[R] Point and click

[Thomas Lumley]

On Sat, 4 Oct 2003, Cliff Lunneborg wrote:

> The following query raises the question: What is it that students learn
> from point and click dialogs?"

If the dialog constructs the same command line that you would type and
shows you what it is, they can learn a lot. SPSS and Stata do this (IMO
Stata does it better: SPSS tends to include unnecessary options, and
doesn't default to showing you the command line).

More importantly, the *point* of interface design is to prevent people
from having to learn things that they don't need to know.  The fact that a
comparison of two means is called a t-test and a comparison of three means
is called ANOVA would not ideally be on my list of the top fifty most
important ideas in statistics.  If the software and textbooks were better,
this fact would be of purely historical interest even to statisticians.


	-thomas

>
> Date: Fri, 03 Oct 2003 16:57:42 -0400
> From:
> To: s-news at lists.biostat.wustl.edu
> Subject: Splus question
> Message-ID: <BAY9-F52Q7OoK42LpqI000238f3 at hotmail.com>
>
> I don't know if this is the right list to post this question. If not,
> please let me know where I should post this. I have a dataframe with 3
> variables: ID, Y, Group Group is either 1, 2, 3. I am trying to run a
> t-test to compare the three groups on outcome Y. I know how to do this
> using the point and click dialogs. But can't get it to work on the
> command line. When I type: t.test(y, group)  it just compares y and
> group
> as though they represent the two samples. I tried doing something with
> tapply(y, group) but don't know how that works. If someone knows, please
> email me. Thanks.
>
> **********************************************************
> Cliff Lunneborg, Professor Emeritus, Statistics &
> Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle
> cliff at ms.washington.edu
>
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>

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle