From murdoch.duncan at gmail.com  Tue Feb 12 15:48:43 2013
From: murdoch.duncan at gmail.com (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2013 09:48:43 -0500
Subject: [Rd] Regression stars
In-Reply-To: <511A4F98.50209@statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
References: <20130209184801.GD14037@laura>
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	<51180503.1080605@gmail.com>
	<loom.20130212T145313-215@post.gmane.org>
	<511A4F98.50209@statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
Message-ID: <511A564B.5020700@gmail.com>

On 12/02/2013 9:20 AM, Uwe Ligges wrote:
>
> On 12.02.2013 14:54, Ben Bolker wrote:
> > Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan <at> gmail.com> writes:
> >
> >    [snip]
> >>
> >> Regarding stringsAsFactors:  I'm not going to defend keeping it as is,
> >> I'll let the people who like it defend it.
> >
> >    Would someone (anyone) like to come forward and give us a defense
> > of stringsAsFactors=TRUE -- even someone who doesn't personally like
> > it but would like to play devil's advocate?
>
> Sure:
> I will have to change all my scripts, my teaching examples, my book, and
> lots of code examples for research and particularly consulting jobs.

Could you post an example of a non-trivial one?  (By trivial, I mean one 
that says "data.frame() converts character vectors to factors". 
Obviously that would need to change.  I mean one that just assumes 
current behaviour, and would be broken by the change.)

Duncan Murdoch
>
> Personally, I think having stringsAsFactors=TRUE is not too bad for
> read.table() but less useful for data.frame().
>
> And since you ask for the devil's advocate already, related to the
> subject line: Removing stars is horrible for consulting: With all those
> people from biology, medicine and other fields who even ask us questions
> in term of significance stars that are obviously very common for them.
> Many of them will certainly ask us for the stars, and ask us to switch
> to another software product once they do not get it from R. They may not
> be interested in being taught about the advantages or disadvantages of
> p-values or stars.
>
> There are different use cases of R, and I want to keep stars for
> consulting tasks where things have to be delivered within minutes. I am
> happy with or without for teaching, where I have the time and can easily
> talk about the sense and nonsense of p-values.
>
>
> Best,
> Uwe
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >
> >> What I will likely do is
> >> make a few changes so that character vectors are automatically changed
> >> to factors in modelling functions, so that operating with
> >> stringsAsFactors=FALSE doesn't trigger silly warnings.
> >>
> >> Duncan Murdoch
> >>
> >
> >   [apologies for snipping context: "gmane made me do it"]
> >
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> >
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
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[Rd] Regression stars
Duncan Murdoch