R on TV

Had a fun day today in a TV studio for Fox Business News, where Revolution CEO Norman Nie was giving an interview to Liz Claman at Fox Business Network. As you might expect, the interview focused a lot more on the business side than on technical capabilities of Revolution R, but there was some good discussion of the impacts of statistical analysis.

The producers did mix up Norman's background a bit though: as much as I'd like to say that I work with a billionaire, it wasn't Norman that sold SPSS to IBM (that happened about a year after he left). Also, the interviewer inferred that Norman was bringing technology from SPSS to Revolution, when (as Norman pointed out in the interview) Revolution R is built on the open-source R project instead. Nonetheless, it's great to see some national exposure for R.

Fox Business Network: Changing the Face of Analytics

Comments

[aga]

Interesting interview, thanks.

I am just wondering, why do you misinform you readers with the links you provide? The link "R project" in your post leads to some (nearly empty) website called inside-R instead to the proper R-project homepage which is on www.r-project.org. In fact, on R hompage readers can find a pretty comprehensive information on what R-project is, see here http://www.r-project.org/about.html.

[David Smith]

Hi aga,

I linked to the page on inside-r.org because I wrote that page. :) The R-project website is the first link on this page on R resources, but I should probably add it to the "What is R" page too. Thanks.

[aga]

OK, sure. Perhaps it is a natural thing for an author to be biased towards his own writings... Nevertheless, I just noticed that in all your post on this blog when you mention R-project you never link to the proper homepage of the project. Don't you find it a bit strange? Especially given the fact that you simultaneously try to promote using R. To me this is pure misinformation, if not guerrilla-PR.

[Hadley Wickham]

@aga: The page David links to is useful because it actually describes what R is! That's not something easy to learn about from the R homepage.