Tuesday, November 28, 2006

The R Project for Statistical Computing

The R Project for Statistical Computing

The R Project for Statistical Computing is an Open Source application with binary installation routines for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is much much more than a simple statistical package. R provides an interpreted statistical programming language that looks a lot like S. The resemblance is so strong that I can use my old S language reference books to work with R.

R provides a graphing facility that goes far beyond what you might have used in spreadsheets like Excel.

R version 2.4.0 was just released last month (October 3).

Monday, November 06, 2006

Facing Facebook and Other Social Networking Technologies

Tracy Mitrano and Anita Rho, both of Cornell University, are leading an online workshop on November 8 to explore ways in which colleges and universities can use social networking tools: Facing Facebook and Other Social Networking Technologies. The announcement seems facebook (and marketing) oriented - If you’re starting a capital campaign at your institution, why not use social networking technologies for your alumni too, so they can create communities, post video and photos past and present, and "poke" old friends? - rather than academically oriented. Online studygroups, school clubs, political action, hobbies and recreation