LLN, le 18/03/05
Dear All,
We're moving away from the initial issues, but, well, the last mails
are worth being discussed.
>Some people seem to think SPM will cure all pains for them...
It is certainly the responsability of the final user to know what
he/she wants to do and, SPM being distributed for fee, the community
should certainly not expect a commercial service from the
developpers. Personnaly, I'm not expecting them to tell us WHAT to do
and WHEN to do it - that would be more the role of the mailing-list
and the Wiki pages to which the developpers can of course contribute
- and I'm not waiting for a do-the-scientific-job-for-me button .
However, I don't think it is asking too much that the developpers
make it clear HOW to do things, especially when there is no
if-you-wanna-do-this-click-here button. (Surely, it would be great if
any final user of SPM would be able to understand any single line of
code of all SPM files, to relate it to statistical concepts and to
infer ingenous tricks to do what he/she wants. Great, but probably
unrealistic.) And if a procedure X becomes common practice in the
community, it does make sense to me to ask the developpers to try and
include it in the package. Making procedure X easy to use in SPM
doesn't imply that the users won't know what they will be doing, and
keeping SPM obscur or complicated hoping to make it completely
idiot-proof is not a solution: idiots are too ingenious, anyway...
Similarly, it does make sense to me that the community sets up some
recommandations for novices (and others!) through the Wiki pages or
anything else, and I'm looking forward for such guidelines.
Yours,
Mauro.
--
_____________________________________
Help fighting hunger: http://www.hungersite.com
Just click your mouse and sponsors of The Hunger Site donate a
serving of food to a person in need - at no cost to you.
______________________________________
Mauro PESENTI
Research Associate, National Fund for Scientific Research (Belgium)
Unite de Neurosciences Cognitives
Departement de Psychologie
Universite Catholique de Louvain
Place Cardinal Mercier, 10
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
tel.: +32 (0)10 47 88 22
fax: +32 (0)10 47 37 74
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.nesc.ucl.ac.be
http://www.nesc.ucl.ac.be/mp/pesentiHomepage.htm
|