I had a brilliant idea to evolve my blogging habits into a once a week...This Week in Tech (TWIT) submission. More of an homage to This Week in Baseball more than anything else. Although most of my colleagues will notice the TWIT moniker first, last, forever. But, I know that this will not be a regular thing...so you'll have to prepare for infrequent installments...
Once again sitting here in the basement. Just spent hours thinking about my upcoming IRB application that I have to finish, running stats analysis after analysis using SPSS, preparing for upcoming talks.....and I take a break to read through the blogs..
Here's why we should revel in the times that we're now living. Here's some things that have happened in the last week that you should know about...
The first installment of TWIT...yeah!
According to results released by eMarketer...there are 82 million, and counting Online Content Creators out there. This is fantastic for my future research and my upcoming dissertation. The only problem is that our schools are not busy figuring out how to educate and prepare our kids for the future that is out there. More content to evaluate and sift through...more to create for themselves. Not to mention Mash-ups...
Secondly, great work is happening in a project between Flickr and the Astronomy.net group. Users can upload photos of the cosmos and the robot will automatically analyze the image and return it with annotated results and a description. The robot uses geographic images in the image to figure out what you took a picture of, and compare it to everything else in the database. When plugged into Microsoft's Worldside Telescope, you get some real magic.
Finally, James Patterson will be writing a "crowdwritten" novel next month. This is taking Web 2.0, and collaborative writing to the next level. Twenty eight writers have already been selected to write along with Patterson, and the resulting collaborative piece will soon be released a chapter at a time, electronically. Apparently there will only be print copies produced for the authors...no chance of picking this one up for a summer read. Unless you have a beach-proof Kindle. I felt like collaborative writing like this would soon be coming. I figured that with the Kindle, authors could go back to the old serial novels. Imagine buying a novel by Stephen King, that you received chapters periodically, rewrites, revisions...updates to the novel. Very cool stuff to live through.
Sadly...as I finish this post...Zemanta is updating and telling me that TWiT already exists, and is in use..so much for that idea. Back to reporting the news...
W. Ian O'Byrne
SPSS 17 new Improvements: - Complete datasets for more reliable analysis using multiple imputation procedure in SPSS Missing Values - Improved administrative tools to facilitate software configuration - Syntax editor update makes it simpler to generate, test and correct syntax - Better integration with Office - SPSS EZ RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value) helps analysts pick out top customers - Capable of integrating third party applications, procedures, and graphics packages that are created in R - Several new algorithms, faster speed and performance
Posted by: Lance | June 19, 2009 at 08:16 PM