SAS goes with sparse matrices

SAS has introduced experimental procedure HPMIXED (High Performance MIXED) in version 9.2. This is a welcome addition and now SAS could probably solve the problem I encountered lately with a large mixed model described here. I really like R and its community (which is getting bigger and bigger and more and more connected to other communities!), but I must say that for me SAS has made quite some important moves lately - see here, here, and here.

Statistics for Molecular Genetics

Nice notes about Statistics for Molecular Genetics by Karin Dorman.

Genes for cowboys

I rally like the title of this "material": Genes for cowboys. I still need to parse the content.

Video posnetki povezani s čebelami

Danes sem naletel na zgledno urejeno spletno stran ČEBELARSTVO Grega Lužar - tipa sploh ne poznam, tako da mu ne delam reklame. Na spletni strani je kar nekaj zanimivih video posnetkov opravil/dogodkov, ki jih sam še nikoli nisem videl:

• Razno
  
• Točenje medu
• Pridobivanje matičnega mlečka
  
• Vzreja čebeljih matic

Inference for R

I got a message from Inference for R team. Their work is interesting, especially if you are bound to MS Excel and Word environment! It would be great if they would also support OpenOffice. They "benefit" from open source R and it would be great if they would also provide a solution for open source "office".

Test for scrapie in goats

See here.

Sweave.sh update

A local version of Sweave.sh has been updated:

• fixed a buglet that caused weaving the file twice when --weaver option was used --> this led to a change how caching is now invoked (--cache invokes cacheSweave package, while --cache --weaver or --weaver invokes weawer package)
• quoting *APP variables to ensure that things work in case of "bad" filenames, i.e., spaces in filenames etc.
• small changes in the documentation

I will take this opportunity to show how PDFAPP and PSAPP environmental variables can be used "open" options. This is an example from the help, which shows that these two variables need to be exported in order to have any effect. I am still fiddling whith how to provide any meaningfull defaults. My defaults are 'acroread' for PDF and 'gv' for Postscript, but I am happy to set any other more meaningfull defaults if there will be enough demand!

# Create PDF via the texi2dvi (latex) tool and open
# a produced file
Sweave.sh -otld file.Rnw

# Create PDF via the texi2dvi (latex) tool and open
# a produced file with a "non-standard" viewer
Sweave.sh -otld=acrobat file.Rnw

# ... or
export PDFAPP=acrobat
Sweave.sh -otld file.Rnw

This is an example of launcing Acrobat Reader installed on MS Windows, while Sweave.sh is launched within Cygwin X-terminal:

export PDFAPP=/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Adobe/Reader\ 9.0/Reader/AcroRd32.exe
Sweave.sh -otld file.Rnw