From: Mike Schwab <michael.schwab@...>
Date: 2005-12-02T17:45:46+09:00
Subject: SPSS

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A piece of software that badly needs to be written is an easy-to-use 
statistics package.  Apparently, in the social sciences the industry 
standard is this program called SPSS, which is a chore to use, quite 
expensive, and suffers from all sorts of vestiges that no modern 
program should.

The essential functions are importing (and 'massaging') data, running 
regressions, and making pretty graphs.  When I got thinking about this 
idea I realized it would be really cool as a web app, because then 
datasets would be public, and different researchers could use them for 
different purposes.  The essence of social science is asking people to 
answer series of questions, correlating their answers and attempting to 
make causal inferences.  While people have their theories and biases 
that lead them to expect certain causal culprits, their data can speak 
for themselves (in cases where the wording of their survey questions is 
smart enough to let them).  Perhaps if other sets of eyes happen across 
these datasets, with the regressions ready to go, and other datasets 
from similar surveys are readily available, a less biased researcher 
can come along, aggregate the data and find a deeper truth about human 
nature.  These studies always have the numbers working against them; 
the cost per subject is high so they don't get as many datapoints as 
they want, but a ton of datapoints is exactly what they need to move 
past deceptive ('confounded') results and find the subtler stuff that 
isn't trivial or outright false.

So I feel that a browser-based datacruncher would be cool because it 
would give people the freedom to work on/show off their findings from 
any computer, and it would force them to make their data public for the 
betterment of social science as explained above.  Also, use of tags to 
indicate which sets might be compatible for aggregation could happen; 
and making all this stuff browsable would help inspire new questions in 
readers, new directions for research.  The only other 'cool' idea I've 
had thus far was to have the thing 'automatically' run all the logical 
regressions and succinctly inform the user which ones are significant.

So I'm looking for someone to shoot ideas back and forth, someone who 
may have experience that could be applicable to this sort of project, 
or who may have a mature understanding of how statistics are used in 
the real world.  I don't exactly have time to get cracking on this yet, 
but I do want to be actively planning it.

-Mike
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