All,

Again please refer to previous disclaimers about the fact that I
certainly and truly have no idea what I am talking about w. respect to
statistics, and perhaps with respect to other issues as well.

In an earlier post, someone or other expressed a concern that gretl
might be  perceived as a toy program that is purely for educational
purposes, and not for serious research. I have no idea whether or not
that's the case, but I would suggest that focusing on pushing gretl as
a serious tool is not the only path toward your ultimate goal. Me
personally, I would recast a perceived shortcoming as a serious
strength: push it as an educational tool. The way to do so, as I
mentioned earlier, is by writing a book. The book should be
data-centric and outcome-centric. That is, the traditional teaching
approach would be to think, "I have x number of statistical topics to
cover, and they can be ranked in terms of difficulty and inheritance
of concepts from one another, so I will present them according to that
rank. I will discuss the math and theory first, and perhaps (or
perhaps not) tack on a skimpy example in the end." This is a
forest-for-the-trees approach IMHO. Me personally, i would approach
the book as "You have (this) type of data, and you want (this) type of
outcome, so you should use (this) type of model, unless your data has
(these) conditions, and the way to deal with (these) conditions is
(chapter)."

I can truly embarrass myself here by offering my own recent exp. as an
example: in my very modest research, a set of 10 OLS regressions (on
time series data) that were truly beautiful and perfect in every way
(they conformed very, very precisely to my initial set of hypotheses)
sat on the pages of my document for months before I realized that the
results were spurious due to non-stationary data. [Econometricians and
statisticians can politely refrain from giggling.] So ch. 1 of your
book, rather than immediately presenting the nuts and bolts of OLS,
could first present the same sort of case (very quickly). And so on.
Make top-level ideas (such as which problems to check for before
considering any given approach) *very* easy to find at a glance. Got
math? It goes in appendices.

And here's the point: you would want your book to help gretl catch on
as an educational tool, but sprinkled throughout the book you could
also mention (w. brief details) its ability to do serious research. No
harm done. Then if it catches on in the former context, eventually
(lag a couple years) people will pick up on the latter idea -- also
realizing, hey, you know, it's free.

So that's all I have to say. Thank you for your patience. TMN
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