R you ready for statistics?

The R program for statistics is an amazingly powerful and completely free program (under the terms of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License).  If you have any need to do statistics, then you really must take a look at R or, more formally, “The R Project for Statistical Computing“.

What exactly is R?  Simply put, “R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics.”  It is a special open-source implementation of S which is one of the earlier statistical programming languages.
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R script for viewing Topaz digital signature files

During the 2013 ASQDE conference I had the pleasure to participate in a workshop by Bill Flynn and Kathleen Nicolaides entitled “Forensic Examination of Digital Signatures”.1 The workshop covered various topics but one part of it involved the production of visual graphs representing digital signature data which was done using a spreadsheet program (MS Excel).  A spreadsheet works well for many things but, for this purpose, it was both tedious and unnecessary.

I decided to take a few minutes to write a semi-automated routine that would run in “R”, free open-source software that does this sort of thing very well.  Please note that the routine has not been updated since it was first written in 2013, however it should still work for Topaz data (.sig) files.

The routine is available, with some restrictions and caveats, to qualified forensic document examiners and interested researchers / academics. If you would like to get a copy of it, please contact me using the form shown below. Please include enough bio information for me to assess your request and I will get back to you.