David Heiser wrote:
> Much of Cryer's complaints, just don't hold up after deeply looking into
> them. I havre spent a lot of time on the issue of Excel's statistical
> capabilities, and am not able to support many of Cryer's complaints.
Please explain... it looked to me as if he provided adequate evidence
for many of his complaints. Which of them can you not support?
I don't consider the examples of graphics that he gives to be
acceptable - do you? No doubt one can produce better graphics by
changing the settings - but why should one have to?
Cryer gives several examples of help windows that I would say betray a
deep ignorance of statistics on the part of the writer. Do you disagree?
Or do you think that users have no right to expect better?
Most authorities do not consider the so-called "computational formula"
to be numerically well-conditioned, and hold that in extreme cases it
can even lead to negative sums of squares (often followed shortly by a
program crash as the computer attempts to take the square root of a
negative number.) Are they wrong?
[The title "computational formula" dates back to a time in which the
use of very little memory was a virtue outweighing accuracy, either on
mechanical calculators in which "memory" was a pencil and scratchpad or
in primitive scientific calculators with only a few storage registers.
Sadly, this has misled many into thinking that it is a good formula
computationally in any other regard. It isn't.]
As you pointed out, "the IT revolution is here." This does NOT mean
that everybody will soon have to code their own kludge in BASIC (Visual
or otherwise) - that was the 1960's. It means that reliable, mature
statistical software is now available.
If you want to use an outdated formula "out on the surface" to see how
it works, most stats packages will permit you to do this. But the
criteria for choosing algorithms for serious work have moved beyond how
easy they are for amateurs (or specialists in other fields) to code
themselves.
-Robert Dawson
.
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