NEWS RELEASE

Contact: Leah Jackson (jacksonl@nsula.edu )
News Bureau
Northwestern State University
Natchitoches, LA 71497
(318) 357-6466

10/05/2004

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NATCHITOCHES-Dr. Jonathan Akin, assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, is the grand prize winner in the "Win a Classroom Edition of KaleidaGraph Contest," sponsored by Synergy Software. Akin will receive this year's classroom edition Kaleidagraph, a statistical analysis and graphing software package.

Kaleidagraph adapts for use in the classroom or research laboratory and is used for graphing and analysis.

The primary users of the KaleidaGraph software will be Akin's 70 Biometry students. Their curriculum includes experimental design and statistical analysis (both parametric and non-parametric). KaleidaGraph will enable his students to move beyond the small data set capability of a graphing calculator to practice with large data sets. For the end-of-semester project he plans to assign students to download data from government agency web sites (e.g. Dept of Labor Statistics) and use KaleidaGraph to produce a professional summary of the data, including figures and statistical tables.

"Biometry is traditionally the statistical analysis of biological observations and phenomena," Akin said. "In contemporary usage, biometry is often associated with the analysis of human body measurements for identification and security purposes. Thus, the term biostatistics may represent how I teach biometry."

Akin's students will use KaleidaGraph for basic exploratory data analysis, but he is particularly excited about students being able to perform two-way ANOVA and the non-parametric statistical analyses.

"They will learn about data summary and manipulation without the hassle of working through programming a beastly program, such as SAS," he said. "Students can focus more on performing analyses correctly and gain a practical understanding of statistical concepts."

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