Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!dgp.toronto.edu!doc
Newsgroups: ut.dcs.hci
From: doc@dgp.toronto.edu (Blaine Price)
Subject: Re: /local/bin/unixstat
Message-ID: <1990Feb27.004330.18285@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
References: <1990Feb26.155935.16845@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <1990Feb26.173656.17187@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <1990Feb26.223013.17768@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Date: 27 Feb 90 05:43:30 GMT
Lines: 29

elf@dgp.toronto.edu (Eugene Fiume) writes:

>Funny, it seemed to me that many of the functions provided were precisely
>the sorts of technical tools you would need to do decent statistics.  If
>you want a Mac interface to give you a warm soft feeling, that's one
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
	    [ooooh, lets get the interface people up in arms, eh? :-)]
>thing.  If you want to do proper data analysis, you have to know the cold
>hard facts.  All of the terms mentioned can be found in a good stats book.

Yes, even my clearly impoverished undergraduate education introduced me
to most of the "terms" used, and I even had to apply them in another 
science (when you study population genetics they kind of want some 
interesting results after you've drugged and counted a few thousand 
fruit flies).  

We can argue interfaces until the Drosophilla Melanogastra come home, 
but given the choice of packages with equal power and the choice of a 
point and click "idiot" interface or a unix command line interface and
a stack of man pages, I'll take the mouse.  Is it intuitive what the
arguments are for the "features" command? (tabulate features of items)
Or better yet, the aptly named "dm" command?

My point:  let's put "ease of use" high on the shopping list, maybe right
after "powerful enough for our purposes."  And we can assume that our users
passed their required second year stats course and can handle ANalysis Of
VAriance or CHI-squares tests without hurting their brains too much...  :-)

						_doc