[R] how do i persuade IT to install R on PCs ?? ...and should I ??

[David Winsemius]

On Nov 22, 2009, at 4:45 PM, stephen's mailinglist account wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 11:14 AM, frenchcr <frenchcr at btinternet.com>  
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Please help me persuade IT to install R on my computer!
>>
>> All suggestions welcome.
>>
>> Our IT department run scared when you mention software that they  
>> have no
>> working experience of.
>>
>> I need to know the pros and cons of having R on corporate desktops.
>>
>> Please no funny stuff, this is quite a serious issue for us.
>>
>> Pros and cons would be good.
>>
>> Thanks.
>> --
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>>
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>
> I requested to have R installed at work.
> For me it helped that I have a lot of non-standard technical  
> packages anyway
> that are off radar for support from the IT department anyway - they  
> only
> support for original install rights anyway.
> They wanted to know what the licence was - GPL is recognised and  
> they don't
> run a mile.
> I did my homework and found some other people on a company research  
> site
> were already using R so I could use that as justification.
> I had some code ready to run that could produce graphs easily that  
> are very
> hard to do in Excel and require a lot of custom code (and even then  
> aren't
> good).
> We do use some other stats packages anyway and are being encouraged  
> to use
> proper packages rather than kludging through in Excel
> References like this (below) have been circulated at work which adds  
> weight
> to arguments that we should not just accept the 'standard' Office  
> install.
> Although I did not use this in my justification.
>
> @ARTICLE{,
>  author = {B.D. McCullough and David A. Heiser},

I'm not surprised to see McCollough and Heiser's names on such an  
article. They have both a long track record of pointing out Excel's  
statistical deficiencies. (I don't they did so together in the past.)   
MS has turned a deaf ear to their efforts to point the way to correct  
methods. It is truly amazing that MS continues to ignore constrictive  
criticism and that such arrogance is compounded by corporate policies  
encouraging reliance on demonstrably faulty tools. The full list of  
articles documenting MS's resistance to statistical corrections would  
be much longer that just this one article and extends back more than a  
decade.

>  title = {On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel
> 2007},
>  journal = {Computational Statistics \& Data Analysis},
>  year = {2008},
>  volume = {52},
>  pages = {4570--4578},
>  number = {10}
> }
>
> ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.csda.2008.03.004)
> I use R via TINN-R (http://www.sciviews.org/Tinn-R/) on a Windows  
> desktop.
>
> Stephen

-- 

David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT