welcome! jeremy freese is a professor in sociology at northwestern university. he finds blogging to be a good diversion from insomnia and a far better use of time than television.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
god, do i hate spss. seriously, with a hatred i would normally reserve for, say, war criminals.
Maybe we should channel your hatred of SPSS and my hatred of SAS into a force for good in the world -- or failing that, for the control of the Wisconsin feral cat population.
why the hatred? do you find that other programs offer a wider range of techniques? please enlighten that component (a majority? a plurality?) of the academy currently employing a hated tool.
Has SPSS got you in some sort of straightjacket? Has it rendered you temporarily typing-mute?
These are the only plausible hypotheses I can think of as to why Brayden's post, bashing an evolutionary psychology study, has been up at the Pub for over 9 hours, without any comment from Jeremy Freese, sociology's foremost expert in the dialogue between sociology and evolutionary psychology.
2 more hours, and we're sending in the SPSS-sniffing dogs.
Jeremy is probably busy preparing his comments for a guest speaker who is doing a very evolutionary-psychology-esque presentation today. I'm tempted to go and watch the carnage.
SPSS has various defaults set up in such a way that assumes you are an imbecile who has no real idea what they are doing (like defaulting to having the menus list variables by their labels as opposed to their names). If you do know what you are doing, the syntax makes it difficult to do things quickly. On top of all that, some menus seem like they are deliberately designed to lure or trick you into doing something you really probably don't want to be doing. Certainly, some of its output seems designed to make it difficult for you to accurately interpret what's going on.
I also like how they're behind the times on nifty little things like, the pseudo-r^2 measure for logistic regression. Not that it's a huge deal to figure it out, but it's a pain in the ass if the computer doesn't spit it out for you.
And if you are an imbecile who has no real idea what she is doing, the menu options are more confusing than helpful. Why can't you just make a scatterplot!?! Just put the dots on the graph, already!
8 comments:
Maybe we should channel your hatred of SPSS and my hatred of SAS into a force for good in the world -- or failing that, for the control of the Wisconsin feral cat population.
why the hatred? do you find that other programs offer a wider range of techniques? please enlighten that component (a majority? a plurality?) of the academy currently employing a hated tool.
Has SPSS got you in some sort of straightjacket? Has it rendered you temporarily typing-mute?
These are the only plausible hypotheses I can think of as to why Brayden's post, bashing an evolutionary psychology study, has been up at the Pub for over 9 hours, without any comment from Jeremy Freese, sociology's foremost expert in the dialogue between sociology and evolutionary psychology.
2 more hours, and we're sending in the SPSS-sniffing dogs.
Jeremy is probably busy preparing his comments for a guest speaker who is doing a very evolutionary-psychology-esque presentation today. I'm tempted to go and watch the carnage.
SPSS has various defaults set up in such a way that assumes you are an imbecile who has no real idea what they are doing (like defaulting to having the menus list variables by their labels as opposed to their names). If you do know what you are doing, the syntax makes it difficult to do things quickly. On top of all that, some menus seem like they are deliberately designed to lure or trick you into doing something you really probably don't want to be doing. Certainly, some of its output seems designed to make it difficult for you to accurately interpret what's going on.
I also like how they're behind the times on nifty little things like, the pseudo-r^2 measure for logistic regression. Not that it's a huge deal to figure it out, but it's a pain in the ass if the computer doesn't spit it out for you.
And if you are an imbecile who has no real idea what she is doing, the menu options are more confusing than helpful. Why can't you just make a scatterplot!?! Just put the dots on the graph, already!
SPSS is well past its sell-by date. Go to Stata, much more clever, much nicer syntax, and a user community which contributes loads of code.
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