The last few months I was tutoring a student in statistics. The class was something I know about but some of the topics were a little rusty. Towards the end of their class, I found myself reading through my old stats book and also doing some additional reading on the internet on Chi-square, ANOVA and hypothesis testing.
This brought back memories of taking my stat classes in college years ago when there was no internet to turn to. I remember going to the college library to read some additional books for some background knowledge.
But now it’s different.
I’ve read so much statistics from the net that I have an even deeper understanding now. I also ordered some statistics books from my favorite book swap store at Paper Back Swap. I’ve been bitten by the statistics bug and I want to know more.
But that’s not the only surprise. While looking for a statistical program to help crunch the numbers, I came across R.
I was amazed.
R is free and it works on my Mac. R is an open source statistical package that is free to use. It also has many niche packages that work with the statistics of science. When I was in college, I had to rent some stat program that wasn’t even that good. So when I saw what R could do, I downloaded it right away to my computer and tried it out. I also use RStudio because of it’s nice interface and to help me with R’s learning curve.
I am finished with tutoring now and my weekends are open. But it’s different now, I’m back on math street but I’m getting on the highway soon.
