FAQ/Jaeger - CBU statistics Wiki

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  • Let me find the R function to do a slipme hypothesis test. Not to mention the function to read data. Many instructors have tried to use R in introductory statistics and almost all have failed miserably. It simply has no presence in statistical education. I find the remarks about the StatCrunch user interface extremely odd. This aspect is what most of the 100,000 annual users seem to like best about StatCrunch compared to other packages. StatCrunch is definitely still under development with a major release in August of 2007. It seems that Nathan did not do his homework on this piece of the evaluation. His comments are even more odd when you take into account that he uses R which has a 1960s interface. What does a 2000ish program look like?The question posed in the last paragraph shows that Nathan really has no idea what he is talking about. The advantages over emailing an Excel file are numerous. First, the Excel issue. Have you ever tried doing basic groupings in Excel (a pivot table nightmare!), and of course, often times P-values in Excel are wrong. StatCrunch also has interactive graphics which means you can highlight observations in a graph to see where they are located in the data table and in other graphics. This feature is very nice to have when teaching/learning statistics. Excel does not have this sort of feature. Simply put Excel is a spreadsheet program that some folks try to use for statistics but it simply does not work very well.Now on to social data analysis where Nathan's comments are most disturbing. Think for a moment about a statistics course where an instructor wants to share data sets with a large group of students. With traditional desktop software, each student would need to obtain the software and install it on their machine. Then using Nathan's suggested approach, the instructor would need to email each data set to every student. Each student would then in turn have to go though the steps to load the data set. With StatCrunch, an instructor can simply point the students to his or her public profile. Students then can immediately start analyzing data by clicking on linked data sets with no need to install any software at all. Students can also access the software from any online location and are not limited in terms of where they can work. They save their work on the StatCunch server so they can access it in the future or share it with others. With StatCrunch, they can even prepare online project reports combining data and analysis results to be shared with their fellow classmates and their instructor.I apologize for my lengthy response here, but this review is really really lacking.


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