I agree with Thomas and Georg: A 40 minute intro should be mostly Marketing and very little "how to".
I think you'll have a more effective sales job if you target, say, 4 examples averaging 5 slides each plus some general overview, max 25-30 slides. If I had sufficient prep time and a few collaborators among physicists, geographers, etc., I might get their help in preparing examples, showing how they would do something in Matlab or Scilab or something else vs. R. And I'd end with a discussion of technical support via an R site search and r-help and showing a list of available contributed packages. I'd do a couple of searches for physics and geographical questions. ODESOLVE, maps, etc. Maybe pick examples that are part of the help files. Then show, here is how I find X, here is the vignette, help or whatever.
Is it fair to say that R is rapidly becoming (if it is not already) the primary platform of choice for new statistical algorithm development? I think they might be interested in a brief overview of the contributed software. If this is an academic audience, they might like to know how easy it is to contribute software, plus journal on statistical computing and graphics, etc.
hope this helps. Good Luck!
spencer graves
I often give talks like that. The thing that has impressed audiences the most is a multi-panel lattice graphic with 2 classification variables and in each panel a scatterplot and a lowess trend line. A single page with 24 small high-resolution histograms also seems to impress people. The nomogram function in the Design package seems to also connect with non-statisticians, as does latex(describe(mydataframe)) using Hmisc. People like seeing in the latex previewer some output that mixes tabular summaries and graphics.
Frank Harrell
Thomas Schönhoff wrote:
Hello,
Am Freitag, 25. Februar 2005 22:37 schrieb Dr Carbon:
If _you_ were asked to give a 40 minute dog and pony show about R for a group of scientists ranging from physicists to geographers what would you put in? These people want to know what R can do.
I'm thinking about something like:
A. Overview
B. data structures
C. arithmetic and manipulation
D. reading data
E. linear models using glm
F. graphics
G. programming
H. other tricks like rpart or time series analysis?
If your audience is well known I would be inclined to target some (simple) examples derived from physics and geography to demonstrate basic ideas of working with R, similar like the ones listed above.
Well, 40 minutes are not too long, so I recommend to simplify your presentation as much as you can. You want teach them R in 40 minutes but rather tend to confuse them if you don't shorten your plan a bit.
I.E. teaching programming in R in a few minutes for scientists who are not at all acustomed to programming is much overhead, I think.
Well, it's up to your estimation on what is expected to follow your presentation. If you are sure that most of them know enough programming to unterstand the basic concepts in R-programming, everything will be fine!
If not, I'd recommend to concentrate on basic operations (data structures, arithmetic and manipulation, import/export data and some often used default statistical procedures demonstrating common tasks (is time series analysis important in physics or geography, I don't know??), including some remarks on diffenrences to widespread statistical packages like SPSS or SAS, maybe LispStat.
Finally there shouuld be some extended view of available ressources (manuals, FAQ, community) as a starter to learn, use and program R by themselves.
I think this would do for a 40 minutes presentation without taking the risk to deter people due to overcomplexity.
regards Thomas
-- Frank E Harrell Jr Professor and Chair School of Medicine Department of Biostatistics Vanderbilt University
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