Editorial Spherwave: an R Package for Analyzing Scattered Spherical Data by Spherical Wavelets

Shortly before the end of 2007 it’s a great pleasure for me to welcome you to the third and Christmas issue of R News. Also, it is the last issue for me as editorial board member and before John Fox takes over as editor-in-chief, I would like to thank Doug Bates, Paul Murrell, John Fox and Vince Carey whom I had the pleasure to work with during the last three years. It is amazing to see how many new packages have been submitted to CRAN since October when Kurt Hornik previously provided us with the latest CRAN news. Kurt’s new list starts at page 57. Most of us have already installed the first patch release in the 2.6.0 series. The most important facts about R 2.6.1 are given on page 56. The contributed papers in the present issue may be divided into two groups. The first group focuses on applications and the second group reports on tools that may help to interact with R. Sanford Weisberg and Hadley Wickham give us some hints when our brain fails to remember the name of some important R function. Patrick Mair and Reinhold Hatzinger started a CRAN Psychometrics Task View and give us a snapshot of current developments. Robin Hankin deals with very large numbers in R using his Brobdingnag package. Two papers focus on graphical user interfaces. From a high-level point of view, John Fox shows how the functionality of his R Commander can be extended by plug-in packages. John Verzani gives an introduction to low-level GUI programming using the gWidgets package. Applications presented here include a study on the performance of financial advices given in the Mad Money television show on CNBC, as investigated by Bill Alpert. Hee-Seok Oh and Donghoh Kim present a package for the analysis of scattered spherical data, such as certain environmental conditions measured over some area. Sebastián Luque follows aquatic animals into the depth of the sea and analyzes their diving behavior. Three packages concentrate on bringing modern statistical methodology to our computers: Parametric and semi-parametric Bayesian inference is implemented in theDPpackage by Alejandro Jara, Guido Schwarzer reports on the meta package for meta-analysis and, finally, a new version of the well-known multtest package is described by Sandra L. Taylor and her colleagues. The editorial board wants to thank all authors and referees who worked with us in 2007 and wishes all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2008!