[R] Michaelson-Morley Speed of Light Data

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 11/04/2012 19:33, Křištof Želechovski wrote:
> Dnia środa, 11 kwietnia 2012 13:26:43 Prof Brian Ripley pisze:
>> On 11/04/2012 12:42, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>>> On 12-04-11 12:43 AM, Křištof Želechovski wrote:
>>>> <URL:
>>>> http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/R/library/datasets/html/morley.html>
>>>>
>>>> "The classical data of Michaelson and Morley on the speed of light"
>>>>
>>>> Can you provide more information about the data? How were they
>>>> obtained,
>>>> etc.? I do not have the book "Genstat Primer" and the nearest location
>>>> where
>>>> it is available is University of York which is rather far from my
>>>> location.
>>>
>>> If you can't find the cited reference, I'd try Google. For instance, it
>>> led me to this page
>>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Michelsonmorley-boxplot.svg
>>>
>>> which appears to show five series.
>>
>> Yes, but that is derived from R.
>>
>> AFAIR the history, Bill Venables got this from Weekes (1986), a book I
>> have only ever seen in Adelaide.  A better reference is
>>
>>        S. M. Stigler (1977) Do robust estimators work with real data?
>>        Annals of Statistics 5, 1055–1098. (See Table 6.)
>
> The data in R are identical with Table 6 but they were not obtained by
> Michaelson and Morley; they were obtained by Michelson.  The description is
> wrong.
>
> It is also a problem in R itself, as evidenced by the following instruction:
>
> data(morley)
>
> Of course, you can name a data set whatever you like, even data(marilyn) would
> be all right, but may I suggest that this data set be renamed to michelson?

That is what it is called in package MASS ....

> Please fix,
> Chris


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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