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McGovern To Deliver Speech At Drury University

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Edward Snowden will be the topic of a speech by former CIA analyst and senior national security advisor Ray McGovern.

Edited from a press release from Drury University:

SPRINGFIELD, Mo., March 26, 2014 Former CIA analyst and senior national security advisor Ray McGovern will speak at Drury University at 11 a.m. on Monday, March 31 in Lay Hall Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. McGoverns speech is titled, Edward Snowden: Patriot or Villain? McGovern met with Snowden last fall in Russia, where Snowden has been granted temporary asylum.

Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst from the early 1960s through the administration of George H.W. Bush. During the 1980s, his duties included working on the classified National Intelligence Estimate document, and preparing the Presidents Daily Brief for senior advisors to Ronald Reagan.

Following his service in the government, McGovern became a political activist protesting abuses of government power, especially the manipulation of intelligence data. In January 2003, he helped form Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) to expose what its members called the falsification of intelligence to justify war on Iraq. More recently, McGovern has criticized the sweeping surveillance programs of the NSA, and U.S. policy regarding Syria and Ukraine.

The lecture is sponsored and paid for by a group of Springfield citizens who are organizing a speaking tour for McGovern throughout the Midwest, and is co-hosted by Drurys Department of Political Science & Geography. Lay Hall is located on Benton Avenue, between Central and Calhoun Streets. Public parking is available along Benton and in Lot 6, across Benton just north of Central High School.

For more information about the lecture, contact: Jeffery A. VanDenBerg, chair, Political Science & Geography Department, at (417) 873-6947.

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McGovern To Deliver Speech At Drury University

How The Rise Of The "R" Computer Language Is Bringing Open Source To Science

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Thanks to dwindling research budgets and the rising cost of science software, "open science" advocates may be succeeding at getting science to go open source. And it's thanks in part to a little-known language called R.

R is free, open source statistical analysis software. Privately owned tools like MATLAB, the mathematical computing software, and SAS, the statistical tool, have historically been necessary tools in labs, much the way Microsoft Office was in offices. But the ballooning cost of the software and dwindling research budgets have prompted scientists to turn to R instead.

Now a growing number of researchers have joined the R development community to create new libraries that branch away from statistical analysis and into parsing the growing quantity of scientific articles and data that find their way online. And it could change the way we do science in a major way.

Today, researchers use open source software to analyze data. And the R language is the de facto enabler for this trend, thanks to its early mainstay as a statistical analysis tool within scientific circles.

I first started using R back in 2005 when I was doing my PhD, and it was a very obscure language that very few people knew and that we used for statistics, says Dr. Ted Hart, a member of the core development team of the rOpenSci project, which develops R packages for scientists.

Most people I knew back then used SAS. It was just a giant, old, programming language, kind of like Fortran. Its analyzed line by line and whatnot, he says.

But when Hart started his post-doc in 2011, the lab where he did research only used R. It was taught by this evolutionary biologist, Dolph Schluter. Every grad student I knew used it, as opposed to when I was a grad student. And I think I was the only one [who didnt use R] in my department. So Ive seen that growth take off, says Hart.

Martin Fenner, the technical lead of the article-level metrics project at the scientific publisher PLoS, agrees. Theres just a lot of R, and everybody is just learning this as a student and is doing some sort of statistics, Fenner says.

Another benefit of R is that it costs no money and requires less administrative hurdles than would be needed to obtain licenses for large software packages, like SAS or MATLAB.

I work at a government agency, and I dont think I can get access to MATLAB. I would have to write a long text justifying the expense for MATLAB. And somebody says, Well you can just use this tool for free. Why are you arguing for MATLAB? says Hart.

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How The Rise Of The "R" Computer Language Is Bringing Open Source To Science

Cryptocurrency News: Recent price fluctuation of BitCoin funding most major BitCoin Startups – Video

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Cryptocurrency News: Recent price fluctuation of BitCoin funding most major BitCoin Startups
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Cryptocurrency News: Recent price fluctuation of BitCoin funding most major BitCoin Startups - Video


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