Ben Hinchliffe writes,
In the paper “Tools for Bayesian Data Analysis in R”, you mention the need for a flexible computing format that allows for the manipulation and summarization of simulations of a Bayesian probability model. I work for a company (Blue Reference, Inc.) that has developed a software environment that enables the creation of dynamic, interactive documents for reproducible research and teaching using Microsoft Office and R. After two-and-a-half years of development work, we are now ready to release Inference for R and focus on its implementation in reproducible research and dynamic document teaching practices.
For an introduction to Inference for R, visit our website at www.InferenceForR.com and view the 2-minute overview screencast.
For a sense of the scope of our Inference project, selectively view the collection of screencasts, postings, documents and screenshots at www.inference.us. For a hands-on assessment of the capabilities of Inference, download a copy of our release candidate at www.InferenceForR.com.
I don’t know anything about these people but I thought it might interest some of you.
It's quite cool that they managed to make it work in Excel and Word, so it should be useful for people who have Word-centric workflows and are are scared of of LaTeX/Sweave.
A key issue however is that the so-called reproducible research requires both MS Office and this package. The proprietary format also makes it hard to tangle and weave the code as one might like.
There doesn't seem to be any pricing information.
In any event, I don't see how this relates to your "need for a flexible computing format that allows for the manipulation and summarization of simulations of a Bayesian probability model". I don't think a proprietary and expensive Sweave alternative was what you had in mind!
Thanks for passing this a long. There is also an excel addin called RExcel which allows you to transfer data more easily between R and Excel and which allows you to call R functions from Excel (and a whole bunch of other things). I have not had a chance to use it yet, but it looks good.
This sort of tool is good for getting wider spread usage of R in industry. Excel is used for a lot of things in engineering (as inelegant is it is), and this will make it easier to use R to do good analysis.
I received a similar individualized email referring to my R-related publications along with an invitation to collaborate with them. But this "collaboration" simply amounts to promoting their product, as I later found out after spending some time to understand what their product does. The product may be fine but I don't appreciate the marketing strategy.
Just a few comments to contribute to this discussion. Disclaimer: I work for Blue Reference, the creators of Inference, so I'm happily/hopefully biased (Happily, because I love my job and our software. Hopefully, because I’m pretty sure you’ll love Inference once you give it a try!).
On the pricing question: Inference for R is free to staff, faculty, and students of academic institutions, and already in use at over 30 colleges and universities. To request a no-cost academic license, visit: http://inferenceforr.com/purchase/Request%20Acade…
A one-year commercial license of Inference costs $199, so it's quite affordable and accessible even for those folks not in the academic world. You can download a free 30-day fully functional trial to make sure you love it before you buy it. http://inferenceforr.com/default.aspx. We just released Inference commercially a few weeks ago, and didn’t know exactly what price point we’d be putting on the software, which is why the pricing wasn’t available until recently. My apologies for the inconvenience.
Inference for R gives users the ability to use R code in Microsoft Excel for loading and manipulating data forms. You can now store and manipulate data in excel spreadsheets, encapsulating data and results in one file.
I welcome any feedback/comments at kristin dot liabraaten at bluereference dot com.