This page contains general information about this site, JSC and its author.

Author

This site and the core JSC software were designed and programmed by Andrew Bertie.

Qualifications

The author has a MSc in statistics and computation, and a PhD in statistics. He has worked as a statistician in the fishing industry, civil service and NHS, and from 1982 to 2003 as a statistical programmer/software designer for the Open University; developing software and related materials mainly for statistics and mathematics courses, but also for other OU courses in science, education and social sciences. He is currently working as an independent consultant in the Department of Economics of the Open University - developing agent-based modelling software and analysing survey data.

Aims and Philosophy

The aim of this site is to promote the use of Java for statistical programming and teaching. The author believes that Java offers exciting opportunities to the statistical programmer and teacher. Java's object-orientated approach can be applied to statistical concepts, methods and data in powerful and expressive ways that would be difficult in older languages: it stimulates thinking about programming and its role in statistics.

The aim of the JSC library is to make Java more accessible to the statistical community, and to provide a reliable correct, modifible and reusable set of statistical classes to the general programmer.

In developing JSC, the author has used the latest published algorithms from reputable sources wherever possible. These have been incorporated into a coherent system of classes and interfaces which aspire to the principles of object-orientated design and effective Java usage. Accuracy, speed and robustness, however, have not been sacrificed in favour of elegant object-orientated solutions that would appeal to computer scientists.

While the author believes that the future of statistics is Bayesian, the JSC library will attempt to cover all schools of inference and approaches to data analysis. Suggestions for additions to the library are welcomed.

The JSC library and other software on this site will be made freely available for non-commercial and limited educational use - see Terms of use page for details.

Some quotations

"Programming is understanding." Kristen Nygaard

"Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about." B. L. Whorf

"...making the statistical language an extension of a general programming language provides the full capability of that general language" John M. Chambers

"...object-orientated programming is very useful for graphics programming in general and statistical programming in particular. Object-orientated methods also have many other applications within a statistical system." Luke Tierney

"[Java]...a more powerful engine for statistical software than, for example, C or C++." John M. Chambers

"There are no 'cookbook' methods that can replace intelligence, experience, and good taste in design and programming." Bjarne Stroustrup

"Bad programmers ignore details. Bad designers get lost in details." Nate Kirby

"Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to reuse." Eric Raymond

"Designing tools, libraries, and frameworks is one of the highest forms of design and programming...that makes the result of such work available to thousands is a way for programmers and designers to escape the trap of becoming craftsmen of one-of-a-kind artifacts." Bjarne Stroustrup

Acknowledgements

JSC uses the JAMA linear algebra package - a cooperative product of The MathWorks and the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which has been released to the public domain.

The use of other public domain Java classes, algorithms originally coded in other languages, and contributions by other programmers are acknowledged in the API documentation of individual classes and methods.

Java platform

JSC and all the Java software available on this site were developed using Sun's Java 2 Platform Standard Edition v1.4.1. Versions earlier than 1.4 or from other providers are not supported. The Java 2 Software Development Kit (J2SDK) and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) can be downloaded free from the Sun Microsystems Java website.

Last update

This site was last updated 15th August, 2005.