A new release of spdep has been published on CRAN and will spread to a mirror near you soon. It includes faster sparse matrix computation in maximum likelihood model fitting, and code for exact global and local Moran's I tests contributed by Markus Reder. Please note two issues: spdep now depends on the spam package (another sparse matrix implementation), so that just updating spdep will not be enough, and spam needs to be installed too, unless you already have it (users of the fields package will probably have it if you update regularly). The second issue is that the ade4 package is currently unable to load spdep in functions that need this dependence, because of spdep's new dependence on spam. We are working on this, and a suggested fix for spam has been sent to its maintainer. So ade4 users who do not need extra spdep functionality may choose not to update spdep until this issue has been resolved. Please let me know of any difficulties, Happy New Year! Roger
Roger Bivand Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43 e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no