|
Albert-Jan
Re: your signature comment, "All right, but apart from the sanitation, the
medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water
system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"
You forgot satire.
Juvenal once wrote, Pariant montes, nascetur ridiculus mus (The
mountains are in labour, a silly little mouse is born) Exactly how I feel
about using drop-down menus to do basic operations (DATA LIST, VAR LAB, VAL LAB,
RECODE, COMPUTE, IF, FREQ, CROS, MEANS) when syntax is invariably far
quicker and easier.
He also wrote, "Cuius imaginem meiere fas est" (Do not piss on
this person's statue). Does this mean the IBM PASW team will now come and
arrest me?
John |
|
John F Hall wrote:
> > Re: your signature comment, "All right, but apart from the sanitation, > the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a > fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done > for us?" > > You forgot satire. John, Albert-Jan can't modify the sentence, because he is quoting Monty Python's "Life of Brian" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python%27s_Life_of_Brian ). Best regards, Marta GG ===================== To manage your subscription to SPSSX-L, send a message to [hidden email] (not to SPSSX-L), with no body text except the command. To leave the list, send the command SIGNOFF SPSSX-L For a list of commands to manage subscriptions, send the command INFO REFCARD |
|
Marta
I didn't want him to change the message, just to
point out something else the Romans did, but only because I used Juvenal as an
example in one of my tutorials yesterday. Come to think of it GUI sounds
like the Stasi or other police. "Life of Brian"? How about Orson
Welles' line about the Swiss, ending in "...the cuckoo clock!"
John
|
|
In reply to this post by John F Hall
'Fas est' means 'it is proper', so the quotation allows, rather than
forbids, what you have in mind! The full quotation is 'cuius ad
effigiem non tantum meiere fas est', the 'non tantum' ('not
only') leaving open, somewhat euphemistically, the possibility of worse
insults to the statue.
Julius On 22/04/2010 09:46, John F Hall wrote:
|
|
I stand corrected. It was more than 50 years
ago that I read Juvenal. Memory must be slipping.
|
|
Is this error an instance of Juvenal delinquency?
Sorry.... Steve B www.StatisticsDoc.com From: John F Hall <[hidden email]>
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:31:53 +0200 To: <[hidden email]> Subject: Re: What have the Romans ever done for us? I stand corrected. It was more than 50 years
ago that I read Juvenal. Memory must be slipping.
|
|
In reply to this post by John F Hall
|
|
Rumour has it that the programming language got its name because the developers were fans of the comedy troupe.
Cheers, Steve Brand www.StatisticsDoc.com From: Albert-Jan Roskam <[hidden email]>
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 08:43:31 -0700 To: <[hidden email]> Subject: Re: What have the Romans ever done for us?
|
|
In reply to this post by John F Hall
John,
If that tutorial involving Juvenal is available online, I'd love to see it.
Marta GG,
¿De donde escribe Vd.?
-- Joe
(José)
S, estudiante de español y estadÃsticas
Español y estadÃFrom: SPSSX(r)
Discussion [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of John F Hall [[hidden email]] Marta
I didn't want him to change the message, just to point out something else the Romans did, but only because I used Juvenal as an example in one of my tutorials yesterday. Come to think of it GUI sounds like the Stasi or other
police. "Life of Brian"? How about Orson Welles' line about the Swiss, ending in "...the cuckoo clock!"
John
|
|
In reply to this post by statisticsdoc
Steve
More like senile dementia! I did the Juvenal
in 1958 or 59, before I discovered Algol in 1964 (just like Latin prose) and
SPSS in 1972.
The first time I ever used SPSS (not!) was in a desperate attempt to obtain
badly delayed results from a live "Life in Oxford" survey designed and conducted
from scratch (under my supervision) by students on the 1972 SSRC Survey Methods
Summer School at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
By the final evening of the course we had managed to code and enter all
the data and get preliiminary frequency counts, but little else. I wanted to have much more analysis to
give students in return for all their efforts, but Clive Payne (our resident
SPSS wizard, who up to then had done all the computing) had to leave early (it
was his wife's birthday). He gave
me the only manual (first time I'd ever seen it!) and I was left on my own in
the computer centre with only the operator for company. Despite heroic efforts from both us, we
obtained nothing but indecipherable error messages and I was eventually thrown
out at midnight as the operator wanted to go home. On top of that I missed my dinner
and the end-of-course party! <IMG
src="file://C:\DOCUME~1\Owner\LOCALS~1\Temp\msohtml1\01\clip_image002.jpg"
width=241 height=299 v:shapes="_x0000_i1025"> (1975 cartoon by Colin Brown, then a trainee researcher in the
SSRC Survey Unit, now Policy Director at the Office of Fair
Trading) Check the link much stress to see how it felt.
I felt almost the same in 2001 when I scrounged a copy of SPSS11 for Windows from SPSS France to help review the 1st edition of Julie Pallant SPSS Survival Manual. which omits swathes of SPSS facilities and has not a line of syntax in sight (actually two words added with PASTE to modify a correlation): none in 2nd edition either. Apart from that it's an excellent book for desperate and lonely dissertation writers in psychology and inferential statistics. See my (different) extensive critical reviews of both on: http://surveyresearch.weebly.com/8-spss-text-books.html
The tutorials on my website (all freely downloadable) should help newcomers to SPSS to avoid all that hassle. They are all syntax based, but many have parallel examples using the drop-down menus. I'm currently updating many of them from SPSS15 to PASW18 and will post a note to the list when they've been uploaded and verified.
My opinion of Mickey (Mindless) Mouse computing is aptly summed up in the video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqLlmQYRols I used in my Old Dog, Old Tricks presentation to ASSESS (SPSS users) in 2006.
Perhaps I should say I am (or was) a survey researcher, so my approach to SPSS is biased by having used it on tens of dozens of ad-hoc surveys, ranging from major national to small local studies. My tutorials are aimed at the hundreds of researchers I have advised and students I have taught, many of the latter inexperienced and anxious about numbers, some downright hostile to empirical research. They invariably found my courses fun.
John
PS Public sector researchers used to quip, "Research is a substitute for action", to which some of us added, "...and SPSS is a substitute for thought!" At least the Romans gave us Latin, which makes you think.
|
|
Enough already ! This was funny when Monty Python did it, but now we're doing the equivalent of painting "Romanes eunt domum" over the city walls 100 times.....time to return to the real world, folks ?
Martin
From: John F Hall <[hidden email]> To: [hidden email] Sent: Thursday, 22 April, 2010 18:06:50 Subject: Re: What have the Romans ever done for us? Steve
More like senile dementia! I did the Juvenal in 1958 or 59, before I discovered Algol in 1964 (just like Latin prose) and SPSS in 1972.
The first time I ever used SPSS (not!) was in a desperate attempt to obtain badly delayed results from a live "Life in Oxford" survey designed and conducted from scratch (under my supervision) by students on the 1972 SSRC Survey Methods Summer School at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. By the final evening of the course we had managed to code and enter all the data and get preliiminary frequency counts, but little else. I wanted to have much more analysis to give students in return for all their efforts, but Clive Payne (our resident SPSS wizard, who up to then had done all the computing) had to leave early (it was his wife's birthday). He gave me the only manual (first time I'd ever seen it!) and I was left on my own in the computer centre with only the operator for company. Despite heroic efforts from both us, we obtained nothing but indecipherable error messages and I was eventually thrown out at midnight as the operator wanted to go home. On top of that I missed my dinner and the end-of-course party!
(1975 cartoon by Colin Brown, then a trainee researcher in the SSRC Survey Unit, now Policy Director at the Office of Fair Trading)
Check the link much stress to see how it felt.
I felt almost the same in 2001 when I scrounged a copy of SPSS11 for Windows from SPSS France to help review the 1st edition of Julie Pallant SPSS Survival Manual. which omits swathes of SPSS facilities and has not a line of syntax in sight (actually two words added with PASTE to modify a correlation): none in 2nd edition either. Apart from that it's an excellent book for desperate and lonely dissertation writers in psychology and inferential statistics. See my (different) extensive critical reviews of both on: http://surveyresearch.weebly.com/8-spss-text-books.html
The tutorials on my website (all freely downloadable) should help newcomers to SPSS to avoid all that hassle. They are all syntax based, but many have parallel examples using the drop-down menus. I'm currently updating many of them from SPSS15 to PASW18 and will post a note to the list when they've been uploaded and verified.
My opinion of Mickey (Mindless) Mouse computing is aptly summed up in the video clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqLlmQYRols I used in my Old Dog, Old Tricks presentation to ASSESS (SPSS users) in 2006.
Perhaps I should say I am (or was) a survey researcher, so my approach to SPSS is biased by having used it on tens of dozens of ad-hoc surveys, ranging from major national to small local studies. My tutorials are aimed at the hundreds of researchers I have advised and students I have taught, many of the latter inexperienced and anxious about numbers, some downright hostile to empirical research. They invariably found my courses fun.
John
PS Public sector researchers used to quip, "Research is a substitute for action", to which some of us added, "...and SPSS is a substitute for thought!" At least the Romans gave us Latin, which makes you think.
|
|
It's actually "Romani", first declension.
nominative case, masculine plural. At least this thread was fun, unlike
all that boring technical stuff. Perhaps we should have a separate site
for people who have to teach SPSS to social research trainees and
students?
In any case I got an appreciative personal
reply from Steve Brand
"John,
By the way, you have a wonderful web site. I have book marked it and will recommend the tutorials to students and clients alike. Best,
Stephen Brand"
|
| Free forum by Nabble | Edit this page |
