Hey Folks! I just got back from the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM, for short), where I was happy to see way more Macs in the hands of high-powered presenters than I would ever have seen in the past. You see, the 500 pound gorilla in the statistical world is a package called SAS, and though SAS runs on both MS Windoze and Unix (and used to run on Macs), the SAS folks haven't seen fit to get it running on Mac OS X. So... many statisticians believe there is One True Stats Package and One True Operating System.
This year, though, it was good to see . The Big Event Talk (in front of roughly 2000 people) was given by a guy from Stanford (David Donoho) with a nice 17 inch powerbook, glowing in the front of the darkened hall. People were commenting afterwards about how nice the graphics looked (lots of movie clips and such) and how easy it was for him to go from application to application (even though he was being fairly clumsy about it). . At the session (series of 3 or 4 related talks) about the future of statistical computing, all of the presenters (speakers) had powerbooks. Also - when I was in the biostatistics dept. at Johns Hopkins a few years back (it is a very good biostat dept.), I was the sole Mac user. Now it seems that most of the department uses Macs, thanks to the stability and large open-source community in the Unix world. To boot, UCLA now uses entirely Macs for statistics... [which they've done since about 2001] and has them all hooked into a big supercomputer using Apple's free XGrid software. Nice to see. I hope that some of the other folks were noticing, too. Bill -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 2373 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20040812/5a332866/attachment.bin
