Archive 2014

Is R dangerous? Side effects of free software for biologists

Published at June 8, 2014 ·  3 min read

When I started my career in the biological field (it’s already 25 years ago), only the luckiest of us had access to very advanced statistical software. Licenses were very expensive and it was not easy to convince the boss that they were really necessary: “Why do you need to spend so much money to perform an ANOVA?”. Indeed, simple one-way or two-ways ANOVAs were quite easy to perform and one of the people in my group had already built the appropriate routines for several designs, by using the GW-BASIC language....