Richard D. Gill’s home page
Mathematical Statistics
Disclaimer: the content of this personal homepage contains,
along with more mundane content, my personal opinions
as a scientist and intellectual and (hopefully) responsible citizen,
on many matters far beyond my own
original specialization of mathematical statistics.
To contact me quickly, try email
(surname at math dot leidenuniv dot nl), or mobile phone.
Click here for my postal and visiting addresses,
office and mobile phone numbers, email address, further contact possibilities, and my hidden agenda.
I prefer it if you do not email me MS™ Word® documents.
Convert to pdf or another open format. For how and why see
below
If you are an Indian IT student looking for a summer
interneeship then please read this
I’m a member of the
biomathematics Leiden
node of the NDNS+
cluster (the PLUS for probability and statistics).
Once a week I’m at CWI in Amsterdam.
Presently I’m president of the
Dutch society for Statistics and Operations Research,
VVS-OR. 
A prize is offered of a good bottle of wine for the person who remasters our logo (presently vvslogo.ps) in the most beautiful postscript. For instance: third degree spine curves are obviously an improvement on first-degree; but better still would be a mathematical/statistical story of the curves themselves, providing an elegant parametric family which reproduces the whole logo.
I'm the next Distinguished Lorentz Fellow (DLF).
Here's my research proposal.
The award ceremony was at NIAS, Wassenaar, late-afternoon of March 22.
On the morning of the same day we held a complementary
Breakfast symposium "Science, Media, Justice"
at LUMC.
Teaching
Autumn 2009
Inleiding Statistiek (Introduction to Statistics)
IST: Tuesdays 9:00--10:45, Sn 412, Fridays 11:15--13:00, Sn 312
Bachelor's level (2nd year)
Teaching assistant Alessio Trojani, student assistant Rick Vooys.
e-guide intro statistics
Forensic Statistics and Graphical Models
FS: Tuesdays 11:15--13:00, Sn 401
Master's level (or advanced Bachelor's)
e-guide forensic statistics
Spring 2010
Statistics II
ST: Tuesdays 13:45--15:30, Sn 312
Master's level (or advanced Bachelor's)
e-guide statistics
I also teaching in the regional
Masters
in Stochastics (SFM) programme,
run by several universities in the close proximity of Leiden,
and in the national
Dutch Master Program in Mathematics
(MasterMath).
Last, but not least, I am one of the founder members of the new
"StatSci", http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/statscience, is a collaboration of our group with others in
mathematical statistics, biomedical statistics, and psychometrics. This Autumn
I am giving some small parts of the basic probability and statistics course: Statistics, Probability and Calculus.
Also contributing to Survival Analysis, and later to Graphical Models.
Research
Interests, most active marked *
Recent talks and papers
Publications
Collaboration
WARNING: Richard P. Feynmann said
that attempting to understand quantum mechanics causes you
to fall into a black hole, never to be heard from again
The past is particles, the future is a wave
Bell’s fifth position
Various
Biography and more ...
First Leiden inaugural lecture
Curriculum Vitae
Past phd students
moblog,
photos,
blogs,
another home
Just for fun:
things you wish your computer had
(including the classic clippy’s suicide note)
I recently discovered the enormous disussion on the Monty Hall (three doors) problem on wikipedia.
My current "last words" on the subject are
a submission to Statistica Neerlandica,
and an invited contribution to
Springer's Lexicon of Statistics.
In these works I distingush between an original, somewhat ambiguous,
real world question about a famous quiz show,
and the many mathematizations of the question which
have been proposed in the literature.
Personally I prefer a little known game
theoretic version. For me, the question is not "what is this probability?" or "what is that probability?", but: "what would you do?".
Moroever, to me, the controversy around
the Monty Hall problems (especially concerning whether we shoudl compute a conditional or unconditional probability of getting the car if we switch doors)
is a warning against solution-driven science.
I want to thank so many wikipedia editors for the inspiration they gave me.
They convinced me that it does sometimes make sense to pose and answer the
conditional version of the problem as well as my earlier favourite, the unconditional problem. On wikipedia I moreover discovered Boris Tsirelson's
stunningly elegant solution of the conditional probability question
using symmetry and the well known (and oh so beautiful) short solution of the unconditional probability question.
Lessons from Lucia
"Learning from Lucia" is the title of many talks I am giving these days, for instance coming September 13, in Amsterdam.
I believe that there is so much of value that we can learn from understanding the Lucia case. Below
is my present list of recommendations.
In my opinion a number of "system faults" were exposed by the catastrophe,
some of them specific to
the Dutch situation (with its specific and fascinating culture, history, ...).
Actually, the Dutch legal system has already learnt a great deal. The same goes for the Dutch scientific world and in particular, the statistical world and the world of forensic science.
What remains is for the medical world to learn. However, as long as it denies any responsibility, that learning process cannot start, and unfortunately
that is definitely still the case.
Here are some of the hard facts of the case and the hard facts of the
Dutch situation.
1) The fact that there was a case at all (2001) and the
outcome of the first round of court cases (Supreme Court, 2006)
was - it seems to observers with access to the dossiers
and who study the reports of CEAS
(judicial review committee reporting
to the Public Ministry), of the Advocate General to the Supreme
Court, of Prof Meulenbelt to the court in Arnhem
and of the conclusions of that court itself -
strongly determined by the interation between
the chef-de-clinique of the Juliana Children's Hospital,
a well-known and respected paediatrician,
and the director of that hospital.
Their actions were influenced by malicious
gossip about Lucia, and moreover we now know that the
paediatrican was mistaken in some diagnoses,
so that she herself could well have been surprised when
some of her patients suddenly died.
Her brother-in-law, a theoretical computer scientist with no experience
whatever in applied statistics, supported her amateur
statistical conclusions based on her own data-gathering
(the data of the amazing coincidence of Lucia
so often being on duty whenever strange things happened).
These were the statistics at the outset of the case.
Together these two
persons reported a number of deaths and other incidents to the
police as being highly suspicious. Each medical dossier
was accompanied by the chief paediatrician's
one-page summary explaining why the incident was suspicious.
She was made hospital coordinator and laison person for the subsequent police investigation, yet she never gave witness to the court of appeal, and only
briefly at the lower court.
Two extremely hierarchical and powerful organisations (a large hospital and the public ministry) had to be linked up for a murder investigation.
So we have some medical errors and, It seems to me some, some managerial
errors. The hospital director was responsible for a number of
very far-reaching decisions.
The fact that the hospital had become aware of a serial killer in the nursing
staff, and a suspect had been suspended from duty, was communicated in
a succession of three internal memos to the hospital staff
and in a press conference,
including TV appearance, before the police had started an investigation;
before any external investigation had taken place at all. To this day,
hospital staff is forbidden to talk about the affair to outsiders
(the board of the the Dutch society of paediatricians has also forbidden
discussion of the case by its members).
The director was an authoritarian manager; perhaps necessarily so, since at the time he was charged with the merger of three badly functioning hospitals
in a bad financial situation. He was focussed on processes and on
the reputation of his hospital(s). He is known for, and proud of, making
rapid criticial decisions and never looking back on decisions once made;
see the interview with him (in Dutch) in Skipr, the Dutch magazine for
health care managers.
These two key persons consider that they acted completely properly
and state they would do exactly the same
again if the same circumstances arose again today --
which further underlines the point
I am trying to make: the "integrity" of the system in which these individual human beings were embedded needs to be investigated,
since it so easily allowed the chance
interaction of their personalities together with some bad luck to spark a catastrophe - of which they too are the victims. And by the way, such medical
and managerial personalities are not rare, nor - as I will explain - is the "run of bad luck" which hit Lucia.
Compare this with an investigation into an air disaster. The direct cause might
be the chance mechanical failure of some bolt or electrical failure of some
wiring followed by
some errors of judgement of pilots faced with what seems like a dangerous situation. My wife usually says: "I know why the plane came down: because of gravity"; but sometimes she lays the blame on the hubris of man(kind).
These are two extremes of
causation, and since we cannot do anything about either they are not really
interesting, however true; we should look somewhere in between the immediate and the ultimate root cause. The point of investigations into air disasters is to make air travel safer for you and me in the future, and for pilots and maintenance engineers too for that matter, by uncovering opportunities to improve training or maintenance procedures or emergency procedures or engineering standards.
So at this stage, we have just found that some persons took some
in retrospect unfortunate decisisions when confronted with a chance situation which to
them appeared sinister. These things happen, and with the benefit of hindsight it is all so easy. But I am not talking about blame. I want to understand.
2) In most modern countries where this sort of case arises the very
first thing that happens is not a police investigation following a
press-release, but a *confidential* and *independent* medical investigation.
3) In most modern countries,
whenever statistical data like this is involved, an external
professional statistician is involved. And the first thing that that person does
is to go back to the original data, I mean back to original hospital records
and back to the persons who gathered and compiled the data. How did they
do it, what definitions did they use, what were they looking for?
As Willem van Zwet had always said: when you see such extreme
data as the little contingency table of shifts of Lucia and shifts with incidents which led to Elffers' infamous "one in 342 million"
the first thing you can be sure of as a statistician is
that the data is wrong. He turns out to have been completely right.
A better number might be something like "one in a hundred".
4) In the UK and in many other modern countries the nursing staff is much better organized and harder to ignore. Florence Nightingale? In NL, nurses have only had a single organisation representing them for a couple of years. They are largely ignored in hospital management decisions and certainly by medical specialists. They are less well-paid and consequently less-well educated than in quite a few other countries. A colleague of mine was in hospital for 6 weeks with a severe heart condition and took great care to note exactly what medication he was supposed to be having and what he actually got. He was given the wrong pills on 8 occasions. He told this to his heart-surgeon who exclaimed "oh those careless sluts". This shocked my colleague to the core, since he could see that a dedicated and overworked nursing staff was doing an almost impossible job to the very best of their ability. Mismanagement and understaffing, mistakes by specialists and pharmacists, illegible prescriptions, were the order of the day.
So my recommendations are:
1) Strengthening of the role and prestige (hence improvement of level of
education, level of training, hence level of salary) of nursing staff in hospitals.
2) More scientific diagnostic reporting ("differential diagnostics"). In the
medical-legal situation the medical specialist must discard his role of God who
knows the right decision to make and never makes a mistake (in life and death
situations), and adopt a more humble scientific attitude, concordant with the
facts that even after post-mortem examination cause of death is not
really known in 30% of deaths, and that three people a day die in Dutch hospitals because of avoidable medical errors (compare this to two a day
in road accidents). But admitting individual medical errors is taboo.
In the Lucia case, none were admitted, but finally many were revealed.
This problem is so severe (for the many victims of medical errors)
that from June 16, 2010, a new "code of practice" has been introduced,
which allows medical practitioners
to apologize for mistakes, without thereby admitting legal responsibility!
3) External and independent and confidential medical investigations in Lucia scenarios, before calling in the police. Probably this will often need non-Dutch speaking experts and more openness concerning health care in hospitals.
4) In the court situation, written scientific expert evidence needs to be put into the public domain as far as possible, so that the scientific methodology used can be openly discussed in the scientific community.
5) A multidisciplinary and in particular statistical and epidemiological
analysis should be made of data on medical incidents at JKZ,
say 1995--2005. We can be pretty certain that there was no serial
killer active during this period, yet we know that over time there were
huge oscillations in the numbers of
incidents on at least one particular ward. But no professional statistician has ever had access to more than the most summary of biased summary
statistics (no professional statistician was ever heard in court or consulted by the hospital or police).
Just like sun-spots, earthquakes, or volcanic eruptions,
long periods of almost total
quiescence were interspersed with short
bursts of intense activity: unexplained clusters of events. This phenomenon is
seen world-wide. It has numerous times led to wild-goose-chase murder
investigations which always end up ruining quite a few lives,
even if at the end of the day there is no reason whatever to suppose that anybody did anything wrong at all.
In fact, some investigators (who have built an academic career with lucrative
media opportunities out of HCSKs or "Health Care Serial Killers),
report a world wide epidemic.
Simultaneously to studying patterns of incidents at JKZ one should study
patterns in nurses' shifts, so that we finally known what is the "normal situation", or more precisely, "a" normal situation. One thing that is for sure, is that the time pattern of
a nurse's shifts doesn't look anything like the outcome of a homogenous Poisson process. Thus even if shifts and events are unrelated (which for many good reasons is not true either)
we are going to see over-dispersion in the numbers of incidents experienced by each nurse, since time itself is a hidden confounder. Since the mean is low but the variance is rather large, many nurses will experience no events at all over long periods of time, while just a few will experience "surprisingly" many.
All experienced nurses know this as an empirical fact
of nursing life.
It is so important to study this scientifically and empirically and in a
multidisciplinary framework, not just to gain knowledge into a fascinating but never studied phenomenon,
but also in order to protect hospital
workers by avoiding future red-herring-witch-hunts
generated by ignorance and prejudice and
the irrelevant statistics of amateur statisticians.
We have seen in the cases of Sally Clarke, Lucia de Berk, O.J. Simpson,
and in so many others, that when lawyers and medics
pretend to be able to do statistics, truth flies out of the window.
Lord Rutherford said "if you need statistics, you
did the wrong experiment". I beg to submit that "if they use
statistics in court, someone will be screwed".
Unanswered email to chairman of board of Haga (pdf)
Lucia interviewed (in English) on CNBC
Learning from Lucia, slides from my lecture at ATSTATS 2010, video of the lecture
12 April, 2010: founding of the 
This organisation has been set up inspired by the self-less efforts by so many
people over the last six years, which only just now
led to the extraordinary and total rehabilitation of Lucia de Berk.
Now that the judicial authorities have apoligized personally and publicly,
it is time to start finding out where avoidable mistakes were made. It is hard
to believe that these can only be attributed to police investigation
and legal procedures. However that is the implication of the recent
public statement by the board of Lucia's hospital, (unauthorized rough English translation).
Lucia de Berk
The tunnel-vision which characterized Lucia's case was cemented in the two
weeks around "the" nine-eleven inside a hospital in the Hague.
Once by the end of those two weeks a major
medical institution had (by implication)
told the world that it had caught a serial killer,
it must have been very hard for those who brought
charges - a few individuals at the
very top of the very same institution -
not to have had some large influence, deliberately or innocently,
on the results of police investigation,
and on the "medical" interpretation of the medical dossiers which
went to the courts. The events of the past year
which came up during those two weeks of internal investigation
and suddenly associated with Lucia
had become unexpected and inexplicable,
though previously every single one of them had been unremarkable.
The hospital investigators into
the crime were the same people earlier treating those patients, and making,
as is completely natural, errors of diagnosis or treatment from time to time.
The collegiality of the medical community means
that mistakes by medical specialists within the Netherlands
can hardly be admitted by
others inside the same relatively tight, and extremely powerful, community.
Highly placed medical authorities had to stand firm
by their own previous and now provenly mistaken diagnoses. Others
would be loath to criticise a highly regarded colleague's decisions
in such a critical case.
In the Netherlands, medical practitioners almost never admit to having made
mistakes... consequently, they do not have to insure themselves agaist being sued
for malpractice (which is good for their income), and in theory
medical treatment should be less expensive than in other countries
where lawyers and insurance companies profit from medical missers.
However the Dutch arrangement has led to increasing distress among all
those "victims" of medical errors, many of whom would probably be satisfied just
to have an "accident" admitted! This June 16, a new code of practice has been
introduced, by which medical practitioners will in future be able to apologize for errors
without thereby admitting legal responsibility. A giant step for the medical profession,
though only a very small step for their patients. Better than nothing, or merely a crumb
to keep us "consumers" (the ones who pay for health care) quiet?
José Booij
One of the cases we have just taken on board is to unravel
the unbelievable story
of the illegal kidnapping of José Booij's
six week old daughter
Julia by a local child protection agency (Assen),
and the ensueing cover-up by silencing of the mother through fair means
and foul, now in it's sixth year. The kidnapping was judged illegal and
a court order was given to return the child immediately. The judges of
the courts for child-protection and family simply laughed, and did nothing.
The child protection agency had acted on the basis of lies and insinuations
of a jealous neighbour
to local police and doctors. Her claims about Jose
were believed. No attempt whatever was made to check these
accusations, nor to hear Jose.
In desparation, two and a half years ago,
Jose wrote to the Cabinet of the Queen just before she was made
homeless and all her remaining possessions were taken from her
because she could no longer
pay her bills (many of them fat lawyer's bills who did nothing except making
a phone call and deciding to keep out of this mess), after losing her job, house, and health.
Here is Jose's letter to the queen in Dutch (original) and in English (first
rough translation), written just before she went underground.
The cabinet of the queen forwarded her plea to the Ministry of Family and Welfare.
Nothing has been done
for two and a half years now.
Her case was also brought at the same time to the
European Court of Human Rights
in Strasbourg.
Nothing has been done
for two and a half years now.
Here is an official report by psychiatrist Bram Bakker, Dutch original, and the report in rough English translation,
written five years ago, when Jose was up and fighting,
though already suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome.
It still then seemed that it might
not be difficult to get her baby back to her, provided she kept on fighting
against the injustice which had been done her, and someone, somewhere,
would stick out their neck for her.
Still then, it could easily have been
possible to save Josés health and livelihood and future.
Unfortunately, that
would have required admitting that some mistakes had been made by some
irresponsible local officials.
Something which is Not Done in quaint
Kafkhanistan-on-Rhinemouth - where the tulips are in flower,
and the smell of fresh smoked nether-weed greets you as you wander
along the pretty canals of the old cities, advisably keeping
an eye open for dog shit below and pickpockets to the side,
as well as for the splendid seventeenth century facades above you.
The picture the Dutch like to project of themselves (indeed, they believe
in it themselves!) to the outside world
is sometimes discordant with the reality within.
And, as we know from the case of Lucia de Berk,
truth can be far stranger from fiction in the Netherlands.
Incredible miscarriages of justice can be triggered when a chance event
sets off a time bomb built from the interaction of personalities of a handful
of people in some critical positions. Moreover, once the damage has been done,
legal and bureaucratic thinking and the Dutch culture of "mind your own
business" (cobbler stay at your last) traps the victim in a complex vicious circle of Catch-exponential-22 system-assumptions ensuring that escape is impossible.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Kevin Sweeney
Another case we are studying, with all the same features,
is the extraordinary story of Kevin Sweeney.
More information on that case can be found below.
The incredible similarities between the cases provide a worthy study in individual
versus group mentality, and how a scape-goat is chosen when a society is feeling
under threat. This will be researched by a multidisciplinary team of
cultural anthropologists, ethologists, sociologists, historians, lawyers, psychologists
and mathematicians during my DLF fellowship at NIAS and of course by
the Bureau of Lost Causes.
More Various
The biggest number in the universe
... is a project by Gerard aka Frans Lelieveld, aka novaloka. Here is his most beautiful exposition.
Statistical ethics of the probiotica trial.
This randomized triple-blind clinical trial of probiotics treatment
for patients with predicted severe acute pancreatitis ended in controversy,
when it transpired at the conclusion of the trial in
December 2007, that rather more patients had died on the treatment
arm of the trial than on the control arm.
It seemed strange that the trial had not been terminated at the
interim analysis. The researchers were using a a stopping rule
of S.M. Snapinn, by which the trial would
to be terminated early either if it were almost certain that the
final result would be a significant positive effect of probiotica,
or if it were almost certain that the final result would be insignificant.
Here is a paper by myself, to appear
in Statistica Neerlandica,
and, in Dutch, a short article by
probabilist Ronald Meester and microbiologist Pieter ter Steeg which
appeared in the newspaper Trouw and an open letter to Meester and ter Steeg
by biostatisticians Hans van Houwelingen and Theo Stijnen. Also in Dutch there
are a series of interviews (early 2008)
on the current affairs chat show
“Pauw and Witteman”:
chairman of the hospital board Geert Blijham, 23 January;
patient Jochim Vromans, 24 Jaunary;
probiotics expert Eric Claassen, 25 January;
leader of the research team Hein Gooszen, 14 February.
Later we obtained the data at the time of the interim analysis.
It was given to journalists at a press conference on Feb. 13 2008,
but never released to interested scientists.
It turned out that the probiotica trial was
not terminated for futility (following the Snapinn stopping
rule) at the half way interim analysis,
through a mis-reading of output of the SPSS package,
which, without consulting the user,
always reports the smaller p-value of the
two one-sided Fisher's exact tests for
equality of two binomial probabilities. Proper application of their
own stopping rule would have led to early termination of the trial,
since according to the criteria set in advance,
there was no chance any more that it would result in a positive
result for the probiotica treatment. The trial
was de facto continued because there was a good chance that it
would finally result in a negative result for probiotica.
Here are slides
of my talk careless statistics costs lives
on the subject.
Kevin Sweeney ...
recently left a Dutch jail at the end of his sentence
for murder of his wife by arson. He has always claimed innocence.
Here is a link to his own site,
Justice for Kevin Sweeney, here is a
short synopsis
of the case, and here is my blog entry
Justice
in the Netherlands: Guilty until Proven Innocent.
In May, 2008, he put in an application
to revise the case (English translation)
to the
Supreme Court. The application is based on an analysis of the fire
evidence by Fred Vos, entitled
Het vergeten tijdspad
(the forgotten timeline). This is the first time a careful
reconstruction of the course of the fire has taken place,
taking account
of all evidence available to the courts.
The evidence seems totally consistent with a fire accidentally
started by smoking in bed; and is totally inconsistent with the prosecution’s
claim of arson using large quantities of white spirits (Dutch: terpentine).
Vos is careful to distinguish observed facts from interpretations thereof.
Many writers on the case, including myself, have been misled by
such misinterpretations.
Mathematical Centre (Amsterdam) publications are now available on internet.
Here are two early works which had quite some impact, including
the reprint of my 1979 PhD thesis:
R.D. Gill (1980),
Censoring
and Stochastic Integrals, MC Tract 124.
R.D. Gill (1983),
The
sieve method as an alternative to dollar-unit
sampling: the mathematical background, Report SN 12
Another useful link is to my Saint Flour lectures on survival analysis.
Product-integrals are to products, as integrals are to sums. Though they have been around for more than a hundred years, they never became part of the standard toolbox, possibly because no-one invented the right mathematical symbol for them. I made a try quite some years ago, though they still have not caught on yet. With the crucial help of JC Loredo, my efforts resulted in
prodint.zip, files for getting beautiful \prodi and \Prodi and \PRODI symbols in your LaTeX, and Loredo.ttf, a TrueType font for ordinary word processing. It is not that difficult these days to get new fonts into your latex, see for instance TUG's font installation instructions.
The Dutch nurse Lucia de Berk has been completely exhonerated. Not only is there no proof that she committed any murders, there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that any of the deaths and other incidents with which she was connected were in any way unnatural.
Lucia had been given a life sentence for seven murders and three attempted
murders of patients in her care. Statistical reasoning played
a central role in her case, first explicitly but later,
after an appeal court confirmed the sentence,
implicitly: it was converted into irrefutable medical evidence, in a completely circular and seemingly unbreakable chain of legal reasoning. An official judicial review committee
uncovered many irregularities in the handling of the case,
in which the rapid response of hospital authorities
led to tunnel-vision and bias from the earliest
stages of the case. A new medical investigation
commissioned by the supreme court has removed the linch-pin
of the prosecution case, the only death “proven”
to be a murder, and “proven” to have been committed by Lucia,
on its own merits.
There is no reason now not to suppose that this was a natural
death. Evidence of any wrong-doing in any of the cases
is totally nonexistent. There was however the usual amount of medical blunders and mistaken diagnoses, but at least the professional behaviour of the nurses was exemplary. The statistical evidence - which is all that remains - has been totally discredited. The data was seriously biased, a meaningless statistic was computed, and the model used was completely inappropriate. A cluster of incidents
on this hospital ward was actually a common occurrence. The
presence of Lucia at many of the incidents in one cluster was not terribly unlikely, though striking enough to have drawn attention to her. Neither shifts nor incidents occur uniformly at random. Half of the incidents were repeated events associated with a small number of particularly sick children. Shifts and incidents are not independent of one another, since a more observant nurse notices problems with a patient earlier than a less careful nurse. Lucia had more weekend shifts than most of the nurses (lesser qualified part-timers, trainees, and temporary employees), while incidents typically occurred in the weekends. Neither fact is surprising, both facts were never reported.
I have written more on the case on my pages
Lying Statistics
Damn Nurse Lucia de B, and you can also find much information
(Dutch and English)
at www.luciadeb.nl
If you don’t intend me to edit your document, send pdf.
I can recommend the free online tool
http://www.pdfonline.com
for conversion from many formats to pdf.
If you do intend me to edit your document,
please use Open Document Text (odt) format
(other OK editable formats: txt, rtf, html, tex).
You can read more about this issue, at
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/sylvester-response.html
“OpenOffice” is one of the many applications which can create
and edit odt files. It is free (free both
as in free speech and as in free lunch)
and it is equally happy in
Mac, Linux, Unix,
and MS™ Windows® environments.
My sanskrit name
Sarasvati Leela dasa (dasa: a devotee; Leela: games; Sarasvati: goddess of science, music, self-knowledge) 
My signature
(Last updated: 19 June 2010)
