On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 8:55 AM, Andrew Douglas Pitonyak <and...@pitonyak.org> wrote: > > On 12/06/2012 12:12 PM, Rob Weir wrote: >> >> >> So two entirely different questions: >> >> 1) Improving the accuracy the statistical (and other numerical >> methods) we already have. >> >> 2) Extending the range of numerical methods we provide out-of-the-box > > > My first thought when I read this was adding extended precision interval > arithmetic; now that would be fun :-) > > >> >> I think #1 is a no-brainer, but it does require some expertise. The >> hard part is determining whether we have improved. For most problems >> we probably already get the same results as SPSS, R or other standard >> statistical packages. To really make an improvement we need to test >> the edge cases, the "poorly conditioned" and more complex cases. >> >> For #2, it probably makes sense to define a bridge to R. R is now >> the standard and there are hundreds of libraries that extend the >> environment. You can call R routines from SAS or SPPS. I just got >> the new Mathematica 9 upgrade, and guess what? They've now added the >> ability to call R. So some seamless of calling R routines and >> embedding R plots in Calc would be great. > > > I considered upgrading Mathematica, but I am too busy to play around with it > these days.... >
I've played around a little. It has now some built-in functions for analyzing and graphing social networks, e.g., Facebook, Twitter. Not sure it is very useful, but perhaps a new software category of "mathertainment"... > Surprised that they integrate with R. Not because R is a bad thing, just > something I had not expected because mathematica already does so much out of > the box. Provides instant access to their huge repository of extra stuff. > So Mathematica out-of-the-box likely has as much as R has out-of-the-box. But the free 3rd party packages on CRAN (over 5000 of them) is a big win for R. The ecosystem is as important (or more so) than the standalone app. I think of it like Python -- IMHO the language itself is undistinguished, but the existence of libraries for every problem domain makes it my go-to tool for many problems. I wonder if there is a lesson here? Imagine magically we made our templates and extensions repository 10x better (by some metric, not necessarily size). Or what about content repositories, e.g., clip art, form letters, etc. Our value proposition then becomes more about the strength of the ecosystem and less about basic editing features. -Rob > -- > Andrew Pitonyak > My Macro Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt > Info: http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php >
