On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 10:50:03AM +0100, Federico Calboli wrote: > > On 12 May 2008, at 01:05, Andrew Robinson wrote: > > >On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 10:34:40AM +1200, Rolf Turner wrote: > >> > >>On 12/05/2008, at 9:45 AM, Andrew Robinson wrote: > >> > >>>On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 07:52:50PM +0100, Federico Calboli wrote: > >>>> > >>>>The main point of my question is, having a 3 way anova (or > >>>>ancova, if > >>>>you prefer), with *no* nesting, 2 fixed effects and 1 random > >>>>effect, > >>>>why is it so boneheaded difficult to specify a bog standard fully > >>>>crossed model? I'm not talking about some rarified esoteric model > >>>>here, we're talking about stuff tought in a first year Biology > >>>>Stats > >>>>course here[1]. > >>> > >>>That may be so, but I've never needed to use one. > >> > >> So what? This is still a standard, common, garden-variety > >> model that you will encounter in exercises in many (if not > >> all!) textbooks on experimental design and anova. > > > >To reply in similar vein, so what? Why should R-core or the R > >community feel it necessary to reproduce every textbook example? How > >many times have *you* used such a model in real statistical work, > >Rolf? > > There is a very important reason why R (or any other stats package) > should *easily* face the challenge of bog standard models: because it > is a *tool* for an end (i.e. the analysis of data to figure out what > the heck they tell us) rather than a end in itself.
But a tool that mostly (entirely?) appears in textbooks. > Bog standard models are *likely* to be used over and over again > because they are *bog standard*, and they became such by being used > *lots*. Well. I have documentation relevant to nlme that goes back about 10 years. I don't know when it was first added to S-plus, but I assume that it was about then. Now, do you think that if the thing that you want to do was really bog standard, that noone would have raised a fuss or solved it within 10 years? > If someone with a relatively easy model cannot use R for his job s/he > will use something else, and the R community will *not* increase in > numbers. Since R is a *community driven project*, you do the math on > what that would mean in the long run. Fewer pestering questions? ;) Andrew -- Andrew Robinson Department of Mathematics and Statistics Tel: +61-3-8344-6410 University of Melbourne, VIC 3010 Australia Fax: +61-3-8344-4599 http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~andrewpr http://blogs.mbs.edu/fishing-in-the-bay/ ______________________________________________ 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.
