Notices tagged with rstats, page 11

My institution has a particularly diabolical policy on intellectual property, especially on software.
-- Ross Ihaka
R-help (August 2003) #Rstats

Brian Ripley: Where did you tell it [...]? (Nowhere: R is lacking a mind_read() function!)
Peter Dalgaard: Please stop complaining about missing features. Patches will be considered.

Oh, it's you, Brian. Never mind then. You'll get to it, I'm sure. ;-)
-- Brian Ripley and Peter Dalgaard (answering why abline(lm(x~y)) would not work)
R-help (January 2007) #Rstats

Jason Horn: Can anyone think of a way to create a pretty() sequence that excludes zero? Or a way to remove the zero from a sequence after using pretty()?
Peter Dalgaard: The former is rather hard because zero is generally considered just about the prettiest number around...
-- Jason Horn and Peter Dalgaard
R-help (October 2005) #Rstats

Tradition among experienced S programmers has always been that loops (typically 'for' loops) are intrinsically inefficient: expressing computations without loops has provided a measure of entry into the inner circle of S programming.
-- John Chambers
Programming With Data, p. 173 (1998) #Rstats

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.
-- John W. Tukey (the first of six "basics" against statistician's hubrises)
in "Sunset Salvo", The American Statistician 40(1), 72-76 (February 1986) #Rstats

These road distances seem to be very non-Euclidean indeed (even non-metric). It seems to be 2282km from Athens to Milan if you go directly, but if you go via Rome it is only 1403km. I thought that World is non-Euclidean, but not that obviously.
-- Jari Oksanen (on the eurodist data)
R-help (October 2004) #Rstats

I'll go back to lurking in the daily R-Helps and not ask any more questions until I've read all the old R-help messages. I'm working on December 1998 right now and reading forward. Perhaps by next year I'll will have read all the old R-help postings and I'll dare ask another question then.
-- Earl F. Glynn
R-help (January 2012) #Rstats

If you aren't sure of the relative priority of two operators, use parentheses. 1:(nr-1) would work regardless of whether : or - had higher priority. Or, in extreme cases, read the documentation.
-- Duncan Murdoch
R-help (August 2005) #Rstats

If you want to do an integer divide, you should only use integers to divide with.
-- Thierry Onkelinx ((not entirely correctly) in an answer to "understanding integer divide (%/%)")
R-help (January 2007) #Rstats

If you really want to assess uncertainty you need to take into account that the models are false and that several models may capture different aspects of the data and so be false in different ways.
-- Brian D. Ripley
R-help (July 2007) #Rstats

So apparently you wish to report as a bug the fact that R 1.8.0 is different from R 1.4.0.
-- Douglas Bates
R-devel (October 2003) #Rstats

Shan-Ho Chou: I got a question about eigenvector. I've tried input a symmetric matrix to both R (using eigen function) and Minitab, but the result is really different. Can anyone tell me what's wrong with that?
Bill Venables: Simple. Minitab must be broken. Have you reported it to them?
-- Shan-Ho Chou and Bill Venables
R-help (July 2007) #Rstats

I think [R] addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code. [...] We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.
-- Anne H. Milley (director of technology product marketing at SAS, quoted in Ashlee Vance's article "Data Analysts Captivated by R's Power")
The New York Times (January 2009) #Rstats

If you think you can learn all of R, you are wrong. For the foreseeable future you will not even be able to keep up with the new additions.
-- Patrick Burns (Inferno-ish R)
CambR User Group Meeting, Cambridge (May 2012) #Rstats

I suggest that we redefine "+" to be a legal character in the name of an identifier. Sure, if you used to have "a+b" you'll have to rewrite it as "+(a,b)", but think of the benefits! You+can+write+out+long+sentences+and+use+them+as+variable+names!
-- Duncan Murdoch (in a discussion whether to use underscore, dot, or mixed case in variable names)
R-help (May 2005) #Rstats

Henrik Bengtsson: Is there a way to turn off the (annoying) beep that occurs when one calls the locator() command and clicks the mouse? [...]
Brian D. Ripley: It's a feature of the windows() device. Windows is fond of beeping, and I just mute the sound.
-- Henrik Bengtsson and Brian D. Ripley
R-help (July 2001) #Rstats

Karl Ove Hufthammer: Why not use 'predict.loess' (i.e., 'predict' on a loess object) directly?
Greg Snow: Because that would be simple, straightforward, and make sense, and not require knowledge about less obvious functions.
-- Karl Ove Hufthammer and Greg Snow
R-help (May 2010) #Rstats

Unfortunately, this is one of those situations where as far as I can tell all of the real statisticians are out there playing with large data sets where the small-sample corrections are not so important and leaving the rest of us to figure it out for ourselves...
-- Ben Bolker (about the 'correct' degrees-of-freedom correction in Wald statistics for GLMMs)
R-SIG-Mixed-Models (December 2011) #Rstats

Lars Strand: Will R run under Windows Pocket PC?
Brian D. Ripley: We don't know! There are no binary versions of R for that platform, but perhaps you could find a suitable compiler and manage to build the sources.
Outside pure mathematics it is usually very hard to establish that something cannot be done (and it can be very hard in pure mathematics, too).
-- Lars Strand and Brian D. Ripley
R-help (November 2004) #Rstats

Liang Che: For example, if coefficient's p-value is less than 0.1 I want the stepwise to automatically drop that variable. Can the stepAIC be customized to do that? SAS seems to be able to customized stepwise function with p-value or cooks'd.
David Winsemius: You might take some time to ponder the possibility that the fact that it's not easy in R might be useful information in its own right.
-- Liang Che and David Winsemius
R-help (September 2012) #Rstats