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Re: Testing


From: John Darrington
Subject: Re: Testing
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:54:13 +0000
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17)

The reaction of your professors is entirely appropriate.  A healthy skepticism
is essential in any academic endeavour.  At least that's what I learned in my
PhD candidature.  I trust however that such skepticism will be applied equally 
to all statistical anaylisis software - not just to PSPP.

One advantage that PSPP has over its proprietary counterparts, such as spss, is
that its implementation is open to scrutiny, comment and critical review.
This means that any problems with its algorithms are likely to be caught, 
published and corrected.  Whereas in the case of proprietary software one has 
no idea of how accurate it is or is not.

If anybody has any information to suggest that PSPP is "not legal" they 
should notify the FSF lawyers with these concerns.

J'


On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 06:11:21PM +0000, Nicholas Smith wrote:
     Hey,
     
     My name is Nicholas Smith and I am a PhD candidate at Auburn University in 
Public Policy. I recently found your software and after reviewing it, was 
extremely impressed. I started evangelizing on campus to my peers about your 
software but I was met with considerable skepticism, especially by my 
professors, that the software might not be legal or may not be statistically 
accurate.
     
     Well, as an open source advocate, I could not stand by and let this 
happen. Tonight, I will be running a data set in both SPSS and PSPP. I will 
post screenshots of both, along with all the tables and graphs. If they turn 
out to be the same, the professors will no longer be skeptical and I can 
continue to advocate for PSPP. I figured this might be helpful to you guys as 
well, so I will email you my findings.
     
     
     Nicholas Smith
     PhD Candidate
     Auburn University
     334-524-1911
     address@hidden
     
     

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     pspp-dev mailing list
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