Naji wrote:
Pr. Ripley
Don't forget that universities have to train their students with the softwares companies are using.
Right 'have' is abusive
Companies want to keep a certain continuity in their service/product. There's a kind of inertia switching from their core software (SAS, MATLAB or other) to any other software. And therefore, universities won't completely leave trainings using those softwares (push and indirect pull 'marketing' efforts from software companies and companies (recruiters)). For the ST/MT, universities won't dump some leading statistical softwares.
I hope more and more universities will teach statistics using R or equivalent (if it exists). They will 'produce' people more likely - to know what they are processing (they have to understand the underlying algorithm, weakness and strength) - to adopt the best approach (versus the one implemented or to wait until the approach is implemented) And as R is 'free', there is no discrimination or financial barrier.
My wish is to see a clear distinction between 'learning statistics' ( a must) and 'using commercial software' (optional). I agree with your point of view that the latest is not the university objective (still the question about preparing for the labor market, which is another debate).
Nice, nice, but some departments cannot afford the fees for some software products, most notably in Dortmund the fees for a certain product which is not unlike R - while (for our budget) SAS and SPSS are expensive but still affordable.
From my point of view, if companies want to get people that are well prepared for a certain software product and/or for a software product they want to sell themselves, they cannot expect the universities to pay for these software products.
Another point:
We are teaching stuff like mathematics, statistics, statistical programming and so on, but we cannot teach each possible software product - we also don't teach how to analyze each possible dataset that might find its way to the statistician's desk, we just use the iris data and Anscombe's quartet. ;-)
Uwe Ligges
Best regards
Naji
Le 21/04/05 7:19, « Prof Brian Ripley » <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> a écrit :
On Wed, 20 Apr 2005, Naji wrote:
Don't forget that universities have to train their students with the softwares companies are using.
Right 'have' is abusive
Not so. But companies have to hire the people universities teach (or non-graduates if they can find them and train those). As a result software companies give universities very good deals, even in some cases including hardware, to use their software.
Our goal is to teach people things useful for the next decade, not what is implemented in current software, commercial or otherwise. R has benefited enormously from parts developed in meeting that goal.
R has more than 400 packages (R 2.01 MacOSX3.9, CRAN list); if one can't find exactly what he wants, he'll get at least a excellent starting point
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