Do you have any recommendations for accessible R tutorials? I would love to get into this a little bit more. R seems quite effective for these kinds of things.
Quick-R http://www.statmethods.net/index.html
R for Programmers http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming
SurviveR http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/09/survive-r/
Official intro http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.html
Might depend on your definition of accessible LOL
Stack Overflow also very helpful - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r
Rseek http://www.rseek.org/