On 06-Sep-05 Mulholland, Tom wrote: > For some reason (probably that our organisation has blocked the site) I > could not see the original articles that prompted the post. I however > immediately assumed that this was precipitated by Tufte and his > comments about PowerPoint (I recall seeing a good example of PowerPoint > on his site) http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint > > When this first came up I recall some dispute about the comments > www.sociablemedia.com/articles_dispute.htm and that John Fox did > something http://ils.unc.edu/~jfox/powerpoint/introduction.html that I > enjoyed reading. > > Other links that are lying on my computer are > "In defense of PowerPoint" > http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/in_defense_of_powerp.html > and "Does PowerPoint make you stupid?" at http://www.presentations.com/presentations/delivery/ article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000482464 > > Tom
Thanks, Tom, for these pointers to interesting discussions! One must of course agree with the general comments to the effect that the quality and merits of a presentation are the result of choices made by the person who designed it, and not primarily due to the software itself. It is also true that software such as PowerPoint provides ready-made mechanisms for linking-in a great variety of content, thereby making it -- in principle -- easier for the designer to choose judiciously what would be best for the result they wish to achieve and -- in principle -- to design an outstanding presentation. It is nevertheless still true that in practice the result is often dreadful, for reasons which largely reside in the software (but which take effect by virtue of user deficiency). I tend to put this down to the provision of so-called "Wizards" -- in reality electronic snake-oil merchants -- the protoype of which is the dancing paper-clip masquerading as an "Office Assistant". There are other "resources" which can have similar effects -- "spell-checkers", "grammar-checkers", auto-formatters which brush you aside and re-arrange your intentions and which can be difficult to evade: indeed, one can form the impression that it has been deliberately made difficult for users to ignore these things and make their own choices. In case you may wonder how I hope to bring this On-Topic, it is as follows. The result of such things is that users' thought and practice become software-led and software-driven. The software is both carrot and stick. The user is the donkey. In contrast, as software and in its implementation as a compendium of resources and documentation, R expects users to know what they are doing and to understand the rationale of the methods. R also requires users to have the capability to locate necessary inforamtion in the documentation. Indeed, one might even describe R documentation as notoriously unintrusive! So using R should educate users in thoughtful and judicious use of statistical software. The same cannot be said so wholeheartedly of S-Plus. While the latter is basically routine-equivalent to R, and the help and menu systems properly used can also encourage judicious use, there is nevertheless a superficial aspect which can seduce users into a "check-box" mentality; and the printed manuals strike me as both unclear and unduly prescriptive. In other words, while S-Plus may tend to attract users who do not know what to do and who expect the softare to tell them what to do (and subsequently will not know what they have done), R will not. This spartan environment is lean and healthy, so successful R users will become lean and healthy! Not donkeys, but mountain-goats. R-help is there for those who need it, and very few responses to queries have been at all superficial. Often it is clear that respondents themselves have had to think before being able to come up with an answer, and very often the response urges the questioner to think! Indeed, evidence of thought on the part of the questioner is something of a pre-requisite for getting a response. The underlying thought behind all this is that there is something of an under-current of disquiet in the statistical community about "software-driven analysis", an increasingly prevalent abuse of our subject. Occasionally it comes to the surface. Crass abuses such as are encouraged by PowerPoint snake-oil and the like are obvious; but once we perceive them we can be sensitised to similar but more subtle dangers in other software. Conscious remedial effort would be a good thing, and R seems to be an excellent vehicle for it. Thanks for reading so far! Best wishes to all, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 06-Sep-05 Time: 14:29:26 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------ ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html