default for 'signif.stars'

Dear all,

I agree with both Russ and Terry that the significance stars option should default to FALSE. Here's what Sandy Weisberg and I say about significance starts in the current edition of the R Companion to Applied Regression:

	'If you find the ?statistical-significance? asterisks that R prints to the right of the p-values annoying, as we do, you can suppress them, as we will in the remainder of the R Companion, by entering the command: options(show.signif.stars=FALSE).'

This is a rare case in which I find myself disagreeing with Martin, whose arguments are almost invariably careful and considered. In particular, the crude discretization of p-values into several categories seems a poor visualization to me, and in any event "scanning" many p-values quickly, which is the use-case that Martin cites, avoids serious issues of simultaneous inference.

Best,
 John