New Versions of Research Software is coming up

This week has been dominated by new version of software. It never rains but it pours in this area, and all I need now is for Minitab to announce that they have a new release. There are new versions coming of both the major packages I support, SPSS and NVivo

Firstly I have been helping to beta test SPSS 21.  That is right there is another version coming soon, I expect it before Christmas, and I hope they are sticking at a once a year renewal. Some of the new bits are very nice. You can now easily get descriptives of any variable by just clicking on the variable row header and selecting the option. This is nice for people like myself who end up dealing a lot with other people's data. When something goes wrong in an analysis quite often the first thing I want to do is look at the basic frequencies and descriptive statistics of the data to see if the number are what I was expecting. They also have intergrated SQL terms into their ability to merge datasets. SPSS "Add cases" and "Match Files" commands pre-date SQL. I can remember a presentation back in around 1990 where someone was talking from one of the big database companies about how they had just introduced SQL into it. Although I was relatively new to SPSS the merging abilities had been there for quite a time already and were mature technology. They were admittedly a poor cousin to those in SAS (even then in SAS it was difficult to think of way to reorganise the data that you could not do) but they were there. If this work from the menus then it will be good but at present there are definite glitches and I am not holding my breath. It also looks like for the Statistical Techie Forecasters there may be some simulation algorithms attached. My guess from CICS point of view, SPSS 21 will be available about February 2013 for purchase with looking at the possibility of an upgrade to it on the managed desktop for September 2013.

Second QSR are just in the final stages of launching NVivo 10, I have downloaded a trial copy and am having a play with it on my machine. It has quite a lot of things to work with the Web including Evernote.Now I have not used Evernote but there are quite a few people promoting it for academics. This will be useful if one of the research bids I am involved in comes off. The other thing is that it claims to handle more data and do it quicker. It is still fairly slow on my machine, which is a decent machine and large dataset did cause problems with version 9. The problem is that QSR added functionality without realising the resource demands of large datasets when they are things like videos. So yes I will be glad if this makes in more reliable.  You can find out more QSR What is New in NVivo 10 or find out more. However if you used 9 and upgrade to 10 your knowledge is still applicable, the only thing you need to watch is that you do not revert to working in 9 and 9 can't read NVivo 10 Data sets. It is not on campus yet but if you want to play then you can download a trial version for thirty days. I expect there will be a wait for the full license copy to come on site. We have just renewed for five years so don't worry it will come.

Then there are other bits and pieces. Research has been revolutionised by the web in ways it is difficult to comprehend. When I started twenty years ago, most researchers spent a fair amount of time searching for articles physically in the library. It meant that your information was controlled very much by what other people were talking about in your discipline as you had to get reference to a paper to find out that it existed. First came big databases of references that were searchable so that you could look for key words, then came the likes of Google. Today if I want to know what is written on a topic my first port of call is "Google Scholar" and only if I find I can't get it online do I start using the elibrary and only when that fails does a trip to the library follow. So it is with interest that I hear about scholr.ly which uses Google but tries to represent it is a scholar friendly way. I will give it a go and see if it adds anything.