First things first: the joke. If Pluribus were writing this post, it would read as follows:

1. Don't.
2. Install R.

I, however, have nothing like the massive kung fu that he has. In fact, one would say that if he is Master Shifu, then this is me:

That being said, as much as I like R, I'm still dependent on SPSS to do what I want to do, and while I love Ubuntu and Linux at large, I still have some massive mis-steps. This is a how-to built out of one of those mis-steps.

Earlier today, a friend showed It Died,  a graveyard for web applications, open source applications and free applications.  A lot of people I know are using this as a way to crow about how proprietary and closed source stuff is better and more secure...Their arg is basically that when you buy from a company that sells the software itself, it's much more likely that the product will last, and that you won't have invested a lot of time and effort in developing your solutions around a product that's likely to disappear.

Bullshit. Total. Utter. Bullshit.  There are all kinds of products and services that people sell that simply don't make it, and the fact that they don't let you see their code is no guarantee that they'll survive.  Think about Eudora or Novell Netware.  Seen anything running those lately?

God, the stupidity just overwhelms me sometimes.

Texas Toast 

In our last Cool Tools, we covered what to do when we run into trouble with our new Linux installs. Knowing that, we're ready to try adding new programs and updating our old ones.

Yesterday, the business section of the NY Times published a provocative article about Ubuntu and the man behind it, Mark Shuttleworth.

A Software Populist Who Doesn't Do Windows

The article's focus is clearly indicated by the title. The author, Ashlee Vance, does a good job introducing the reader to Mark Shuttleworth and his incredible personal story (would anyone like to help me do a documentary on this guy?). Unfortunately, the author added a dash of FUD to the mixture of facts and quotes; resulting in a schizophremic presentation of Linux that does a disservice to the reader. I am definitely disapointed by this article. Here's why:

When I joined OD.net, I set out to write an introductory guide to R. But, just as I began to write my articles and think about the direction this tutorial should take, I found this:

Quick-R

I found this site accidentally, and I have to say that it is the best introductory R material that I have ever seen. The authors of Quick-R have already written about the topics I planned to discuss in this very series. The site is well organized and accessible.

The only thing not covered by Quick-R appears to be installation, but I already wrote about installing R on Linux, Mac, and Windows. Therefore, it appears that my series needs to be re-thought. Rather than create another introduction to R, future posts will focus on how to analyze actual data sets. I will work with the other folks here at OD.net and see if we can fake the results of a small "poll" that can be the basis of future discussions.

I'm interested to see if any of you are interested in  a specific data set (preferably available to the general public). These data sets could also be used in future articles. I will expand the nature of these articles to include information about how to I approach the analysis. As I write these articles, I will make the data available AND all of the R Syntax used to write the article.

--pluribus

The New York Times has published an article on R titled, Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power. My favorite part of the article is the quote from the SAS spokesperson;

“I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code," said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

I think the SAS spokesperson  made a mistake with this cheap-shot comment. Because R publishes how it operates internally, I have the ability (and right) to see how R operates. There is no way for me to get the same kind of information regarding SAS' mathematical procedures. They are proprietary. They are a secret.

I would rather fly on a plane built by a company that actively reviews the quality of it's software and KNOWS the answers their computers give them are correct. Of course, all computer software has bugs and it is entirely possible that there is an undiscovered bug in R, but the same can be said about SAS, SPSS or any other piece of statistical software. The difference is your right to look at R's code, and evaluate it for your self.

I wish the author had also interviewed someone from SPSS. Newer versions of SPSS include an optional plug-in that make it possible to access R through SPSS. I am not aware of any such product or tool from SAS (but I am NOT a SAS expert). SPSS is spending a lot of time and energy trying to improve the programmability of it's product (pure SPSS macros suck). SPSS has chosen Python and R for this purpose and I assume that a spokesperson from SPSS would have been much more complimentary to R, and the open-source community in general.

Here's a quick one for you...The New York Times has a great piece on R, and how its extensibility and availability are making it the go to stats suite for lots and lots of big firms like Google.  SPSS is great, but if R ever gets a GUI, I think that it's going to be dead in the water.

DD

Today, I want to talk briefly about my goals for this series. I also want to be very clear about what I am not going to do here. Behind the scenes, I am developing a realistic, but fake dataset for us to play with in the coming weeks.

This series, "An Introduction to R" will take you through the basic steps used by pollsters all over the country when they receive polling data. These steps include importing the data, building crosstabs (weighted and unweighted), and running some basic statistical tests. Later in the series, I will show you how to format the data for printing.

This is not going to be a comprehensive review of R. For starters, several already exist:

• SimpleR
• An Introduction to R

I have read both of these texts and they are terrific. If you are following this series and want to get the most out of it, you will want to read these texts. I will make sure that I refer to relevant chapters where appropriate. At the beginning of my future posts I will also highlight the commands you will need to master in order to complete the exercises. I will also provide you with example data sets and code to help you complete the exercises, but I will not review each and every command. To do so would be A) repetitive/tedious (see above) and B) Boring as #$^%$. I would rather use our time together focusing on the problems unique to working with the kinds of data commonly found in the social sciences.

Until next time

--pluribus

Open Source tools promote Freedom. Proprietary tools do not. Of course, companies that intentionally build tools that promote Freedom may also be interested in other progressive ideals. Red Hat, the company that produces the Fedora Linux distribution is one such company. 

Red Hat Cancels Party;  will feed needy instead

The corporate culture at Red Hat has changed over the years. This year, Red Hat scaled back it's plans for their corporate Christmas party. The savings will be donated to a charity, Feeding America. They expect the donation will enable Feeding America to provide roughly 800,000 additional meals. That's a lot of food. Other offices are involved in coat drives and canned food drives.

With the economy in a tail-spin, this change in corporate culture is not only timely and appropriate; it shows how the values of community and collaboration created by the open-source development process can also result in a different style of corporate capitalism. I only wish stories like this got more attention in the main stream media.

--pluribus

Introduction . . . .

In my Installation article, I mentioned that R does not provide a graphical user interface. By default, this is true. On Linux, the default R interface looks like this:

There's more.