How to make a list of own publications in LaTeX in APA Style with sub-headings

Your PhD is through and you apply for a post doc or, after that went through, write a grant proposal. And you have to attach a list of your own publications. You wrote everything else in LaTeX, so that should be in LaTeX as well. How do you do that in APA style and with subheadings (e.g., "Peer-reviewed journal articles", "Manusripts under review")? It took me a while to figure out so I thought I'd share it with the web. First, apacite and biblatex seem to be incompatible, so that does not work out. My solution is a combination of the apacite package and the bibunits package. This works for me:

...
\usepackage{apacite}
\usepackage{bibunits}
...

\begin{document}
\large{\flushleft Publications by Bertolt Meyer}\\

\begin{bibunit}[apacite]
\nocite{meyer2008stics,meyer2008gpir,patil2008}
\renewcommand{\refname}{\normalsize Manuscripts under review}
\putbib[blit]
\end{bibunit}

\begin{bibunit}[apacite]
\nocite{meyer2008}
\renewcommand{\refname}{\normalsize Monographies}
\putbib[blit]
\end{bibunit}

...
\end{document}

This requires a BibTeX bibliography file blit.bib in the same folder that holds the document. Somehow, a reference to my usual bibfile containing all my references didn't work, so I copied all of my own publications into a seperate bib.

Running latex over the above codes produces a sub-bibliography file bu[i] for every section, so in this case bu1 and bu2. Bibtex has to be run seperately over these two, which does not work from within TeXShop, so you have to do that from the console. The \renewcommand{\refname}{\normalsize Monographies}command changes the bibliography heading or title from "References" to something custom ("Monographies" in this case) and adjusts the font size of the bibliography heading acordingly.

The Finnish Husband

The husband and his group's design ideas for creating a new sense of identity for the inhabitants of the former Finnish capital Turku were mentioned quite extensively in the Finnish newspaper Turun Sanomat today. They asked a few inhabitants what they like about their city and many said that they like the river. So one of their ideas is to illuminate the river at night in order to give it a stronger presence. I don't know what the fish make of that, but the newspaper liked it. They actually used one of the husband's mock-up photos of the illuminated river on the top right of the article.

The longest Finnish word I found in the article is kulttuuripääkaupunkivuonna. I think it translates into Capital of Culture, as Turku will be the European Capital of Culture in 2011.

UPDATE: The Finnish tabloid Iltalehti also brought the story. Can someone please tell me whether they like it?

My PhD thesis was published today despite copyright screw-ups

Since I embrace the concept of open access very much, I published it on the electronic document server of Humboldt-University Berlin. It can be accessed here. The great advantage of doing it this way lies in the possibility of people finding your work through a google search. By putting the document on an open access server, you make the full text available to the entire internet. Fortunately for me, my science (Psychology) is internet-dominated enough to not devalue this publiation channel. From my perspective, open access has many advataes: It is quick, cheap, and ensures the highest possible range.

However, it comes with at least one issue. My dissertation contains quite a few figures. A lot of those were taken or adapted from other sources. I thus had to seek permission to reprint from the respective copyright owners. I made the worst experience with Oxford University Press. I sent them a request to use a small diagram (boxes with text) from a book they published in 1995. Their very brief reply:

I am afraid that we would not grant permission for this as it is our policy not to allow our material to be placed upon open access websites.

Simple as that, with no further explanation whatsoever. I can understand some of the reservation that copyright owners might have, but forbidding me to use a simple figure that consists of four boxes and a swirl in an academic content just because it is available on the Internet is too much. Screw you, OUP. What year do you think it is?

Starchitecture

The husband finally has a website that displays his gorgeous architectural designs. I'm sure that he's up for quite a career.

Re: Grok or: Information, Knowledge, and Mental Models

Jack Shedd has an insightful piece on his blog concerning shared patterns of thought and language:

If you ever meet two folks who collaborate well, who can finish each other’s thoughts, chances are they share a pattern language. ... Recognizing that our language is not absolute, that labels are open to personal interpretation; Slap whatever label you’d like on it, I’ve found no better way to think of it than in the term of patterns.

This is an issue thats widely discussed in Psychology and Philosophy. It comes down to the difficult relationship between language and thought, and between knowledge and information. Consider Jack's figurative example:

The best way for me has always been to repeat back whatever idea I hear in my own words and try hard only to use terms I know I share with the person. If someone says they want a “patriotic” logo, I immediately say, “So something with red, white, and blue, maybe stars or stripes in it?” Maybe that’s what the person was thinking. Maybe not. He might have been thinking of something airy and old, with black-letter type and dark brown hues. That could be patriotic to someone who thinks of the Constitution, and not the flag, as patriotism itself. He’s no more wrong or right than I am in my definition.
But oh, what a dick I’ll look like when I turn in that blue logo with the star. The client will think he’s chosen the wrong designer, that I didn’t understand his business at all; Worse, that I didn’t listen to him. That’s the first thing everyone thinks when there’s a mismatch. They blame you and think you didn’t listen. Even if you listened perfectly. Even if you took detailed notes. Everyone always thinks it was a lack of effort on your part. That you’re somehow dense, or dumb.

From my perspective, the problem lies in different interpretative frameworks and different cognitive biographies. Both persons (subjectively) know what a patriotic logo is, but their knowledge is highly subjective and contextual. Each person has his or her own "interpretative framework" (Polanyi, 1958). In communication, this subjective knowledge structure is transformed into information that does usually not convey its full set of attributes. The German philosopher Ulf von Rauchhaupt nails it quite well in his definition of knowledge:

The interpretation of information that leads to knowledge by an individual can be seen as an organization process: The process of interpreting data as information is already an act of organization: we perceive the data, order it and link it with other informationfrom our previous knowledge.... In this way, the new information becomes a part of our knowledge for further acts of interpretation. What we know then has a higher degree of organization than the barely obtained information.... Contrariwise, knowledge becomes information again if it is expressed. In order to express knowledge, an individual cannot supply his or her entire network of previous knowledge, which consists of his or her entire history of experiences, his or her cognitive biography. In order to share and exchange knowledge, humans have to partially reduce it to information. The possibility of such a reduction, the possibility to encode knowledge into information, is the reason for the sometimes synonymous use of the terms knowledge and information. Information is a condensed form of knowledge, knowledge is information whose organization exists only for the knowing person (Rauchhaupt, 2005, p. 98f, own translation).

Note that in von Rauchhaupt’s view, knowledge is represented as a network of organized information. Jack has come up with a practical solution: He will verbalize a part of his network of previous knowledge that is connected to the information that he perceives and integrates into his network of previous knowledge. This approach has its limitations, especially if implicit knowledge is involved, but I see it as a good mental exercise that can potentially limit misunderstandings and conflict. Furthermore, I find it quite fascinating that someone arrives at a similar description of the problem based on general wisdom. Furthermore, I think that Jack's illustration nails the issue quite well.

However, I would contradict Jack's original claim that two folks who collaborate well, who can finish each other’s thoughts, share a pattern language. I would say that these two individuals share a task-relevant mental model. In research, such mental models have been operationalized (measured) as knowledge networks (graphs), in line with von Rauchhaupt's concept of a network of organized information. For example, Mathieu et al. (2000) elicited team members' mental model with a structural knowledge elicitation technique similar to my AST.

It turned out that teams in which the resulting knowledge graphs were similar, i.e. in which mental models were similar, performance was higher.

References:

Mathieu, J. E., Heffner, T. S., Goodwin, G. F., Salas, E., & Cannon-Bowers, J. A. (2000). The influence of shared mental models on team process and performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85(2), 273–283.

Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Rauchhaupt, U. von. (2005). Wittgensteins Klarinette - Gegenwart und Zukunft des Wissens [Wittgenstein’s clarinet - present and future of knowledge]. Berlin, Germany: Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag.

UPDATE: Jack sent me an E-Mail and asks:

What is the distinction between a "knowledge network"
and the "pattern language"?

I should have made that clearer. The term "pattern language", as far as I understand Christopher Alexander's use of the term, is a codified (i.e. articulable, speakable) repository of methods for solving typical problems (that occur in design-related areas).

Knowledge can be defined as a set of structural connectivity patterns whose content has been viable for the attainment of goals [1].

Therefore, knowledge is always a network of components that have been referred to differently in different fields and by different scholars, but the network organization of knowledge is something that most people can agree upon.

There are similarities between the concepts pattern language and knowledge, but the difference I see between the concepts lies in the dependency of a pattern language on a codifiable language (and possibly in its dependency on a specific field of expertise). This dependency on codification becomes quite clear in Wikipedia's notion of a pattern in this context [2]:

"A single problem, documented with its best solution, is a single design pattern. Each pattern has a name, a descriptive entry, and some cross-references, much like a dictionary entry. A documented pattern must also explain why that solution is considered the best one for that problem, in the given situation."

In a pattern language, a pattern is thus something explicit and almost objectively true. Knowledge on the other other hand relies in no small parts on implicit content and connections, i.e. things we know but cannot articulate, _especially_ in the context of doing something. Consider these two sentences (example by Wittgenstein):

1. I know the height of the Mont Blanc.
2. I know how a clarinet sounds.

Both sentences constitute knowledge and both pieces of information have an entire network of associated information to them in the head of the person who says either of these sentences. However, neither the associations with these pieces of information, nor the associated items need to be explicitly available, i.e. speakable. We know more than we can say [3]. The network associated with the second sentence cannot be made explicit in such a way that a receiver who has never heard a clarinet before acquires the same knowledge as the sender.

This issue taps in the fundamental question on the relation between language and thought. Without going into too much detail, my point is: Similar knowledge structures between two individuals can lead to the point that those two individuals share a pattern language, but that must not necessarily be so, because parts of the knowledge structure cannot be articulated. However, similar knowledge structures condition successful cooperation in task performance (at least thats what some scholars claim; others, like myself, argue that a certain amount of cognitive heterogeneity between team members facilitates higher team performance).

Thus, the configuration of knowledge structures conditions the ability to work together, but the link between knowledge structures and pattern languages is not 100%, i.e. there can be diverging languages that base on similar knowledge (structure/networks). It is possible that two people can have similar knowledge, can work together, but have a different pattern language.

References

[1] Meyer, B., & Sugiyama, K. (2007). The concept of knowledge in KM: a dimensional model. Journal of Knowledge Management, 11(1), 17–35.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language#What_is_a_pattern.3F

[3] Polanyi, M. (1983). The tacit dimension (Reprinted ed.). Gloucester, MA: Smith.

Obtaining the same ANOVA results in R as in SPSS - the difficulties with Type II and Type III sums of squares

I calculated the ANOVA results for my recent experiment with R. In brief, I assumed that women perform poorer in a simulation game (microwolrd) if under stereotype threat than men. My students who assisted in the experiments used SPSS for their calculations. I realized that they obtained different results than I did, with the same model on the same data set. As I was new to R, my initial calculation, an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) with the dependent variable microworld performance (MWP), the treatment factors gender and stereotype threat, and the covariate reasoning ability, looked like this:

I see two significant main effects of the treatment factors, a significant effect of the covariate, and a significant interaction effect. However, Quick-R tells me this:

WARNING: R provides Type I sequential SS, not the default Type III marginal SS reported by SAS and SPSS. In a nonorthogonal design with more than one term on the right hand side of the equation order will matter (i.e., A+B and B+A will produce different results)! We will need use the drop1( ) function to produce the familiar Type III results.

I do not want order to matter and adjust my calculation accordingly:
What a difference: The main effect of the participants' gender on thir microworld performance does not reach statistical significance. However, that is still not what SPSS produces:

UNIANOVA MWP BY GENDER STTHREAT WITH reasonz
/METHOD=SSTYPE(3)
/INTERCEPT=INCLUDE
/CRITERIA=ALPHA(0.05)
/DESIGN=reasonz GENDER STTHREAT GENDER*STTHREAT.

In SPSS, the main effect of gender is still significant. I dug a little deeper and found another line I needed to add to the R command in order to get exactly the same result:

As you can see, these results are identical. But why all these differences? What does options(contrasts=c("contr.sum", "contr.poly")) actually do and what the heck are Type-III sums of squares? I surely did not learn about these things at my university. I thus did a little reading.

It turns out that the decision about which type of sums of squares to use is based on the question whether it is reasonable to report main effects in the presence of an interaction. Let's review the hypothesis of the experiment: It assumes that women exhibit a decrease in microworld performance under stereotype threat. This is an interaction hypothesis. An error bar plot (lines representing 1 SE) reveals that this is the case:
The plot indicates a significant interaction between gender and stereotype threat. The main effect of stereotype threat is obtained by averaging the performance scores of all participants (both male and female) over the two stereotype threat conditins. This will lead to a low average score under the stereotype threat condition because of the interaction, because the female participants score so extremely low unter stereotype threat and account for the lower average. Thus, it makes no sense to look at the main effect of stereotype threat if an interaction of stereotype threat * gender is present.

Looking for a main effect of stereotype threat under the presence of a significant interaction is a violation of the marginality principle that assumes that all terms to which a particular term is marginal are zero. Lower order terms are marginal to higher order terms, i.e. the main effects of two factors A and B are marginal to the interaction effect A*B. Thus, in this case, the marginality principle would assume that if we inspect and report main effects of gender and stereotype threat, the interaction of stereotype threat and gender is zero. That is not the case and the above example illustrates that - under the given hypothesis - it is useless to report the main effect of stereotype threat.

Now, the problom with Type-III sums of squares (also referred to as marginal sums of squares) is that they are "obtained by fitting each effect after all the other terms in the model, i.e. the Sums of Squares for each effect corrected for the other terms in the model. The marginal (Type III) Sums of Squares do not depend upon the order in which effects are specified in the model" (source). In the case with stereotype threat, that clearly doesn't make any sense: Reporting the Type III sum of squares (as SPSS does per default) for the main effect of stereotype threat means doing so while correcting for the interaction. But it is precisely this interaction that caused the main effect in the first place! Thus, Type-III sums of squares violate the principle of marginality and do not make any sense in the stereotype threat case. Even more so, Type-III sums of squares do "... NOT sum to the Sums of Squares for the model corrected for the mean". I wonder whether this renders the usual way of calculating a factor's effect size eta-square by dividing the SS of the factor by the total SS useless, too?

Anyway, coming back to the ominous contrasts=c("contr.sum", "contr.poly"): In order to obtain the correction for the rest of the factors in the model that Type-III SSs deliver, R needs to know how to balance the factors in the calculation of the SSs. Therefore, it requires a cotrast matrix with zero-sum columns (see here). The R-help for the options() command (?options()) tells us:

contrasts:
the default contrasts used in model fitting such as with aov or lm. A character vector of length two, the first giving the function to be used with unordered factors and the second the function to be used with ordered factors. By default the elements are named c("unordered", "ordered"), but the names are unused.

As the treatment factors gender and stereotype threat are unordered factors, R will use contr.sum in order to construct a contrast matrix of the apropriate order (i.e., 2), because contrasts=c("contr.sum", "contr.poly") was specified. contr.sum(2) produces

[,1]
1 1
2 -1


My first attempt at Type-III SSs in R above produced nonesense and differed from SPSS, because this wasn't specified.Without going into too much detail here (basically because I haven't yet understood everything myself), there is an alternative to the sequence-dependent Type-I SSs and the marginality-violating Type-III SSs: Type II sums of squares preserve the marginality principle. This is how to get them, and this example illustrates that they are diffrent from Type-III SSs and that they are - at least in this case - order independent:
SPSS can do the same by specifying /METHOD=SSTYPE(2) in the UNIANOVA syntax.

The remaining problem in the present case is the main effect of gender. It does make sense to investigate the effect of gender in the presenence of the interaction with stereotype threat, because it could be that women are generally poorer complex problem solvers than men and perform especially poor under stereotype threat on top of the general difference. In fact, the error bar above indicates that this is the case. This leaves me with one main effect that cannot be interpreted (stereotype threat) and another one that can be interpreted. Which SSs should I use? I am a bit lost.

Beautiful Correlation Tables in R

I have achieved another victory in getting R to produce SPSS-like results. In experimental psychology, an analysis of measurement variable correlations is a common method in the course of a statistical analysis. Thus, I wanted R to produce a publication-quality output similar to SPSS: a correlation matrix of measurement variables that contains only the lower triangle of observations, where observations have two decimal digits and are flagged with stars (*, **, and ***) according to levels of statistical significance. However, as statmethods notices:

Unfortunately, neither cor( ) or cov( ) produce tests of significance, although you can use the cor.test( ) function to test a single correlation coefficient.

I did a little research and found this post on the R-help list. I modified Chuck Cleland's code a little so that the following command on the swiss data frame (provided in the Hmisc package) produces a beautiful output:

> corstarsl(swiss[,1:4])

Fertility Agriculture Examination
Fertility
Agriculture 0.35*
Examination -0.65*** -0.69***
Education -0.66*** -0.64*** 0.70***

If one employs the xtable package that produces LaTeX tables from within R, xtable(corstarsl(swiss[,1:4])) produces this:
Isn't that beautiful? I like it a lot. Here's the code (as I said, much of it taken from here):

corstarsl <- function(x){
require(Hmisc)
x <- as.matrix(x)
R <- rcorr(x)$r
p <- rcorr(x)$P

## define notions for significance levels; spacing is important.
mystars <- ifelse(p < .001, "***", ifelse(p < .01, "** ", ifelse(p < .05, "* ", " ")))

## trunctuate the matrix that holds the correlations to two decimal
R <- format(round(cbind(rep(-1.11, ncol(x)), R), 2))[,-1]

## build a new matrix that includes the correlations with their apropriate stars
Rnew <- matrix(paste(R, mystars, sep=""), ncol=ncol(x))
diag(Rnew) <- paste(diag(R), " ", sep="")
rownames(Rnew) <- colnames(x)
colnames(Rnew) <- paste(colnames(x), "", sep="")

## remove upper triangle
Rnew <- as.matrix(Rnew)
Rnew[upper.tri(Rnew, diag = TRUE)] <- ""
Rnew <- as.data.frame(Rnew)

## remove last column and return the matrix (which is now a data frame)
Rnew <- cbind(Rnew[1:length(Rnew)-1])
return(Rnew)
}

Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials

Marvelous piece mocking exaggerated demands for randomized experimental designs. Some journal review editors should definitely read this.

"Objectives: To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge. ... It is a truth universally acknowledged that a medical intervention justified by observational data must be in want of verification through a randomised controlled trial. ... Results: We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention. Conclusions: As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organized and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute".

(via the social science statistics blog)

More Beautiful Error Bars in R

The rather complex structure and syntax of R (at least to the spoiled SPSS user that I am) comes with a steep learning curve but also with a huge profit: Flexibility. I managed to produce multiple clustered error bars in R today that come across better than a comparable SPSS output:
With regard to my experiment, the graph shows that despite the fact that an ANOVA does not deliver a significant interaction effect of microworld and participant gender, the effect of stereotype threat varies over different microworlds. FSYS produces the smallest gender effects and exhibits the smallest (and statistically insignificant) gender differences in the no stereotype threat condition.

With regard to R, two days of extensive reading and trial-and-error (and my sketchy previous knowledge) have enabled me to achieve almost all the graphical functionality I require (ANOVA interaction plots are next). Maybe R's learning curve isn't that steep after all. What I learned today: the use of the par() function for changing R's graphic output settings and using that to create a multiple figure environment that I then filled with three custom-generated error bars.

Beautiful Error Bars in R

One of the reasons why I haven't made the switch from R to SPSS is R's lack of proper error bar graphs. I use them frequently because they are easy to interpret: If you plot the means of several groups of participants in one error bar chart and scale the error bars to a length of one standard measurement error, non-overlapping error bars indicate a significant difference between the according means. In fact, the APA advocates the use of error bars for reporting results since 2005 [1]. This way of reporting differences in means is also called "Inference by Eye" [1].

After my rants about SPSS, my wise R mentor, Stephan Kolassa, pointed me at the gplots library that features a good function for drawing error bars in R: plotCI(). Stephan also pointed me to Rseek.org, an excellent search engine for R related queries. I fiddled with Stephan's example code in order to reproduce my SPSS clustered error-bar chart from last week's post on stereotype threat in complex problem solving:


And this is how I got in in R:
I like it very much; the only thing I need to work out is how to offset the bars in the same conditions so that overlapping error bars don't actually overlap but are drawn next to each other with a few pixels between them.

If you would like to try this out for yourself, here is the R code that produces the image above:

# Clustered Error Bar for Groups of Cases.
# Example: Experimental Condition (Stereotype Threat Yes/No) x Gender (Male / Female)
# The following values would be calculated from data and are set fixed now for
# code reproduction

means.females <- c(0.08306698, -0.83376319)
stderr.females <- c(0.13655378, 0.06973371)

names(means.females) <- c("No","Yes")
names(stderr.females) <- c("No","Yes")

means.males <- c(0.4942997, 0.2845608)
stderr.males <- c(0.07493673, 0.18479661)

names(means.males) <- c("No","Yes")
names(stderr.males) <- c("No","Yes")

# Error Bar Plot

library (gplots)

# Draw the error bar for female experiment participants:
plotCI(x = means.females, uiw = stderr.females, lty = 2, xaxt ="n", xlim = c(0.5,2.5), ylim = c(-1,1), gap = 0, ylab="Microworld Performance (Z Score)", xlab="Stereotype Threat", main = "Microworld performance over experimental conditions")

# Add the males to the existing plot
plotCI(x = means.males, uiw = stderr.males, lty = 1, xaxt ="n", xlim = c(0.5,2.5), ylim = c(-1,1), gap = 0, add = TRUE)

# Draw the x-axis (omitted above)
axis(side = 1, at = 1:2, labels = names(stderr.males), cex = 0.7)

# Add legend for male and female participants
legend(2,1,legend=c("Male","Female"),lty=1:2)

[1] Cumming, G., & Finch, S. (2005). Inference by Eye: Confidence Intervals and How to Read Pictures of Data. American Psychologist, 60(2), 170–180.

A reply from SPSS Inc.

SPSS Inc. replied to my open letter on the poor quality of SPSS 16 for Mac:

Dear Bertolt:

I want to acknowledge your email/blog and apologize for the inconveniences caused by SPSS 16.0 for Mac. Your bugs, issues and suggestions have been logged and we will work on fixing them in future releases.

We are getting ready to start beta testing SPSS 17.0 for all three platforms -- Windows, Mac and Linux -- in a couple months. Would you like to participate? We would love to have your input. Beta testers get a free copy of the final software.

Thanks,
Arik

________________________
Arik J. Pelkey
Sr. Product Manager
SPSS Inc.
Phone: [deleted]
www.spss.com

________________________________

I do acknowledge the friendly mail and the fact that they didn't try to reason or to justify certain issues. However, note that they apologize for the inconvenience SPSS caused, but not for the bugs, i.e. for the quality of their software. That may sound like splitting hairs, but to me, it's a difference. Why can companies never ever say something like: "We know we screwed up big time. We're sorry." Why does it always have to be some sort of marketing speech? Anyways, I do appreciate their invitation to their beta program which I am going to accept (criticism should always be constructive, eh?).

However, I also suggested two steps on SPSS's part in my reply: Firstly, SPSS should publicly acknowledge certain issues with SPSS 16 for Mac. Secondly, I urge SPSS to review their internal processes for software testing. A more rigorous product testing would have saved them and me a lot of time and nerves.

SPSS 16 for Mac Doesn’t Make the Cut

Mark Kupferberg took up my open letter to SPSS on his Blog. He agrees with me on the poor impression that SPSS 16 for Mac's UI creates:

I haven’t personally seen SPSS 16 for the Mac, but looking at the pictures Bertolt provided, I can certainly see why one might be concerned. It really does look like something that belongs on Windows 3.1.

Some of the people who commented on my rants defended the UI for two main reasons: First, it has been this way since the first release and its good that it stays the same, and second, that it's what Windows users get, too. I think that both views are flawed, because a good piece of software can improve its UI without turning its users away. Changes to the worse have to be avoided of course, but no changes at all just for the sake of stability doesn't sound like a sound argument to me. And secondly no, the Mac UI is not what Windows users are served. The icons on Windows look similar, but they're smaller, integrate better with the overall design and the entire UI makes a more organized impression on me:

Learning R for SAS and SPSS Users

For all of those who as frustrated with SPSS as I am, decisionstats has a great tip:

So you decided to cut down on your Statistical software expenses and decided to get R.

but the problem is you know SAS /SPSS and you need to learn R fast enough to justify switching over …….

the ideal book for you is http://oit.utk.edu/scc/RforSAS&SPSSusers.pdf

SPSS 16 for Mac: Insulting users. An open letter to SPSS Inc.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen at SPSS Inc,

As a psychologist working in experimental research, the statistical analysis of data is the bread and butter of my daily work. Like the majority of my colleagues in the social sciences, I use the de-facto industry-standard for this task: SPSS; the very product your company is bulit on, the very product that is supposed to deliver a "statistical package for the social sciences" - what SPSS originally stood for before it became a brand.

Let me remind you that this is an exclusive piece of software that comes with a steep price tag of $639 for the single base version for higher-education institutions ($1699 for commercial users).

I am writing you this open letter concerning the quality of your most recent version of SPSS for the Mac - the first version that runs on intel-based Macs, SPSS 16.0 for Mac.

SPSS 16 for Mac - that I have to use on a frequent basis - is the most insulting piece of software I ever came across. I have been frequently annoyed by software in my life time, but this is the first time that I actually feel insulted by a commercial piece of software. Its astonishingly poor interface design and the long list of bugs I discovered during a single week of intense usage make me wonder whether SPSS 16 for Mac was ever used for its intended purpose at your company before you dared to ship it to us - your end users and customers. Do you think that just because we're scientists, you can throw this half-baked crap at us?

The poor impression begins right after double-clicking the icon, when SPSS displays its spalsh screen:

Non-English characters, as they appear in the name of my organization (Universität Zürich), are not displayed correctly. Your programmers have obviously never heard of proper internationalization.

Secondly, the overall appearance makes me think its 1996.

Especially the tool-bar looks exactly like I would expect a toolbar to look like in a 1990s piece of cheap shareware:

I mean, honestly, is this some kind of joke? This interface does neither convey any informational value nor scientific professionalism (if that was intended). The only thing it conveys is your utter lack of interface design principals.

But apart from such minor issues (as you seem to think that UI design is a minor issue), the list of bugs in SPSS that I came across during a single week of working with SPSS 16.0 for Mac is mind-blowing.

• Double-clicking a saved viewer output in the finder opens an empty data file instead. Double-clicking the output in the finder again leads to an error-message that tells me that the file is already open (which it isn't).
• If I go through the cumbersome process of defining input parameters for a data file in text format, and save the parameters as a template for future imports, I cannot load the template the next time I want to use it. When I click on the template file in the open template-dialog, nothing happens.
• If I select "Data... -> Merge Files -> Insert Variables", choose an external file and tell SPSS to add certain variables from that file to my current file while dropping others, the resulting syntax produces an error and nothing happens.
• Importing variables with values that are stored in the decimal format (e. g. "4.023") from a text file produce missing values, i.e. they're not imported at all despite the fact that they're displayed correctly in the preview of the import wizard. Changing the variable type from numeric to string doesn't help.
  
• The menu bar in the output viewer disappears from time to time. Only quitting and restarting SPSS brings it back.
• When re-opening a saved viewer file, the font face of all custom-edited headlines is changed from Arial 16 to Times New Roman 12.
• Overall performance is incredibly slow.
• In the output-viewer, double-clicking a diagram for editing and closing it again sometimes leads to all changes being lost.

These are just the most prominent bugs I came across. I am sure that there is more where that came from. Do you have any kind of testing whatsoever at SPSS? What kind of impression do you think such experiences create? On my part, it creates the impression that you disrespect your users.

According to Eric Sink, there are three categories of software:

• MeWare: The developer creates software. The developer uses it. Nobody else does.
• ThemWare: The developer creates software. Other people use it. The developer does not.
• UsWare: The developer creates software. Other people use it. The developer uses it too.
  

For me, SPSS is an extreme example of ThemWare. You seem to have no clue about the poor quality you're creating - at least for the Mac. This impression is extremely stark because I have to use your products alongside beautifully designed pieces of software such as bibDesk, Apple Pages, and Apple Mail.

In my opinion, there is a piece of statistical software that is just the opposite of SPSS: R. It doesn't sport a graphical interface such as SPSS (it's syntax only, like SPSS used to be), but it's certainly more powerful, creates better graphs, and is built and maintained by a community of people that care for their product and actually use it. I've been trying R alongside SPSS for six months now and I haven't come across a single bug. If R had a powerful graphical interface, your product would be off the market within a week.

My experience with SPSS 16 for Mac will make me change to R once and for all. Furthermore, I will encourage my colleagues to do the same.

Frustrated,
Bertolt Meyer

Note: The link to the three categories of software stems from Jeff Atwoods coding horror.

Update: Two more bugs I can reproduce:

• Copy and Paste from Excel is not working
• Importing Excel Files produces "?" as values after the 40th variable

Update 2: According to this sitemeter-entry, someone from SPSS has read this post. I wonder whether I will receive a reply.

Update 3: The story has been picked up elsewhere and SPSS replied.

Gender Effects in Complex Problem Solving

I am really excited about my most recent experiment on gender effects in complex problem solving (CPS). Complex problems represent the type of problems that managers and politicians face on an everyday basis: A complex and dynamic (changing on its own over time) system needs to be transformed from a current state into an ill-defined goal state; the system is networked (i. e., tweaking at one screw will lead to unanticipated changes in other parts of the system) and multiple, possibly conflicting goals need to be pursued. The ability to solve such complex problems is tested with so-called "Microworlds", complex computer-simulations that place the gamer in a semantically framed complex problem scenario: A company needs to be saved from bankruptcy, a system needs to be steered within certain parameters, a forest needs to be catered for, an eco-system must be maintained. These microworlds run over a simulated period of time (usually several months), many variables can be tweaked, and decisions taken at an early step influence the further cause of the game. A bit like SimCity if you will. CPS performance is largely determined by certain factors of intelligence and by knowledge on the system in question. This knowledge is usually obtained during the problem solving process itself. Thus, the ability to identify connections, to understand systems, and to learn quickly is a key determinant of CPS.

Since complex problem solving is considered to be a core managerial competence, microworlds are frequently employed in assessment centers by large corporations such as banks and business consultants.

However, I came accross two studies that bothered to examine microworld performanc scores seperately for male and female experiment participants. All other studies I came accross did not report individual findings for the two sexes. I have an idea why: The two abovementioned studies reported gender effects in the direction that men outperform women. Those two studies (both from the 90s) explained the gender effect with higher intelligence levels of male participants and with higher levels of computer experience among male participants. If these artifacts were controlled for, the statistical difference between male and female complex problem solvers would vanish. That was not the case in the experiment I conducted in my PhD-thesis. I found severe gender differences in CPS performance, even after controlling for several variables: Intelligence, learning, computer experience, and economic knowledge. These variables were unable to explain the gender differences I found.

Now, one wouldn't say that women are poorer managers than men. At the same time, if my results hold true, the use of microworlds in assessment centers favors male applicants over female applicants. This sounded like an important issue to me and I decided to pursue the matter further.

My brilliant colleague Carmen Lebherz suggested the concept of stereotype threat to me when I told her about my odd findings. Wikipedia:

"Stereotype threat is the fear that one's behavior will confirm an existing stereotype of a group with which one identifies. This fear may lead to an impairment of performance."

In my case, the either explicit or implicit stereotype that women are poor in CPS (or in "computer-related stuff") may have impaired the performance of my female experiment participants. I designed an experiment in order to test this assumption. We employed a 2 x 2 x 3 between-subjects design: gender (male / female) x stereotype threat (yes / no) x microworld (Taylorshop / FSYS / ColorSim). Stereotype threat was altered by the instructions that the experiment participants received. In the stereotype threat condition, participants were told that we would measure their ability to solve complex problems with a complex problem solving microworld. We told them of the role microworlds play in assessment centers and asked them to do their best. In the non-stereotype-threat condition, we told them that we would like them to play a kind of computer game and that we would be interested in the emotions that this game would create (which we measured with Marx & Stapel's 2006 questionnaire).

The result: Over all three employed scenarios, female experiment participants exhibited much poorer performance under the stereotype threat condition than under the non-stereotype-threat condition, as the graph below illustrates (standardized CPS performance is indicated on the y-axis over all three microworlds).

The weird thing is that this happens both to women who think that men do better in microworlds and to women that do not think so, i.e. the effect of stereotype occurs regardless of the salience of the stereotype.

Further analyses of covariance will hopefully shed more light on the conditioning factors of these effects (we measured motivation, frustration, anxiety, intelligence, experience with computer-simulations only to name a few). However, this is a compelling example for the role of the situation and setting on human performance.

I will try to write up a paper on our findings as soon as I finish data analysis. In the meantime, I would like to thank my collaborators and the people who enabled this experiment: Heinz Gutscher for the generous funding and the tremendous working conditions at his group, Jürgen Boss for adapting ColorSim for use in my expriment (during his xmas holidays!), Annette Kluge for providing me with Jürgen's taylor-made version of ColorSim, Dietrich Wagener for providing a copy of FSYS, my students Jeanine Grütter, Marisa Oertig, and Rahel Schuler for their great efforts in conducting the experiments (179 participants in the lab in six weeks!), and finally our great and willing participants.

Copyright for the first two above images obtained from www.istockphoto.com. Reproduction is prohibited.

hi-speed wifi

I always thought that the German ICE is the top of the food chain when it comes to bullet train technology. Dubbed as 'Maybach on rails' by Deutsche Bahn, I was convinced that hi-speed train traveling couldn't get any better. Comfortable, great design, and laptop power outlets at every seat.

Well, thats nothing. It's nothing compared to the latest french TGV lyra that I had the pleasure to ride last weekend. 4 hours and 20 minutes from Zurich Central to Paris Est (at a steep 200 EUR return). The train was well designed, nice colors but it didn't feel quite as luxurious and solid in comparison with the ICE. Until I booted my laptop, detected a Wifi and found this:
The train apparently has its own web server that displays the above site. In the center is a flash-based live map that displays the current location of the train. The box on the top left displays the current speed (up to 340 km/h) and the completed percentage of the journey. The best thing however is the third menu-item on the left: Internet! During approximately 2 hrs of the journey (and within France), that link fires up a free internet connection (realized by orange mobile). I checked my emails and surfed the web at decent speeds. For free.

Fuck you Deutsche Bahn, the holy grail of coolness now resides with the french, and an overpriced WLAN-Service on one lousy connection that is only available to first-class passangers can't stick up with that.

Hi-Speed trains rock: You travel from center to center, no airport annoyances (check-in, security, weight limitations, waiting at gates, endless journeys to shitty airports and god-knows-what), its much better for the environment, and there's power for laptops. If you ask me, it's the best way to travel - at least in Europe.

Paris was fantastic by the way.

Windows Vista SP1 installation circle of death

It turns out that the auto-update function of Windows Vista (ON by default!) downloads SP1 for Vista and leads to a continuously rebooting system after install for many users (see thread on Microsoft forums here) User echostormfury summarizes his extremely frustrating experince with M$ tech support:

3 hours on the phone with Microsoft Technical Support did not get me anywhere except to a "professional level technician" that asked me right off the bat to pay $249 for the incident support
[...]
So I now have to migrate my data out, reinstall Windows, and salvage my files in a new install.
[...]
Points Learned:
Microsoft Sucks (Relearned)
Microsoft Windows Vista Sucks (Relearned)
Microsoft Windows Update should BE TURNED OFF from Automatic Updates (Not feasible or practicle, but I'd rather be hacked and whored than risk losing ALL MY FILES again due to stupidity rather than devious ingenuity)
RAID with Windows is trouble (sync a backup instead daily, or image weekly)
A likely culprit: AVG may be contributory to this problem
And did I mention, Microsoft Sucks?

Microsoft you owe me 14 hrs of my time

my first Windows Vista experience

After hearing and reading a lot about Windows Vista, I recently had my first experience with it. For an experiment I am currently conducting at UZH, I borrowed ten identical laptops from our competent and helpful IT services department. I received ten seemingly new HP Compaq nw8440 machines with Vista Business. Their specs from the system preferences: Intel Core 2 T7400, 2.17 GHz, 2 GB Ram, 80 GB HDD. The windows performance index (is that the correct translation for Windows-Leistungsindex?) of those gizmos was 4.2 (anything above 4 indicates a top machine, according to system info). So a very decent set-up. However, the continuously blowing fan was the adequate sound track for an experience that felt slow and clumsy. Despite the advanced speed of the system, responses were slow, a lot of HDD access without any applications running. An update of Windows Defender took more than five minutes during which the system was inoperable. I found the frequent security warnings and announcements extremely irritating. Even native Windows-System applications that are rooted deep within the system, such as Defender or Update, caused the screen to fade to grey and displayed a frightening warning message ("Windows defender update is about to launch, are you sure you want to proceed?"). To sum it up: It was a horribly annoying experience. I am so glad that I switched to the Mac, I'd never want to work with Vista. It feels bloated, clumsy, and slow.

The first proper and decent looking electric car (EV) will ship in Europe this year

I promised myself that I will never buy a car with a conventional combustion engine that runs on regular fuel. I told myself that I will wait until a proper battery-powered electric vehicle is available before I buy a car. It looks as if I could buy my first car this year: a Think City. Think Global AS, a Norwegian automotive company that used to be a subsidiary of Ford, is now advertising its new electric car (EV), the Think City, which features a maximum range of 180 km with one charge, a maximum speed of 100 km/h and a charging time of 10 hours for a full charge. And above all, it looks like a regular small car:
Technology Review's December issue has a lengthy story on the baby (in German) and refers to it as "an iPod on wheels". However, the most important information is missing from the official website and the review: Availability and Price. I wrote an E-Mail to Think and received a very prompt reply. Here is the deal:

The car will be launched in the UK, Norway, Switzerland and Denmark in 2008. In 2009 we will look to launching in more European countries plus the US and Canada.

Switzerland! Hooray! I can get one this year! I knew it was a good idea to move to Switzerland.. If I can afford it, because the little gizmo comes with a steep price tag and a little catch:

The car costs from 199.000.- NOK [Note: at current conversion rates, thats 24.772,53 EUR]. In addition, one rents a battery pack for 975.- NOK [121,37 EUR] (plus tax) a month.

The indicated prices are for the Norwegian market and will be adjusted for in other countries. We have included the mobility agreement because;
1. The battery is still quite expensive.
2. Think is responsible for the battery functioning as it should.
3. Think will deliver a new battery when needed without any additional costs.
4. It will be possible to "upgrade" to other battery technologies when available.

According to the Technology Review report mentioned above, the true reason for this "mobility agreement" is another one: The battery is so expensive that it doesn't make sense to fracture its price into the price of the car; the overall price for the car would be beyond reason. Thus, they found a clever way of fracturing out the cost of the energy pack: You buy the car but you lease the battery, i.e. technically, you don't own the battery but pay a monthly fee to use it. I think that is rather clever. And at "180 km range at the price of a glass of mineral water" (company website) and with drastically reduced taxes due to zero-emission, 120 EUR per months looks like a fair deal to me.

I probably won't buy one though, because its limited range destines its prime use to commuting to work and for shopping, and I do both very conveniently by Zürich's perfect public transport. Sigh. But who knows? If the range expands I'll get one. And I am really glad that there finally is a decent electric car available in Europe. Well done, Think!

Even if you don't speak German, make sure to check out the beautiful photo gallery of the Technology Review Article. I especially like the plug beneath the fuel tank cap.

On the link between the brain and the body

I attended LEARNTEC 2008 a week ago where I gave a presentation on scientific findings on knowledge management. On the last morning, I attended a session on brain research and innovative teaching concepts. Prof. Dr. Gerald Hüther of Göttingen University gave a stunning talk on the "requirements for successful learning from a neuroscience perspective". His main message was that the development of the brain is primarily condinioned by bodyliy experiences of the brain. According to him, the structural connectivity pattern of our brain is in no way determined by genes, but it structures itself according to bodily experiences prior to one's birth. Thus, a conceptual separation of mind and brain is obsolete, because the primary impressions that shape our brain come from the body. The brain is continously shaped through experiences and different experiences shape different brains (racall Simon LeVay's 1992 study that indicated that the brain of homosexual men is differently structured than the brain of heterosexual men).

Hello Züri

Ok, here it goes. I finally managed to open my new (German) blog on my new life in Switzerland. Check it out here.

The Rule of Least Annoyance

On all of my recent journeys, I encountered situations in which I was annoyed by other travelers. Travelers who try to jump the queue at the check-in. Passengers who block the aisle during boarding by undressing and stowing in super slow-mo while 100 others are stuck behind them; most of them still outside of the plane. People who smuggle two pieces of hand luggage past the check-in only to have one piece taken away from them by gate staff while others wait behind them. These people annoy me to death. They exhibit zero interest for the annoyance they create for the people around them.

When standing in line at the security check, I take off my jacket and belt, empty my pockets and take out my macbook before I reach the x-ray scan. When I board the plane and reach my row, I take a step into it before stowing my hand luggage.

There is a very simple rule in traveling: Create the least possible annoyance for the people around you. I advocate death penalty for those who break this rule. And I suggest a service similar to youparklikeanasshole.com, e.g. youbehavelikeanasshole.com.

Because Change Happenz

I hereby make it official: I have moved to Zürich! I am based at the chair of social psychology at the Institute of Psychology at Zürich University (UZH) now. And no, that does not mean that I have handed in my PhD (although I'd say it's 99% complete). I will document my move to Zürich and my impressions on a separate blog (in German) soon. I now live outside of the European Union!

LWA07

Yesterday, I had the privilige to give an invited talk on the barriers in knowledge management at the LWA07 (Lernen-Wissen-Adaption) at the Martin-Luther University in Halle. I summarized the findings of our 2004 delphi study on the future of KM and of my 2005 case study on user-perception of two knowledge management systems and received a lot of positive feedback. I also learned the new fad: Experience Management. Difference from Knowledge Management? It's about knowledge that comes from personal experience. Oh. Now thats something different.

Daniel Rocks Glasgow

The husband has a blog. I hate the fact that he's away. I miss him.

Freaquisch PopCulture Mayham

I did a few posts on music and pop culture on this blog in the past. I teamed up with my two best music loving friends hansblond and legun for a new (German) blog where all our music-related stuff will go in the future. Check out le freaque!

My EndNote/Word Nightmare...

...looks like this:
(translation: Not enough RAM. You cannot undo the operation. Proceed?)
Or like this:
(A COM exception has occurred)
Both windows pop up regularly when I open my PhD thesis (about 210 pages) in Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac on my MacBook (1,83 Ghz, Mac OS X 10.4.10, 1 GB RAM) and try to edit a citation. When I wrote the thesis, I did not use CiteWhileYouWrite, but inserted EndNote in-text citations like this: {Author, Year #Record} (or {, Year #Record} if I wanted to omit the author's name). It was just faster to type. When I finished my document, I clicked on "format bibliography" in my EndNote PlugIn, and Word started working, until the above COM exception occurred. Now dare you, this is a legal and fully registered Version of EndNote (I spent 100 EUR for an upgrade to Mac in January!), so I contacted EndNote support. They were friendly and asked me to send in the document and my library, which I did. Then they formatted my document on a Windows machine for me without any substantial advice on how to avoid the problem in the future. Which is not much use because some citations were arbitrary (I forgot to place the #Record) and of course they didn't get it right. So I did the following thing: I opened a clean and fresh Word document and pasted my thesis chapter-by-chapter into the new document. I avoided two citations which the EndNote support suspected for having caused the error. After every chapter (about 20 pages), I formatted the bibliography. Guess what, already after the 3rd chapter, Word started to slow down extremely, and to re-run page breaks over and over again. After the fifth chapter, both above error messages started to show up again. Citations would remain unformatted untiil I manually clicked into them, this would sometimes help. It took me an ENTIRE DAY to auto-format my bibliography and as a result I have a complete document BUT: Whenever I open the document and try to edit a reference in the text (or add a new one), Word freezes and the above errors appear. Sometimes that happens without me doing anything.

Thus, I have a frozen version of my PhD that I cannot edit. This is a complete nightmare and a catastrophe beyond belief. I now switched to LaTeX (gwTeX / TeXShop / BibDesk) and typeset the entire document again. I should have done that right from the beginning. Not only does it produce a beautiful thesis, but its also a much better workflow. My advice to everyone: Do not write your PhD on a Mac with Word/Endnote. Both pieces of software appear to be badly ported from Windows to the Mac (see here for Word), and their shortcomings in terms of performance multiply into one big piece of junk. What an annoying waste of time and money. I am frustrated beyond belief. I will NEVER EVER use Word/EndNote again for scientific purposes.

The iPhone has a removable SIM card

Remember how Walt Mossberg claimed that the iPhone does "not support SIM cards"? I even spent an entire post on this subject. It turns out that Walt was wrong. CNN:

Contrary to earlier reports, the SIM card is removable via a small drawer on the top of the iPhone.

Maybe Walt's quote meant that it cannot use T-Mobile's cards? Which is true, as the iPhone is SIM locked to AT&T in the states.

iPhone: European model and SIM card slot

Walt Mossberg:

[The iPhone] can't use the digital cards (called
SIM cards) that would allow it to run on T-Mobile's network.

All mobile phones in Europe operate on the GSM and/or UMTS network standard, both of which rely on SIM cards. To my knowledge, there is not a single mobile Phone on the European market that does not have a SIM card slot (although some phones are locked for exclusive operation with certain provider SIM-cards ("SIM lock")). Thus, the European version of the iPhone, announced later this year, will have to feature a SIM card slot, most probably with SIM-lock, as the iPhone will be exclusive to one operator in Germany: There was a story on Germany's biggest online news mag, Spiegel Online, on the fight among operators for the iPhone contract. Translation of the title and intro:

Monopoly business: German mobile network operators brawl over the iPhone

One player gets it all: Like in the USA, Apple seems to plan granting only one mobile network operator in Germany the exclusive right to sell the iPhone. A grim fight over the cult device has erupted among the industry.

21-year-old student missing since June 7th

Tanja Gräff disappeared from a party at her college in Trier (southern Germany). Her university has set up a web page with information.

Come on Word

This is why writing my PhD thesis with Microsoft Word was a bad idea.

Extreme Geoexhibitionism

If plazes isn't enough for your web 2.0 geoexhibitionism, try hipoqih (however you pronounce that). You download a plugin for your GPS-enabled mobile device and the service will display your whereabouts in realtime on a google-maps mashup. Guys, this is really scary.

(via hansblond and live.hackr)

What happens if you drive over a MacBook Pro

The guy forgot his MacBook Pro on the trunk of his car and drove off. When he realized, it had already fallen off and had been run over a few times by snow trucks and SUVs... So the guy dries it, tries to boot it and guess what: it doesn't start. My favorite: He's on apple care and will call them on monday to see if the can help him. Check out the pictures of the autopsy.

new plazes beta test: first impressions

I had the unparalleled pleasure of meeting (a fraction of) the plazes crew at the designmai on Friday. News: There will be a new plazes soon (yay!) but they will discontinue the mobile plazer app for symbian phones (sob). Stefan told me that only 10 people in berlin are using it - and I am one of them. I was so struck by the bad news that they gave me a beautiful plazes t-shirt (Daniel liked it) and invited me into their new (closed) plazes beta that I just tried out. The new features that struck me first:

1. plaze yourself over the web
2. twitter functionality (tell everyone what you're doing)
   
3. set past and future plazes
4. groups

I think that web-plazing is the most important feature because it will allow people to use plazes who do not carry their laptop with them all the time but use different desktop machines at different places (Hans? you'll have to join now, dammit). I also think that it is really important to have a small dashboard-page that you can run in a small browser window that lets you set plazes and twitter easily. Web-plazing probably makes up for the loss of the mobile plazer, but I don't really see sms-plazing as a full replacement because it is much slower and much more cumbersome. (The increasing popularity of twitter and the inclusion of this functionality into plazes proves my first negative comment on twitter wrong). Setting past and future plazes also adds to the functionality. I have yet to explore the benefits of the group stuff. AFAIK no official release date yet.

How to burn 4 billion dollars with a blog entry

Whoa. My favorite tech blog, engadget.com, reported yesterday that the iPhone will be delayed until October 07 and that Leopard will only ship in January 08. They got this from an internal memo being circulated inside apple's corporate e-mail. That turned out to be a fake, but engadget's report caused the apple stock to drop from $108.83 to $103.42. Within minutes. The power of blogging.

Berlin Mayor 2.0: Klaus Wowereit on plazes.com

Our wonderful, adored and beloved mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, has gone web 2.0: He is now a plazes user! (link to his profile). In case you don't know what plazes is: A web service that tracks your location (via the MAC address of the router your laptop is connected to or via an app on your symbian mobile phone) and shows it on the Internet. Keep track of your hangouts, log the cool plazes you visited, add your flickr pics and geotag them. I am a big fan (see my profile here) and plazes provides the nice little gadget displaying my location on the right side of my blog. And since locations are transmitted via RSS on plazes, I can now keep an eye on Wowi here.

The e-cigarette: smoking without consequences

Kraisch! Quitting smoking was hard enough, but I would still be puffing those things away if I wouldn't be afraid of cancer (and the costs). Looks like these worries will soon be gone with this gizmo. I want one.

It feels like a cigarette, looks like a cigarette but it isn't bad for your health. A Chinese company marketing the world's first "electronic" cigarette hopes to double sales this year as it expands overseas and as some of China's legions of smokers try to quit. Golden Dragon Group Ltd's Ruyan cigarettes are battery-powered, cigarette-shaped devices that deliver nicotine to inhalers in a bid to emulate actual smoking.

If you're living in the EU, smoke without remorse for € 249.
(via endgadget.com)