Thanks! (Was: Re: [R] R-2.1.0 is released)

[Uwe Ligges]

Naji wrote:

> Pr. Ripley
> 
> 
>>>Don't forget that universities have to train their students with the
>>>softwares companies are using.
> 
> Right 'have' is abusive
> 
> Companies want to keep a certain continuity in their service/product.
> There's a kind of inertia switching from their core software (SAS, MATLAB or
> other) to any other software. And therefore, universities won't completely
> leave trainings using those softwares (push and indirect pull 'marketing'
> efforts from software companies and companies (recruiters)).
> For the ST/MT, universities won't dump some leading statistical softwares.
> 
> I hope more and more universities will teach statistics using R or
> equivalent (if it exists). They will 'produce' people more likely
> - to know what they are processing (they have to understand the underlying
> algorithm, weakness and strength)
> - to adopt the best approach (versus the one implemented or to wait until
> the approach is implemented)
> And as R is 'free', there is no discrimination or financial barrier.
> 
> My wish is to see a clear distinction between 'learning statistics' ( a
> must) and 'using commercial software' (optional). I agree with your point of
> view that the latest is not the university objective (still the question
> about preparing for the labor market, which is another debate).

Nice, nice, but some departments cannot afford the fees for some 
software products, most notably in Dortmund the fees for a certain 
product which is not unlike R - while (for our budget) SAS and SPSS are 
expensive but still affordable.

 From my point of view, if companies want to get people that are well 
prepared for a certain software product and/or for a software product 
they want to sell themselves, they cannot expect the universities to pay 
for these software products.

Another point:
We are teaching stuff like mathematics, statistics, statistical 
programming and so on, but we cannot teach each possible software 
product - we also don't teach how to analyze each possible dataset that 
might find its way to the statistician's desk, we just use the iris data 
and Anscombe's quartet. ;-)

Uwe Ligges


> Best regards
> Naji
>  
> Le 21/04/05 7:19, « Prof Brian Ripley » <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> a écrit :
> 
> 
>>On Wed, 20 Apr 2005, Naji wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Don't forget that universities have to train their students with the
>>>softwares companies are using.
> 
> Right 'have' is abusive
> 
>>Not so.  But companies have to hire the people universities teach (or
>>non-graduates if they can find them and train those).  As a result
>>software companies give universities very good deals, even in some cases
>>including hardware, to use their software.
>>
>>Our goal is to teach people things useful for the next decade, not what is
>>implemented in current software, commercial or otherwise.  R has benefited
>>enormously from parts developed in meeting that goal.
> 
> 
> R has more than 400 packages (R 2.01 MacOSX3.9, CRAN list); if one can't
> find exactly what he wants, he'll get at least a excellent starting point
> 
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