Notices tagged with rstats, page 143

Zhu Wang: I am trying to create a library which uses some Fortran source files [...]
Douglas Bates: Someone named Martin Maechler will shortly be sending you email regarding the distinction between 'library' and 'package' :-)
-- Zhu Wang and Douglas Bates
R-help (May 2004) #Rstats

A sufficiently trained statistician can read the vagaries of a Q-Q plot like a shaman can read a chicken's entrails, with a similar recourse to scientific principles. Interpreting Q-Q plots is more a visceral than an intellectual exercise. The uninitiated are often mystified by the process. Experience is the key here.
-- Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Murdoch University
StatsNotes #Rstats

There's an informal tradition that those announcements [about R releases] contain at least one mistake, but apparently I forgot this time, so users have to make up their own....
-- Peter Dalgaard (about an apparent non-bug report in his former R-announce message)
R-help (December 2009) #Rstats

JPM Miao: Why can't R understand if(num!=NA)?
Peter Dalgaard: Because comparison with an unknown value yields an unknown result.
David Winsemius: Anything else would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We cannot have comparisons reducing entropy, now can we? Uncertainty cannot run uphill.
-- JPM Miao, Peter Dalgaard, and David Winsemius (on why is.na() is needed)
R-help (May 2013) #Rstats

It is unusual for the actual data not to be available in real problems.
-- Brian D. Ripley (in reply to a question how to fit a distribution if not the data but only their histogram is available)
R-help (June 2006) #Rstats

This is like asking, "My car doesn't work. Can anyone tell me what is wrong?"
-- Jeff Newmiller (in response to the generic question why "some packages do not work" in R 3.2.5)
R-help (June 2016) #Rstats

That's a casual model, not a causal model - you can tell the difference by looking for the word "excel".
-- Hadley Wickham (commenting on an Excel chart showing student's SAT score increases with family income, without considering further covariates)
http://twitter.com/#!/hadleywickham (February 2012) #Rstats

Contrary to popular belief the speed of R's interpreter is rarely the limiting factor to R's speed. People treating R like C is typically the limiting factor. You have vector operations, USE THEM.
-- Byron Ellis
R-help (October 2005) #Rstats

Careful now, or I'll get into a rant about how much you pay for ArcGIS and whether you are getting value for money if bugs become 'well-known'! Bugs in R tend to be either 'obscure' or 'fixed' :)
-- Barry Rowlingson (in response to a request for rgdal to work around a well-known bug in ArcGIS)
R-SIG-Geo (March 2012) #Rstats

Similarly to Brian, I'm much more reluctant to help people who don't exist -- who knows, maybe you're a computer program who has just passed the Turing test :-)
-- Martin Maechler (about postings with anonymous e-mail addresses and without real names)
R-help (March 2006) #Rstats

Similarly to Brian, I'm much more reluctant to help people who don't exist -- who knows, maybe you're a computer program who has just passed the Turing test :-)
-- Martin Maechler (about postings with anonymous e-mail addresses and without real names)
R-help (March 2006) #Rstats

Achim Zeileis: Other visualizations of departures from indepence include mosaicplots with shading or association plots. See mosaicplot() and assocplot() and the package vcd.
Peter Dalgaard: I see that you've taken initive to abbriate statiscal concepts...
-- Achim Zeileis and Peter Dalgaard
R-help (January 2005) #Rstats

David Winsemius: Any of your staff can view the (open) source code just as any other member of the human race.
Uwe Ligges: I do not think the GPL excludes other species...
-- David Winsemius and Uwe Ligges (following a request for access to the R sources)
R-help (December 2011) #Rstats

Okay, let's stand up and be counted: who has been writing diamond graph code? Mine's 60 lines.
-- Barry Rowlingson (in a discussion about the patent for diamond graphs)
R-help (August 2003) #Rstats

It seems to me against the spirit of Open Source software to attempt to monitor distribution. We could ask R to 'call home' on first use (in the way e.g. pine does) but I suspect many users would find that objectionable.
-- Brian D. Ripley (in a discussion about trying to estimate the number of R users)
R-help (April 2004) #Rstats

Readable, obvious, maintainable, 'portable' for some value of 'portable'...
-- Barry Rowlingson (suggesting some function)
R-help (September 2003) #Rstats

I begin to think that R needs a _mis_fortunes package...
-- Stephen L.R. Ellison
R-help (March 2010) #Rstats

Basically R is reluctant to let you shoot yourself in the foot unless you are really determined to do so.
-- Bill Venables (about the warning hist() issues when being called with unequal interval widths and freq=TRUE)
R-help (May 2008) #Rstats

Josh O'Brien: Figuring out what was going on here obsessed me for several days, before I realized "Oh, duh. I should ask this on [Stackoverflow] and get some better minds working on this for me!"
Brandon Bertelsen: I've learned to give up after 30 minutes. It's cheaper to pay people in checkmarks and upvotes :)
-- Josh O'Brien and Brandon Bertelsen (discussing a package's definition of reorder.factor changing results)
Stackoverflow (October 2012) #Rstats