Re: [R] Writing to a UDP server from R?
Saptarshi Guha wrote:
This does not work
u - socketConnection('localhost',9000)
UDP and TCP are entirely different worlds. They don't share the same
port space; TCP port 9000 and UDP port 9000 are different things. Plus,
UDP is connectionless, so you can't connect to a UDP port. All you
can do is throw packets at a server, which may or may not be listening
for those packets.
You will either have to rely on an external program to do the UDP
communication for you, or write an extension to R to provide this
functionality.
Suitable helper programs are 'nc' and 'ncat'. nc is abandonware, so the
nmap folk built their own version of the same idea and added it to nmap
v5. nmap v5 is very new, though, so you might have nc on your system
already, but and old version of nmap, and prefer to use the defunct
program rather than upgrade your nmap.
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Re: [R] downsampling
Michael Knudsen wrote: On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Jan Wienerjan.wie...@tuebingen.mpg.de wrote: x=sample(1:5, 115, replace=TRUE) How do I downsample this vector to 100 entries? Are there any R functions or packages that provide such functionality. What exactly do you mean by downsampling? It means that the original 115 points should be treated as a continuous function of x, or t, or whatever the horizontal axis is, with new values coming from this function at 100 evenly-spaced points along this function. This procedure is how a sound editing program can produce a good-sounding 44.1 kHz CD quality file from material recorded at 48 kHz, for instance. Something similar happens when you ask your photo editing program to give you a smaller version of, say, a 12 Mpix picture for emailing or putting up on the web. These are all forms of interpolation. There's a degenerate case, where the number of output samples divides evenly into the number of input samples. For instance, to downsample a 96 kHz audio file to 48 kHz, just throw away every other sample. I, too, wish I know how to do the harder interpolation case in R. I've been in the OP's shoes, fighting with zoo and failing. The last time I had to do this, I gave up on R and did it in Mathematica. I also remember that it was easy to do this in Igor Pro when I played with its demo version. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] productivity tools in R?
Michael wrote: I saw my friend has a R Console window which has automatic syntax reminder when he types in the first a few letters of R command. And he's using R under MAC. Is that a MAC thing, or I could do the same on my PC Windows? Yes, the Mac GUI for R is a lot nicer than the Windows version. I guess it's just a matter of what interested the people who wrote each, as there's no technical reason it has to be that way. Maybe someone will port some of the Mac GUI's features over to the Windows version. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] can you tell what .Random.seed *was*?
Duncan Murdoch wrote: 1) can you tell me what my original set.seed() value was? (I wouldn't be able to figure it out, but maybe someone can) The only way I know is to test all 2^32 possible values of the seed. I think cryptographers would know faster ways. Well, I'm not a cryptographer, but I know a faster way: rainbow tables. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table Given that the algorithm to generate these images is known and that each seed always gives the same image as output, you can simply precompute all possible images, hash them using your favorite algorithm -- say, SHA-256 -- and record the seed-to-hash correspondence on disk. Then given an output image, you can hash it and use that to look up the seed. It can take a long time to generate all the images, but then you have database like lookup speeds for image-to-seed correspondence. This is not just a theoretical idea. There are underground sites where you can put in, say, an MD5 password hash and get out the likely password that was actually used. This allows a black hat to break into one site, grab their password hash database, reverse engineer the passwords, and then go use them to bang on the front door of other sites users of that site he first compromised also use. There are defenses against this: salting the passwords and using passwords too big to appear in rainbow tables are easiest. Now, if the seed was removed just before the values were generated, the seed would be generated from the system clock. If you knew the time that this occurred approximately, the search could be a lot faster. This also helps with the rainbow table approach. Given that the seed for the generation algorithm is always the current wall time, you can restrict the needed rainbow table size greatly. You simply have to know when the algorithm was first put into use, then start your rainbow table with that time's value as the first seed, and only compute up to now plus whatever you need for future operations. For instance, you can cover about 3 years worth of image production in about 1/45 the time as it takes to cover all 2^32 possible images. Say it takes a month to generate a rainbow table covering those 3 years. Full coverage would then take nearly 4 years. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] can you tell what .Random.seed *was*?
G. Jay Kerns wrote: I want it to be *difficult* for students to figure out the seed and automatically generate solutions on their own. Hmmm Would it really be a bad thing if someone reverse engineered this to generate answers given the problem set? If it's hard enough to do that, it'd be more worth solving than the given problem set. I call that extra credit. a brute force search of set.seed() is really pretty easy and fast... even for students at this level. Either you're misunderstanding Stavros' benchmark results, or I am. Could easily be the latter...I'm an R newbie. As far as I can tell, the inner part of the loop does very little. If that's right, Stavros is saying it will take 18 hours to try every possible seed when the algorithm based on that seed takes almost no time to run. But, if generating each problem set takes, say, a minute, it will take 4.7 million years to generate a complete rainbow table when there are 2^32 possible seeds. what if the Instructor inserted an *unknown* very large number of calls to the RNG near the beginning of the .Rnw (but after the set.seed)... and did not distribute this information to the students... that would make it much harder, yes? There are better ways. As above, one key to making rainbow tables impractical is making the per-iteration time long enough. Even if it only takes a second to generate each possible problem set, that's enough when multiplied by high enough powers of 2. The other key is using big enough powers of 2. I hadn't looked into R's random number generation before, but it appears quite robust. Seeding it with the current wall clock time (a 32-bit integer on most systems) is an insult to its capability. The default pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) in my copy of R is the Mersenne Twister, a truly awesome algorithm. It's capable of very high quality results, as long as you give it a good seed. It will take a vector of *many* integers as a seed, not just one. It's not clear to me from the R docs if you can pass an arbitrary array of integers with any value, or if it needs something special. Assuming you can give it any old passel of randomness as a seed, you just have to find a good source of randomness to create that seed. On a Linux box, you could concatenate several dozen bytes read from /dev/random, the current wall clock time in microseconds, the inode of the R script being run, the process ID of the R interpreter, and the current mouse cursor position into a single string. Feed all that into a hash algorithm, and break off pieces of that 4 bytes long, cast them to integers, and send that array of ints to set.seed(). If you use SHA-256 as the hash algorithm, that scheme should give you enough input randomness to get any of the possible 2^256 hash outputs, making that the amount of possible problem sets. That's more than a rainbow table buster...there aren't enough atoms in the visible universe to construct a computer big enough to cope with 2^256 possible outputs. That said, the quality of the PRNG just *allows* you to avoid screwing up. It doesn't make it impossible make a weak algorithm. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Do you use R for data manipulation?
Farrel Buchinsky wrote:
Is R an appropriate tool for data manipulation and data reshaping and data
organizing? I think so but someone who recently joined our group thinks not.
The new recruit believes that python or another language is a far better
tool for developing data manipulation scripts that can be then used by
several members of our research group. Her assessment is that R is useful
only when it comes to data analysis and working with statistical models.
It's hard to shift people's individual preferences, but impressive
objective comparisons are easy to come by. Ask her how many lines it
would take to do this trivial R task in Python:
data - read.csv('original-data.csv')
write.csv('scaled-data.csv', data * 10)
R's ability to do something to an entire data structure -- or a slice of
it, or some other subset -- in a single operation is very useful when
cleaning up data for presentation and analysis. Also point out how easy
it is to get data *out* of R, as above, not just into it, so you can
then hack on it in Python, if that's the better language for further
manipulation.
If she gives you static about how a few more lines are no big deal,
remind her that it's well established that bug count is always a simple
function of line count. This fact has been known since the 70's.
While making your points, remember that she has a good one, too: R is
not the only good language out there. You should learn Python while
she's learning R.
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Re: [R] Beyond double-precision?
joaks1 wrote: I need to perform some calculations with some extremely small numbers The R package Brobdingnag does this. It uses logarithmic representation, as recommended by others in this thread, but wraps it all up for you in a custom numeric class so you can use them as any other numeric type. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Brobdingnag/vignettes/brobpaper.pdf __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Plotting C++ output in R
andrew@lshtm.ac.uk wrote: I want to be able to continuously plot the output from the model in R each time a new run generates data. From the C++ program, run the R script that plots the data. Something like this: system(Rscript myplotter.R); That assumes Rscript is in the PATH, and that it works on Windows. I'll assume you can figure out the details. You might also consider making the C++ program write the R script, so bits can vary. For instance, each iteration of the model could write out to a different data file, then call R from a new thread, so the R analysis stage doesn't interfere with the generation of the next iteration's results. Remove the now-unwanted data file when system() returns, and end the thread. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] RES: R on netbooks et al?
Leandro Marino wrote: I use it on an ASUS EEE 701 PC! It works with some limitation, because this model have only 512mb of RAM. But it is working fine. The OS is Windows XP. Ditto, except that I put Ubuntu Eee on my 701. (Since renamed Easy Peasy http://www.geteasypeasy.com/) A nice thing about using Ubuntu is that R and a lot of common R packages are in the standard repositories. Start with apt-get install r-cran-base, and work from there with packages discovered via apt-cache search r-cran. Only thing I wish is that they'd update to R 2.8.1...the repository still only has 2.7.2. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Python and R
Esmail Bonakdarian wrote: I am just wondering if any of you are doing most of your scripting with Python instead of R's programming language and then calling the relevant R functions as needed? No, but if I wanted to do such a thing, I'd look at Sage: http://sagemath.org/ It'll give you access to a lot more than just R. Is there much of a performance hit either way? (as both are interpreted languages) Are you just asking, or do you have a particular execution time goal, which if exceeded would prevent doing this? I ask because I suspect it's the former, and fast enough is fast enough. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] R on Mobile Devices (Android)
Gustaf Rydevik wrote: 3.3.2 [...]No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built- in interpreter(s). and An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plugin architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. I'm not too familiar with programming speech, but it seems this would cover R, no? Mmmm...I think there's wiggle room here for a limited version of R. The first clause says you couldn't have an R interpreter on the device that downloaded an R script and ran it. It doesn't say you can't type an R script into the phone and run it there. They're trying to block things like Flash and Silverlight with this restriction. That, and the general security risks of running remotely-sourced content. The second clause says install.packages() won't be allowed. I don't see that it prevents you from distributing R with a pre-selected group of packages, however. Keep in mind that all apps have to be approved by Apple, who haven't been entirely fair in their selection criteria. And, you don't get to find out if they will accept the app until you finish it and submit it. You risk wasting a lot of time, doing the port and then being rejected. If you go ahead anyway, I hope you go beyond just customizing the stock keyboard. I'd like to see: - Instead of customizing the default keyboard, I'd rather have a calculator-like UI, with just a line or two of text at the top so you can see the expression, and the rest of the screen having an extended keyboard: letters, numbers, operator symbols, even custom buttons like an arrow button for assignment instead of having to type two math operators. - Automatic parens, brackets, and quotes inference: when you've typed the name of a known function, add open and closed parens, and put the cursor between them. In case of ambiguity -- can't do this for functions like print(), since you don't know if a dot is about to be typed to select a particular print method -- let user type open paren and add closed paren automatically. Similarly, when the user types a bracket, quote, etc., supply the matching one and put the cursor between them. Several text editors for Eclipse do this well, but not all. A tricky bit is editing, where adding another quote, for instance, might not require the matching one to be added. - Buttons for common functions, like plot() - A button for downloading a data set from a web or FTP server and assigning it to a variable. Basically, a wrapper around download.file() and read.table(), with automatic variable assignment and memory for the last variable name and URL used. This is what I mean by changing the UI to match the capabilities of the device. You'll probably end up excising a lot of stuff. PDF support for instance: unless Cocoa Touch includes access to PDF rendering abilities, I don't know that I'd bloat the binary by adding it, particularly with the lack of a user-visible file system. Yes, I'm aware that there are tools that let you poke around in the file system, but it's not the way the device is meant to be used. Maybe you could justify it if there were a built-in way to send the generated PDF off elsewhere, such as an email attachment. Bottom line: if it were available and worked well, I'd sure use it. I just don't think a straight port would do it for me. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] R on Mobile Devices (Android)
Harsh wrote: At the cost of sounding far-fetched and almost incredulous, I would like to know if any R user is remotely considering the use of R on Mobile devices, and Android in particular. In addition to the other objections in the other replies, I add this one: the assignment operator and the parens are up on ALT keys on the Android keyboard. Typing R expressions would be pretty painful. You can demo this by installing an ssh client and logging in remotely to a machine with R on it, and trying to use it remotely. A local one wouldn't be better...it might not even be faster, because the faster CPU on the machine running R might matter more than the speed of the network link between client and server. I briefly thought of what it would take to port R to an iPhone or iPod touch, and the keyboard issues would be even worse. Bottom line, R has the idiom of a real keyboard written into its bones. To be popular, a statistical analysis tool for such devices would have to work differently, taking advantage of the platform's native input mechanisms. mobile phone would allow for micro statistics to be collected from the log files reflecting number of calls dropped, average time spent talking, a time series of the amount of time taken for battery recharge, and a host of other information that could be collated and analyzed. I agree with the other person that the program to write to cover this case would be just a stat gatherer, which somehow gets the data off the device for analysis by R running elsewhere. It could be a web service, or you could write a CSV file that somehow gets downloaded from the device for use on the computer the phone syncs to. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Passing data among multiple instances
Feng Li wrote: I have two R instances running at the same time, On the same computer, or on different computers? Is the number of Rs likely to change, or will it always be just the two? Is this a simple one-off problem, or are you breaking the problem up into pieces so you can throw lots of hardware at it? Is there a simpler way to pass the data in A to B? Perhaps the simplest option is to write the data structure to a file, using any of the several R ways to do that. When instance 2 sees that a file is available, it slurps its contents in and works on it. The hard part is making the second instance wait until the whole file is written out by the first. You wouldn't want it to read in half the file then hit the end because the first process hasn't finished writing out the file. I don't see any good mechanism in R to fix this. A more robust option is to use sockets. This is suitable even within a single machine. See ?make.socket. This solves the how do I know when I've got the full data structure problem because the second process can just keep reading until it gets an error indicating that the remote peer closed the connection. Once you have the data structure in string form, you can eval() it to get an R object suitable for munching on. Figuring out how to pass the data might be the hardest part. deparse() might be the easiest way. If you're hoping to scale this up to lots of processes, look into Rmpi. This provides a very clean way for an R program on one computer to start slaves on other computers and then pass data to them in native R structures. Setting up MPI itself is not trivial, however. It's best when you already have a cluster of computers linked with MPI. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
[R] Statistics today on xkcd
http://xkcd.com/539/ Not entirely on topic here, but how often do you see a box plot in a cartoon? __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] How to import HTML and SQL files
Arup wrote: I can't import any HTML or SQL files into R..:confused: Yeah, I'm confused, too. What exactly is it you're trying to do? Not the technical task you asked about, but the effect you're trying to achieve? Can you give details about the exact nature of your data sources, or, better, examples? I ask because actually importing HTML and SQL files is almost certainly the wrong approach. You almost never want to handle texts in either language directly in R. For SQL, you usually don't have SQL files: files literally containing SQL queries. Or if you do happen to have SQL query files, you probably don't want to parse them with R. I expect what you really want is to be able to query a database using SQL. For that, look up DBI on CRAN. This will let you connect R to a database server, and use SQL to get data from it in a format that R can process directly. For HTML, the problem is that HTML is a very difficult language to parse correctly in the general case. Much of the reason for that is that few web pages are actually legal HTML, but browsers will quietly cope with many classes of errors. To parse such stuff in R, it's usually best to take a case-by-case approach, matching particular structures within the file so you can extract the few bits of data you want. You might want to post a snippet of the HTML here to get suggestions. If you really do have to be able to accept arbitrary HTML, I'd suggest running the HTML through a filter that converts it to XHTML, then use the XML package from CRAN to load it up into R. You might also want to look into the RCurl package, if the HTML lives on a web server. You can download it directly instead of saving it out to an HTML file. Then you can use the methods above to process it. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Problems in Recommending R
Stavros Macrakis wrote: anti-alias the demonstration graphic. The current graphic makes R graphics seem (falsely!) to be very primitive. I'm afraid I don't know how to do the anti-aliasing myself. Simply re-plotting it in 2.8.1 built with Cairo support produces something better: http://etr-usa.com/tmp/swiss-cairo-281.png The text is antialiased, as are some of the graph lines. The dots in the largest plot aren't, though. Outputting to PDF and then scaling down does even better: http://etr-usa.com/tmp/swiss-from-pdf.png The command at the end to do this is: pdf(file=swiss.pdf, width=12, height=8) The R webmasters are welcome to use either of these in place of the current graphic, but it might be good to change the script to fix up some of the changes in the way the script is interpreted first. Fair warning: I won't be hosting these pictures for very long. Download 'em if you want 'em now. Replacing the fixed-width, typewriter-style font with something a bit more elegant might also be good The choice of fonts on the web is pretty limited, unless you want to get clever. I prefer to work with the few standard web fonts, building up improved styles relative to the defaults with CSS. It might be interesting to keep the current font, but experiment with letter spacing, for instance. Far more serious problems: - Use of frames. The usability problems of frames are well known, and are justified only in a few special cases. A content-heavy site like r-project.org is not one of them, if only because of the bookmarking issue. - Use of Times as the standard font. Times was commissioned by a newspaper, with a primary goal of reducing paper costs. Its creators succeeded by creating something compact and spindly, and thus uncommonly ugly and hard to read considering its popularity. It is marginally justifiable on paper, its design target. It should never be used on computer screens; at least, not until they get to 300 dpi or so. In general, use sans serif fonts on computer screens. There are rare exceptions, like Georgia (designed for PC screens from the start) and Courier (heavy slab serifs that come out okay on low-res screens). Look at the default fonts used on every OS, and every device with an LCD screen you own: they're all sans serif, aren't they? There's a reason for that... - HTML tables using the default 3D chiseled look. Nothing says 1995 better, except maybe blink tags, rainbow colored separator bars, and under construction graphics. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Problems in Recommending R
friedrich.lei...@stat.uni-muenchen.de wrote:
For technical reasons there are some conditions: the homepage is
maintained via SVN like the R sources, so all should be plain HTML, no
content management system etc.
Consider using a static templating system, or a higher-level document
language like DocBook's website variant; perhaps even Sweave?
The idea is, you write your pages in a non-HTML format that gets
compiled to HTML, just like building a program. Such tools let you do
things like add a common navigation bar to all pages, so you can stop
using frames for the nav bar, add common tags to all pages such as CSS
includes, generate parts of the page programmatically, etc.
I have sites using GTML and WPP for this:
http://sunnyspot.org/wpp/
http://www2.lifl.fr/~beaufils/gtml/
Unfortunately, both are basically abandonware now. I keep using them
because they still work, but if I were starting a new site design, I'd
first look for better-maintained tools.
One option would be to build something similar in R. A simple
templating system might only take a few thousand LOC. R is flexible
enough that the page source could be R code. Something like this:
#!/usr/bin/Rscript
require('rhtml')
foo - 'bits'
page - ('
pPage body text goes here./p
pSome [[foo]] of the page can be replaced, or you can
call functions to calculate bits, such as to insert the
current date: [[R(date())]]/p
')
rhtml::generate(page, navbar = 'templates/navbar.R',
header = 'templates/header.R')
Call the script index.R, run it, and get index.html as output.
A side benefit is that you could generate inline graphics with R. This
would fix the antialiasing problem brought up above: as better graphics
drawing code gets put into R, just rebuild the web site on a machine
with the current version of R.
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Re: [R] Problems in Recommending R
Neil Shephard wrote: Perhaps this is a deliberate design and serves as an intelligence test. If you can't navigate through to find the correct download you're really going to struggle getting started with R ;-D Yyeahhh...look how much that sort of stance has helped the cause of Linux on the desktop. World domination has been a year or two away for the last 10 years. (Speaking as one who uses Linux every day, and used it as his main desktop at home for many years before switching to OS X.) It's easy to pick apart the 6-step process posted above point by point, but the main thing to realize is that there really is no good technical reason why there have to be 6 decision points between arriving at the home page and getting an installable package. Take a look at how, say, getfirefox.com works. The download button is the biggest thing on the home page, impossible to miss. The site detects what platform you're on, and sets up the button to download that platform's latest version. No doubt they're using a CDN or mirror system on the back end, but detection of geographical location is done automatically based on client IP, not bothering the user. I think that's the earlier poster's main point: this can be a one-click process. Why make the human tell the computer things it already knows? __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] How do I get my IT department to bless R?
Stavros Macrakis wrote: Condescendingly assuming that the IT department is run by idiots whose decisions are ruled by emotional attachments (as one correspondent suggested), or that they are irrationally prejudiced against free/open source, and that it is obvious and irrefutable that you know better than them (as was implied by some correspondents), may make you feel better, but probably won't help much. I assume that I am that one correspondent. My longer post above was one-sided to drive a point. I suspect everyone here is a logically-leaning sort, who has more than once fallen into the trap of thinking that if you just present a logical argument, your interlocutor will have no choice but to come over to your side of the issue. This can work, but it's not all that common. A likelier path to success includes an element of emotional jujutsu. Something I neglected to touch on above is that we should also be aware of our own emotional tie-ups. Most of those of us here *like* R, and not entirely for rational reasons. Perhaps you enjoy the aesthetics of the language; maybe you think the default graph types look especially nice; maybe you think free software is the only ethical sort; maybe some of the people here are friends of yours. If someone tells us R is no good, those emotions can turn on us, and you get a typical ugly advocacy battle. On the other hand, our feelings about R and its community can give us a reason to develop and pursue an emotionally forceful argument, which can win the day where a purely rational one wouldn't. It takes a certain amount of charisma or backing force for this to work; emotion again. It also won't help much if you don't explain clearly and calmly *why* exactly you need to use R for your work. Certainly. Just don't rely wholly on rational reasons. Don't forget that you are trying to change a human organization, and that this is much harder than swapping two columns in an R matrix. Some companies will be more careful, wanting to vet any software that can open a TCP connection (which most non-trivial software systems, including both Excel and R, can). Well, yes, I suppose I can't argue that there are probably some companies that do actually do this. I can't prove otherwise. What is obvious from just with a quick look-around, though, is that the vast majority of organizations don't. If they did, it wouldn't have taken a decade to get from ActiveX to UAC. Even if the IT department *is* behaving irrationally, responding irrationally yourself probably won't help your cause. I never said you should pursue the cause irrationally. I just said you should never forget that those you're trying to convince are never wholly rational. (A wholly rational human being is actually a pretty scary thing, so thankfully rare.) If you pursue your campaign thinking your audience will respond to your questions with T's and F's, the only way you can succeed is if they were inclined to support you regardless. Otherwise, you are lost. By the way, another reading suggestion I kicked myself for leaving out: http://www.issurvivor.com/ http://weblog.infoworld.com/lewis/ Want to know how IT management thinks and how to work with them to effect change? Read Bob's blog and InfoWorld column. Some selections that are particularly on-point here: http://www.weblog.keepthejointrunning.com/wordpress/?p=1594 http://www.weblog.keepthejointrunning.com/wordpress/?p=1603 http://www.weblog.keepthejointrunning.com/wordpress/?p=1623 http://www.weblog.keepthejointrunning.com/wordpress/?p=2552 http://www.weblog.keepthejointrunning.com/wordpress/?p=2691 __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] Problems in Recommending R
Neil Shephard wrote: Why make the human tell the computer things it already knows? Because sometimes the human has a better idea as to what they want than the computer? I think the computer can guess the right answer in the solid majority of cases. Up in the 90th percentile certainly, probably much higher. It gets all it needs to make that guess in the HTTP request. If the default doesn't work, fine, the user can go through the same 6-step process as now, losing nothing. This is no argument against trying to make a good default. Example - I've found it infuriating when I've wanted to download browser source code (as the distro I use compiles from source) for firefox and only been presented with pre-compiled binaries (if I'm browsing at home) or windows versions (if I'm at work), then wasting more time trying to find FTP mirrors where the most recent source tar-balls are available, and as I remember that took far longer than being able to choose what OS and version I wanted from a series of clearly written pages. Granted, Mozilla's leaning strongly toward the end-user binary-only case. People in the R world are more likely to want source than Firefox users. But, it's still less than 1% of all downloads, I'd bet. __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] How do I get my IT department to bless R?
Daniel Viar wrote: I'd like to get our company to feel comfortable with open source Anyone still denying, here in 2009, that open source offers serious business value is a dinosaur, doomed to extinction. Their cerebella have calcified. The balance tipped a decade ago. Just like the real dinosaurs, extinction will only be fast on a geological time scale. Don't expect your job to evaporate next year because they won't use open source. Just expect that over the coming decades to be routinely outcompeted by the mammals. Chances are, your company actually has embraced open source in some way. One facile argument is to ask if they use Google. Yes? Google uses Linux, MySQL, and yes, even R, so your company does too, if indirectly. Likely, some bit of open source has crept into your actual operation elsewhere besides your little R enclave. How does one get an all Microsoft shop on board with allowing users to user R? Proceed the same way you already are. It is as Gandhi said: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Every revolution in corporate IT happened this way, including Microsoft's own rise to dominance. (Remember Big Blue?) __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] How do I get my IT department to bless R?
Erik Iverson wrote: First, you should try to figure out why they would not want you to run R, so you can address those reasons specifically. Reasons imply reasoning. It's usually the case that decisions like this are made on an emotional basis, not a rational one. All of my business associates use Microsoft. All of my friends use Microsoft. Microsoft is dominant. I like Microsoft. These are not reasons. They are expressions of emotional state. Envision a person saying such things wrapped in a security blanket printed with the colorful Windows flag logo, sucking their thumb. Works, doesn't it? They are telling you that Microsoft makes them feel comfortable. I don't call this vision into your mind to belittle the people saying these things. We all have these emotional responses; everyone can be tarred by this brush. The point is, if you want to fight such a thing, you can be as rational as you like, but never forget that your opponent is not being rational. Tell them this other blanket is better, and they'll deny it. Give them the other blanket, and they'll either drop it or attack you for offering it. Rip away their blanket and you will face a tantrum. A true revolution is unstoppable; open source is such a thing. Eventually your opponent will pick up the other blanket all on their own. You can push things along faster with the tools of statecraft. This field has two main branches. One branch is war. This is the practice of applying a combination of superior will, strategy, and force to defeat an opponent. This is the rational argument option. Yes, I call that war. Why? It's the emotion vs. rationality thing again. You're using the wrong tool for the job, so your only hope of success is to make the opponent capitulate through that combination of superior will, strategy and force. Since the OP isn't in a position to mount a frontal assault, this leaves only the uglier option, guerrilla war. This has a good outcome even less often than traditional war. The other branch is diplomacy. This takes longer, is not as direct, and requires a deft touch, but usually works better in the long term. It also requires a certain amount of backing strength. You can't hope to succeed at diplomacy when there is no possibility of war. If war is out, diplomacy is out, too. If I read the OP's post correctly, he isn't in a position to directly wield strength, so he'll need to work through channels that give him access to that strength. He needs to find strong allies, and support them. If there are no such allies, he has no way to prosecute war, and thus no way to back diplomacy. That forces him down a minor branch of statecraft, which I call the Switzerland model: keep your head down, and continue to be useful to those around you who practice the other forms of statecraft. There are other ways to run a state, but they don't work. Reading suggestions for anyone who thinks I'm full of it: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/132/132.txt http://www.miyamotomusashi.com/gorin.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15772/15772-h/15772-h.htm http://catb.org/esr/writings/ __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Re: [R] How do I get my IT department to bless R?
Michael Olschimke wrote: Could you please share a link to the NY Times article? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/technology/business-computing/07program.html __ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
