Only yesterday a friend told me that
some young people from his nonpartisan research unit recently have
the opportunity to learn SPSS. SPSS, as you know, is the Statistical
Package for the Social Sciences and
is close to a household word in Myanmar with people in some way
connected with social sciences, or surveys, or statistics. Most of
the time when I mentioned R, a complete environment for statistical
computing, or CSPro, a survey data processing software, they would
just ask: how does it compare with SPSS?
The point of the story is that this
friend told me that the training was offered by some professionals
from an industrial powerhouse nation in Asia, entirely free, and I
suppose—with no strings attached. However, I was a bit worried. We
have seen that when we began opening up not too long ago, a lot of
swindlers disguised as businessmen came in by swarms (to make it a
little more dramatic). I don't know how much they've squeezed out of
our people, but later searching on the Web with the clues I heard of,
I could identify that they were using the pyramid and ponzi schemes;
may be more. I suspect they are still lurking somewhere.
Anyway I was carried away talking about
our people being cheated. In the present context relating to our
friend I am positive they are receiving a genuine transfer of
know-how. Nevertheless, my concern with it is sustainability and the
prospect for an expansion of the knowledge base. We should be aware
that while learning to use SPSS or any other commercial software
could be made free, the software itself is not free and successive
sharing of knowledge would call for proportional expansion of
financial resources. While such software could be free in the sense
that some funding agency undertakes to license it for you for the
time being, clearly the agency could not do it indefinitely, or
respond to ever growing needs.
So, you have two options: (A) when the
honey moon is over, or when you want to expand a significant number
of computers on which SPSS has been installed initially, you could
resort to using pirated copies of the software, or (B) use some
open-source or free software from the beginning. Looking at the price
list of SPSS just now, I found a lot of complicated arrangements for
licensing. As far as I could understand, there are four package
configurations with starting prices in (US dollars per user): Base
($1140) ; Standard ($2530); Professional ($5090); and Premium
($7590). With each of them it seems you get software support for only
12 months, but you could use the software indefinitely. Here, it
should be noted that for complex samples, which virtually is for all
sample surveys, you need to use the complex samples module for data
analysis. Among the packages mentioned, only the Premium package came
included with it. For others, license per user for indefinite time
will cost an extra US$1450.
Let's do a little bit of calculation.
Let's assume also that you need at least 10 of your computers
installed with SPSS to be realistically operational. Then we have (i)
Base + Complex Samples, total cost US$25,900 and (ii) Premium, total
cost US$75,900. Well, these don't look much for an international
donor, right? But think again. If you are mandated to share, or you
intend by yourselves to share knowledge with people outside of your
organization, that won't work.
This reminds me of a political joke of
many years ago about a zawgyi, a mythical magician who at the
height of his powers could fly in the air or bore through the earth.
Apparently, this particular rookie zawgyi couldn't quite
finish building up his magic. So he ended up neither flying nor
walking but hovering at a man's height in midair.
For R, base module and any or all
packages is free. For example, the “Survey” package is a
dedicated package for the analysis of complex samples and you could
download it any time you want to.
Obviously, my choice is for the
option(B) and I have been advocating the R statistical environment
in my earlier posts:
- Spigot algorithm for calculation of pi (in Teashop PI-I)
- Pigeon half, five-for-duck, quarter a-sparrow
- An Unclaimed CD on Psychometrics with R or Intro to Anything with R
- Big data: small guys could do it?
- Big data: hands-on correlation, old and new
- Correlates of labor productivity growth
- Blind leading the 20/20
- Econometrics for the Masses, Blind Boy, and Courage
- Fooling around and having fun with PVT
I call the option (B) mentioned earlier
as “Thakhin spirited” and the open-source model an expansion
to thousand lights model, as lighting thousand candles from a
single source would only increase the sum total of available lights
and won't take away the light from the donor candle.
On the other hand, if you like option
(A), take it, and then you may like to name it yourselves.
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