The R Project

In my copious free time (yes, that is a sarcastic use of "copious"), I copyedit for Limnology and Oceanography: Methods via ScholarOne, a subsidiary of Thomson Scientific. Recently I was working on the article, Karel Van den Meersche, Karline Soetaert, Jack J. Middelburg
A Bayesian Compositional Estimator for microbial taxonomy based on biomarkers (preview of abstract available at http://www.aslo.org/lomethods/free/2008/index.html). Of course, I cannot tell you more about this article, but because Eckerd subscribes, you will be able to access it once it is published. However, reading this article, I learned about the R Project for Statistical Computing. According to its home page, "R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics." Given that it is free, I wanted the NAS community to be aware of this software. The article mentioned above, when published, will demonstrate one use. Eckerd students and faculty may want to investigate other uses for their own research.