We Got Mail (Part 1)

Here are two emails that we have received with comments on various statistical packages. The first email is only a few days old, while the second one goes back to last April. Part 1 contains just the emails themselves. In Part 2 we will post our comments. It will take several days to write Part 2 so that we can think of clever things to say.

James Peluso of Nassau Community College writes:

I'm fortunate to have the following packages on my home laptop:

Stata 9
JMP 6
SAS 9 (from my primary job)
Minitab 14
Maple 9

I'm like a kid in a candy store. I bought STATA thanks to your analysis, and I'm very happy with it. So I thank you for that.

I'd like to mention a terrific capability of JMP (I've used JMP for over 10 years). If you call for histograms for all of the categorical variables at the same time, you'll get a pop-up window with all of the histograms (from left to right).

Now if you click on a bar on one of the histograms, the corresponding values in the histogram bars in all of the other variables get highlighted.

JMP calls this whole process "dynamic linking"... I've used this feature countless times. It allows an analyst to quickly SEE relationships between variables.

Additionally, if you then go back to the original dataset, the corresponding records will be highlighted. This will allow the user the option to quickly create a separate dataset, which only has those records.


I think that the graphics in SAS are much better than before, thanks to ODS. But you are correct: STATA graphics are terrific.

I've just started using Minitab in my Applied Statistics course... I really like it.

I wonder if you will be analyzing Minitab in a future update to your great article?

And in response to our old podcasts Bob Solimeno of International Paper send in this email:

I just recently got an ipod and found your podcast! I enjoyed listening to the 7 podcasts published, and understand you (collectively) teach statistics with the software discussed. However, as a scientist in the corporate world many of us use Minitab or even MATLAB which gives us much more than a dedicated statistics package typically does.

Would these be possibilities for future podcasts? I would be very keen to hear your reviews of the statistics capabilities of these in contrast to MPlus, SPSS, SAS, and Stata. I realize that as educators you need to focus on a few packages and that teaching the software supplants, to some degree, the statistics curriculum. So I'll understand if my requests asks for coverage that is too broad for your podcasts.