Adding a few more lines to this...
Don't forget that universities have to train their students with the softwares companies are using.
What do they use? This may change among companies and countries. If we go for the majority we would probably end up teaching only Excel - and F. Harrell would be desperate :) --
Right! Universities need to teach whatever they think is best for the future, then to teach a little of whatever is necessary for the current job market (e.g., a 3-day course in SAS).
Frank Harrell
In some contries like Brazil, a software like R is doing a real revolution in practice and teaching of statistics. Access to modern statistical methods are readily accessible as they have never been before.
Several year of teaching based on commercial software have produced negligible results compared with what are are achieving now. This discussion reminds me a quote from Box, Hunter and Hunter book (may not be perfectly reproduced below):
"More important than teaching statistical methods is to teach the statistical thinking"
best P.J.
Paulo Justiniano Ribeiro Jr LEG (Laboratório de Estatística e Geoinformação) Departamento de Estatística Universidade Federal do Paraná Caixa Postal 19.081 CEP 81.531-990 Curitiba, PR - Brasil Tel: (+55) 41 361 3573 Fax: (+55) 41 361 3141 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.est.ufpr.br/~paulojus
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Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine
Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
