Notices tagged with rstats, page 169

If your ultimate interest is in real scientific progress, I'd suggest that you ignore that sentence (and any conclusion drawn subsequent to it).
-- Andy Liaw (in response to a question on the meaning of the sentence: 'Independent variables whose correlation with the response variable was not significant at 5% level were removed')
R-help (March 2010) #Rstats

Have you ever wanted to write a book, but not known where to start? Now is a very good time to jump in, because there is currently a very simple recipe for success: just put R in the title and you will have to beat the publishers off with a stick!
-- Paul Murrell
ASA Statistical Computing & Graphics Newsletter 17(2) (November 2006) #Rstats

It's interesting that SAS Institute feels that non-peer-reviewed software with hidden implementations of analytic methods that cannot be reproduced by others should be trusted when building aircraft engines.
-- Frank Harrell (in response to the statement of the SAS director of technology product marketing: "We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.")
R-help (January 2009) #Rstats

R is a strange, deeply flawed language that nevertheless has an enthusiastic and rapidly growing user base. What about R accounts for its popularity in its niche? What can language designers learn from R's success?
-- John Cook (Abstract of "Why and How People Use R")
Lang.NEXT 2012 (April 2012) #Rstats

You need to prepare your students for the future, not the past.
-- Spencer Graves (making a case for using R in academia)
R-help (November 2006) #Rstats

[Listing original copyright holders in R packages is] especially useful if there are areas of doubt and uncertainty (eg code published on ftp sites before people worried about licenses), since it at least gives you rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.[5]
[5] Adams D, (1978) Hitchhiker's Guide. BBC Radio.
-- Thomas Lumley (in a discussion about copyright vs. licenses)
R-devel (January 2010) #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

When in doubt, keep adding slashes until it works.
-- Joran Elias (on how to escape a backslash in R)
Stackoverflow (March 2015) #Rstats

Oops. Was that what I was expecting?
-- Louise Matthews (during the practicals of 'Statistical Practice in Epidemiology Using R')
SPE Course, Tartu (May 2005) #Rstats

@Efi @noelle R really is all about functionals and vectorized operations, so you rarely need direct indexing. IMO, the ideal for R code is to completely avoid explicit loops. What are you getting into #rstats for?

hist(rnorm(1e6), col = colors()[grep("grey", colors())], nclass = 108, main = "R's 108 Shades of Grey")
-- Fritz Scholz (proving R has more than 50 Shades of Grey)
private communication (March 2015) #Rstats

Justin: Is there a function that just does whatever I'm thinking (aka whatever my homework question is...)?
Joshua Ulrich: That's the magic_pony function.
-- Justin and Joshua Ulrich
stackoverflow.com (June 2013) #Rstats

The existence of a method is not a sufficient reason to use that method.
-- Jari Oksanen (about relative advantages of several multivariate analysis methods)
R-SIG-Ecology (November 2013) #Rstats

I was actually reading it with some curiosity as to how they managed to find 5 locations that were close to everyone on R-help...
-- Peter Dalgaard (after XL Solutions announced courses 'R/Splus Programming Techniques, @ 5 locations near you!')
R-help (April 2004) #Rstats

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

Note that there is a reasonable discussion in Writing R Extensions, but as always, you have to find it first.
-- Dirk Eddelbuettel (in a discussion about where to include data-generating scripts in an R package)
R-pkg-devel (March 2016) #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

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

This is at best a matter of opinion, and credentials do matter for opinions.
-- Brian D. Ripley (in response to the claim that only 1.79e3 is printed with three significant digits whereas 1790 is not)
R-help (December 2006) #Rstats

Have you ever wanted to write a book, but not known where to start? Now is a very good time to jump in, because there is currently a very simple recipe for success: just put R in the title and you will have to beat the publishers off with a stick!
-- Paul Murrell
ASA Statistical Computing & Graphics Newsletter 17(2) (November 2006) #Rstats