10 July 2004

Shoulder to shoulder

My occasional colleague Hafeez Jeraj, better known as 'Hash', is doing work on the use of a bioluminescent pseudomonas aeruginosa isolate to quantify bacterial adhesion to contact lenses. All scientists are, by definition, nosy creatures given to inquisitiveness, and freelances like myself are the worst of all - so I've been unable to resist the temptation to paddle around in Hash's data. I've learnt a lot, some of which makes me glad that I don't use contact lenses, but that's another story.

Hash is working in a university where the standard desktop statistical software is the academic stalwart, Minitab. By a strange mischance, I happened to have a new version of the program (release 14) about my person when we started discussing his findings, so it immediately became our lingua franca. Part way through the conversation, a major version release of Systat (11.0) arrived, made itself at home on my desktop machine, and joined the exploration. Since both of these packages have a long track record, it was interesting to see their latest incarnations at work, side-by-side on the same task. Both have reputations as packages uniquely useful for particular audiences, but with idiosyncratic interfaces in the eyes of the mainstream market, evoking the clich? 'no gain without pain'. The differences are still visible, but the pain has now disappeared and both are well worth revisiting. [read more]

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