was NATO bombing and not Serbian forces
that caused the deaths and displacement.  

Mr. Ball makes the point that it is important that he used Open Source
software for this analysis.  The article states

 Ball added it was important to note that human rights work "is best
 served by free software, so that any group who wanted to reproduce my
 work could do so without a huge investment. I did the data processing
 using Python, we used MySQL, and all the data coding teams used Linux
 and Apache.
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