SpatialStats Version 8.1 (November 2008)

This version of the Spatial Statistics package for Spotfire S+
contains several new features, numerous bug fixes, and, for
Windows users, a full Graphical User Interface.

NEW FEATURES in 8.1:

* Variogram Modeling - A new function variogram.fit was included to fit
  a theoretical variogram model to an empirical variogram object using
  a local minimizer for smooth non-linear functions subject to bounded
  parameters.

* Block Kriging - The function predict.krige was amended to calculate
  predictions on blocks.  You may specify the block's size and the number
  of points in each block to use in the block averaging.

* Non-homogeneous Poisson process simulation - The function make.pattern
  was improved by adding an option to make the intensity parameter for a
  Poisson process a location-dependent function. 

* New summary and plot methods for Spatial Neighbor objects.

* A new dataset is included, Glasgow.SMR, containing standardized mortality
  rates for 87 community medicine areas in Glasgow, Scotland for 1980-1982.
  A neighbor object, Glasgow.neighbor, is also included.

IMPROVEMENTS TO EXISTING FUNCTIONS:

* New argument drop.self=F added to find.neighbor.  Setting this to TRUE
  avoids the extra step of removing self-neighbors from its result,

* Allowed the row.id argument to spatial.neighbor to be a matrix containing 
  both the row.id and col.id values since this is what is returned from   
  find.neighbor. 

BUG FIXES:

* spatial.neighbor, when used with the neighbor.matrix argument always 
  produced a spatial.neighbor object that was NOT symmetric.  Now, it
  sets attr(x,"symmetric") to T if the input matrix is symmetric. 

* anisotropy.plot had a default value for angle of seq(0, 180, len=5) 
  but 0 and 180 give the same values so the default was changed to 
  angle=c(0, 45, 90, 135).  

* When a spatial neighbor object has no islands and remap=T,
  check.islands returns the object, not numeric(0) as it used to.     

* Some of the row names for the sids/sids2 data frames were misspelled.
  Changed are counties:  Cumberland, Edgecombe, Mecklenburg, and Montgomery.

GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE:

* Windows users have now access to the full functionality of the module
  through a point-and-click interface.  Menus and dialogs allow direct
  access to the functions and facilitate the analysis of spatial data on
  this platform.
