Posts Tagged software

Statistical software package R in the New York Times

Posted by jasonwong in academia on September 16th, 2009

Even though this New York Times article is a little old (it is from January 2009), the profile of the statistical package named “R” (yes, the letter R), highlights the free, open-source statistical software package in a wonderful light.

The problem: For many researchers that deal with statistics, the options for software packages are few, far between, and expensive. SAS, Statistical Analysis Software, doesn’t even bother listing its prices on its website (believe me, I looked!) and SPSS, Statistical Package for Social Sciences, is $700 for the “basic” stats package and $600 for the “advanced” package.

The problem, 2: Data mining, which is all about extracting useful information out of piles of data, is a big buzzword with businesses. For example, grocery stores have immense amounts of data about everyone’s shopping habits thanks to those discount cards. But what good is all that data if you can’t make sense of it? There is a lot of money to be made from this, and companies like SAS and SPSS are aiming their products at this lucrative market. In fact, SPSS just got bought by IBM – I guarantee you IBM has no interest in developing reasonably-priced software for psychologists to use.

The solution: Free, open-source software developed by researchers for researchers: R, also known as “The R Project for Statistical Computing.” It does almost all the stats that researchers need to use. The best part is that, because R is open-source, many others have contributed packages that extend R and give it new functionality, and anyone can even program their own R functions. So R is an ideal framework for doing nearly any kind of statistical analysis. It’s free, and while there is a learning curve (a fairly steep one at that), it is a worthwhile thing to know.

And yeah – about that learning curve. Well, something like SPSS is designed to give you a nice-looking GUI, and statistics generally become point and click.

spss

R, however, is command-line based, so you type your commands, view your statistics in text form instead of a pretty table, and the graphs pop up in a separate window.

r

It is not the worst thing in the world, but it is a totally different way of thinking – if someone is not a programmer, they will have a harder time picking up R. However, the skills you gain (and the money you save!) are well worth the trouble.

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Ubuntu Installation Instructions: The Power of Open Source

Posted by jasonwong in social on May 3rd, 2009

I received some feedback on the last post where I discussed the Ubuntu installation rules. A very nice person noticed an error in Step 7 and told me what to change. Additionally, that user also made the changes to the page itself, since it was a Wiki.

A wiki allows anyone to come in and make changes to the page, which means a site can access the talent of their user base. Therefore, I went ahead and made a couple of changes that hopefully made the Mac OS X installation instructions more clear. Wikis exemplify the power of open source, with a community of users contributing to make something better. Oftentimes it is programmers, but sometimes the improvements come from regular users. That desire to improve what gives us joy is a factor of psychology that open source exploits, and everyone is the better for it.

Check out the new installation instructions here.

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Office 2007 on a netbook: Not designed for small screens

Posted by jasonwong in bad design on April 28th, 2009

I installed Office 2007 (the new one with the ribbon menu system) on my Dell Inspiron mini 9 netbook. Netbooks are made to be small and light by sacrificing power, speed, and storage space. It runs Word surprisingly well, but when I opened it for the first time, I was kind of shocked.

Netbooks have a small screen – my 9″ screen has a resolution of 1024×600. I am sure that Microsoft did not plan on Office being used at such a small resolution; after all, big LCD monitors are the norm. So it’s not a huge usability knock against Microsoft. But nonetheless, here is what I saw (minus the pixel measurements, of course):

word2k7_netbook

The ribbon takes up a HUGE amount of screen real estate! Combined with the Taskbar that I keep at the top of my screen (I’m a Mac user at heart), 170 vertical pixels (out of 600) are gone. The default New Document screen shows a small border and the headers as well, so the point at which you actually start typing is nearly 290 pixels down screen. This leaves you with about another 290 pixels to work with! Only half the screen.

Now, of course, you can scroll up to hide the header, change the document view to see just the text, hide the ribbon menu, and implement a host of other strategies to make the text your main focus. I plan on doing that and I credit Microsoft for allowing the flexibility of doing that. Still, it was shocking nonetheless to open Word 2007 for the first time and barely see any document at all.

By the way, in case anyone is curious, here is PowerPoint. Since you often need to see the entire slide to do your work… well, this is pretty darn small – about 330 pixels! This is definitely more of a problem.

pp2k7_netbook

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Ubuntu Install Instructions: Confusing and Non-Working

Posted by jasonwong in user testing on April 23rd, 2009

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution that is fairly popular these days. It mostly lies in the realm of computer enthusiasts, but more and more regular people are trying it out. I recently got a Dell Inspiron mini 9 netbook that I loaded with Windows XP. However, Ubuntu just released a new version of Ubuntu today, so I figured I would try it.

The newest version has a “Netbook remix” edition, which is streamlined for these underpowered little machines that often don’t come with a CD-ROM drive. Mine doesn’t, but Ubuntu has instructions for how to put the image on a USB flash drive. My netbook can boot from that drive and install Ubuntu that way. I figured, why not. Here are the instructions for OS X, which is my main operating system (website here):

ubuntu

I am pretty comfortable with the Terminal, so I didn’t think it would be a big deal. I even managed to get up to Step 5 without getting confused. Then comes Step 6.

From Step 5, I determined that the device node for my flash drive was, in fact, /dev/disk2. So Step 6 says to Run diskutil unmountDisk /dev/device/node. Two issues. Firstly, the command is listed in monospace type, and this convention typically means you should type the command in exactly as you read it. However, you are SUPPOSED to replace /dev/device/node with the device node name you got from Step 5.

Secondly, the device node name from Step 5 was /dev/disk2. The instructions show /dev/device/node – three slashes instead of my two. Was I missing something? Did I need /dev/disk2/something else? Apparently not. I WAS supposed to replace /dev/device/node with /dev/disk2. That does not match in terms of the number of items between slashes, so knowing what to replace with what was not apparent.

So, on to Step 7. Execute sudo dd if=/path/to/downloaded.img of=/dev/device/node bs=1M. Again, there is the problem that /path/to/downloaded.img needs to be replaced by the actual path of your disk image. But once I passed that hurdle, I got the following error message:

dd: bs: illegal numeric value

That, of course, is a technical problem, and not a human factors problem. What IS a human factors problem, though? A simple set of 8 instructions that are confusing, unclear, and don’t even work!

That bodes poorly for actually using Ubuntu, doesn’t it? I think it does.

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Safari 4: Top Sites vs. History CoverFlow view

Posted by jasonwong in data visualization, visual search on February 28th, 2009

Safari is a web browser developed by Apple and is primarily used on Macintosh systems, though there is a Windows version available. They just released Safari 4 Beta, so it’s not quite ready for primetime, but it’s close.

There are several great new features. One of which is called Top Sites. In place of a home page (though you can still set a home page), you get a panoramic display of 9, 16, or 25 of the sites that you visit the most. It’s displayed dramatically, arranged so you can see all your sites at a single glance. You can move sites, get rid of them, and pin them to a certain location if you want. The thumbnails are updated periodically and starred if they’re changed. Handy.

safari_topsites

Another feature is a visual browsing history. This is typically shown as a list of sites you’ve visited, going backwards in time. The list isn’t especially helpful, since all you have to go on are the URLs (because http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&item=320344855221 is not helpful) and the page titles, which are sometimes helpful. Having a visual for each page in your history, though, is great – it’s way easier to recognize visual things visually. Apple implements this feature using CoverFlow, which looks like this.

safari_coverflow

Now, it’s visual – the item you’re focused on is presented fully, and the items before and after are pretty visible. Trying to look at sites three or four items away, however, is unhelpful – you can’t see much detail in the site. All you can see if the left or right margin of the page, which tells you very little. Instead, if history was implemented like Top Sites was, where you could see all (or at least more) of each site, the feature would be more useful because you could more easily identify the site you wanted to go back to.

It turns out that this issue has already been discussed here before. Window switching in OS X using Expose (where you can see all the windows) was compared to doing it in Windows (where you can only see part of the window), and it was the same argument. Interfaces where you can see more of each window allows you to pick out the object you want more quickly because you can search in parallel instead of in serial. I think Apple should take this advice and apply it to more of its interfaces.

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