Walking Randomly

Genstat, a general-purpose statistics package that seems to have a good following in the biosciences has been upgraded to version 12.1.  A selection from the ‘whats new?’ section:

• Release 12.1 includes 2 new directives, 42 new procedures and 41 new functions.
• Support for Cornell ecology file formats.
• Support for MapQTL loc and map files.
• Support for R/QTL rotated comma-delimited separate genotype (csvsr) files.
• Support for Stata 10 files.
• Quantile regression menu for fitting quantile regression models.
• Parallel regression analyses.
• Ability to display confidence intervals for parameter estimates.
• Display all standard error of differences in General Analysis of Variance menu.
• Trellis plot of means.
• Biplots added to principal components and canonical variates analysis menus.
• Permutation tests availible for MANOVA.

Check out the full list of new features over at VSNI’s website.

Since I am not a statistician and I don’t support statistics software, I hadn’t heard about Genstat until fairly recently but they seem to be a very cool company.  Take a look at the free Genstat Discovery Edition for example which is for use by not-for-profit research organizations, charities and educational institutes based in the developing world.

Commercial software companies who give something back to the community in ways like this always earn respect in my eyes.