Re: next version of PSPP

[Alan Mead]

Jason Stover wrote:
> I'm not sure about the time frame, but among the new statistical
> procedures will be GLM. What kinds of analyses do you most need?
>   

Are correlations available yet?  (Last week, my student just showed me 
his PSPP installation and "Analyze > Correlations" was not an option.) 

I have taught both statistics and research methods at the undergraduate 
level and PSPP is completely useless to me until it includes the 
computation of (simple, Pearson) correlations.  About a year ago, I 
tried to figure out what the problem was and emails I dug out of the 
mailing list archives seemed to suggest that the PSPP team was waiting 
for some background plumbing to make the calculation of correlation 
matrices efficient.  Efficient would be nice, but while that "right-way" 
plumbing were being implemented, it sure would be nice to have an 
inefficient, naive implementation today.  After all, the actual SPSS 
(i.e., PASW) is getting progressively slower with each version... a 
naive implementation in PSPP might well be faster than PASW 17.  (This 
is of such importance to me that I installed GSL to write my own PSPP 
patch but I got distracted by C and gsl and started writing a program to 
perform latent semantic analysis.)

I'm honestly shocked that no one else has mentioned correlations in this 
thread... Is there a build switch that does enable some naive 
implementation of correlations?  Or they've been implemented and I 
missed it?  [I've got to be honest, I don't bother installing new 
versions because until basic descriptive stats are implemented (like the 
ability to generate the correlation matrix of variables that would be 
submitted to GLM or Factor) PSPP is simply unusable.]

Also, Reliabilities ('Analyze > Scale > Reliabilities') would also be 
useful for me.

-Alan


--
Alan D. Mead, Ph.D. 
Assistant Professor, Institute of Psychology
Scientific Adviser, Center for Research and Service
Illinois Institute of Technology
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