E Pluribus Unum
Out of Many, One
    --Official Seal of the United States

I am pleased to introduce a new ongoing column here at overdetermined.net focused on the R Project for Statistical Computing (I'll just call it R). R is an interactive programming environment, based on the same high-level "language" the commercial product S-Plus uses. Many of you are probably familiar with tools such as SPSS or Stata. Although these are nice tools; they are expensive, proprietary products. A base copy of SPSS costs nearly $7000, and that does not include an operator! The open source community can provide your campaign or organization (and the competition) with a full suite of enterprise-grade tools for $0.00. How many bumper stickers and t-shirts can you print with an extra $7000? For smaller campaigns and not-for profits, purchasing proprietary software (of any sort) is simply not a good use of funds when there are free software packages capable of doing the same work. I look forward to introducing you to a few of these tools.

We will start slowly, and build on what we learn. Starting next week I will begin a series titled: "Introduction to R". We will learn how to install R and use it to perform very basic tasks. Future series will build on these skills. Although R is an interactive programming environment, I do not expect you to have any programming experience. When necessary, I will provide a primer on important topics or skills that are relevant to the task at hand. All you need to do is follow the examples and try out the homework which I will present as a sort of puzzler from time to time. Extra credit to those who get the right answer!

Although most of my efforts here at overdetermined.net will focus on R, my interests are wide ranging and often geeky. I will introduce you to other interesting sources for statistical data and show you how to use R (or other open-source tools) to learn something interesting about our nation. I also enjoy debunking "sophisticated" efforts to use statistics to support completely non-sensical policy positions. Mark Twain was right, statistics are often used to tell the worst sort of lies. It is my professional obligation to club those individuals over the head with a good dose of reality. And, I must warn the ideologically blindered that I can be quite non-partisan in my drubbings when provoked!

I'm glad to be here and I look forward to getting to know all of you better in the future.

Until we meet again . . .
--pluribus

We'd be remiss if we didn't note that we're not the only ones that think open source products are the way to go for stable, usable and powerful systems. The Obama campaign used Ubuntu 8.04 in their campaign offices across the nation. (Though it seems that Barack Obama tends to favor Macs himself.)

In the first installment of Cool Tools, I explained what the series is all about: giving everyone the ability to set up and use a set of quality tools for statistical analysis. Now we get into the nitty-gritty of actually building the system that will do this for us.

As an analysis site inspired by the principles of the open source movement, our job would be incomplete if we didn't provide our readers with the tools to look at the numbers on their own. What good is all this talk about analytical openness if you can't take a look at our analysis yourself? So it is in that spirit that this column will cover free and open-source tools to allow interested individuals, cash-strapped local campaigns, or really anyone with the desire to do some number-crunching on their own to participate.