We spend too much time musing about the Data Deluge, I fear, at the expense of talking about another component that has made citizen-statisticianship possible: accessible statistical software. “Accessible” in (at least) two senses: affordable and ready-to-use. This summer, Chris Wild demonstrated his group’s software iNZight at the Census@ School workshop in San Diego. iNZight is produced out of the University of Auckland, and is intended for kids to use along with the Census@Schools data.
I have been thinking for quite some time about the computing skills that graduate students will need as they exit our program. It is absolutely clear to me (not necessarily all of my colleagues) that students need computing skills. First, a little background…
I teach in the Quantitative Methods in Education program within the Educational Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota. After graduating, many of our students take either academic jobs, a job working in testing companies (e.
I attended useR! 2012 this past summer and one of the highlights of the conference was a presentation by Yihui Xie and JJ Allaire on knitr. As an often frustrated user of Sweave, I was very impressed with how they streamlined the process of integrating R with LaTeX and other document types, and I was excited to take advantage of the tools. It also occurred to me that these tools, especially the simpler markdown language, could be useful to the students in my introductory statistics course.
