Wisdom of the Cloud

Many summers ago when I started out in the Craft, I could log onto the trusty DEC-20 literally anywhere in the world, and use SPSS or BMDP to analyse data. Nowadays, I have to have IBM SPSS or Stata installed on the right laptop or computer, and bring it with me, wherever I may roam, and wonder dreamily  if I could just access my licensed stats packages from anywhere, like a library, a beach, a forest, a coffee shop.

One option would to subscribe to a stats package in the Cloud! Iin terms of main line stats packages, https://www.apponfly.com/en/ has R (free plus 8 euro’s ($A12.08) per month for platform, NCSS 10 at 18/27.19 per month + platform, IBM SPSS 23 Base 99/149.54 ditto and Standard (adds logistic regression, hierarchical linear modelling, survival analysis etc) for 199/300.59 per month + platform.

Another option, particularly if you’re more into six sigma / quality control type analyses, is Engineroom from http://www.moresteam.com at $US275 ($A378.55) per year.

Obviously,  compare the prices against actually buying the software , but to be able to log in from anywhere, on different computers, and analyse data,  sigh, it’s almost like the summer of ’85!

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Author: Dr Dean McKenzie

I hold a BA(Honours) in Psychology from Deakin University, and much more recently, a PhD in Psychiatric Epidemiology (Classification & Regression Trees) from Monash University (2009) I have many years experience applying classical (e.g. ANOVA), contemporary (e.g. quantile regression) and data mining (e.g. trees, bagging, boosting, random forests) to psychological, medical and health data using Stata, IBM SPSS, Salford CART and open source Weka, as well as in statistical consulting, and advising people of many different levels of stats experience