I’ve recently become a convert to Stata for data analysis tasks, and it seems to be an excellent piece of software. One thing that interests me about statistical software in general is the proliferation of different programs. Aside from Stata, there’s SAS, SPSS, R and Eviews, to name a few. Unlike operating systems or wordprocessors for example, there’s no one dominant standard, and each has its own quite loyal and sizeable user base. I guess data file sharing is less common among users of this software compared to wordprocessors, but there still are some network benefits associated with support that you can get from other users of the same software. So it’s interesting that so many varieties can persist in this market but seemingly not in other software markets.

Google Finance is now offering free realtime stock quotes for the NASDAQ, with promises of more realtime data to come.

It must be rather tough to be a competitor of Google.

Via Statistical Modelling:

I seriously think people should have to get a license to create charts. Original here.

Google spreadsheets has added forms, which allow web users to input data into a spreadsheet that you’ve created. This makes it perfect for running simple surveys. Here’s a quick run-down on how to do it:

First go to Google Docs and create an account if you haven’t already got one. Then make a new blank spreadsheet.

Next, share the spreadsheet by clicking the share button at the top right corner:

You’ll be prompted to name the spreadsheet, and then you get some sharing options. Choose the forms option, then click “Start editing your form”:

Then you’re presented with a form editor which is pretty self explanatory. You can enter a title for the survey, some explanatory text, and then questions which can be short or long text input, multiple choice (with an “other” option), checkboxes, or selection from a list. You can add, edit, delete and re-order questions easily.

When you’re done with the questions, click “Next, choose recipients”. Then you’re presented with various options for giving the survey to people. You can email it to specific people by entering email addresses, and if you like you can embed the form in the actual email (if the recipients can handle html email). Alternatively you can click the “Embed” link at the top right to embed the form in any kind of web page. Just copy and paste the code that’s provided into your web page.

And that’s all there is to it. Columns corresponding to the questions will be automatically created in your spreadsheet, and any data that people enter will appear in the right place, with a timestamp. One thing lacking is data validation, so you can’t check at the input stage to make sure that people have entered appropriate responses, and you can’t have mandatory questions. It also lacks conditional branching questions, so all respondents will get to answer all questions. Despite these limitations, Google Spreadsheets are a very quick and convenient way to run a simple survey or other data collection exercise.

To keep track of new data, you can periodically check the spreadsheet, or you can add this gadget to your iGoogle homepage, which will automatically inform you when there are new entries:

Very loyal reader Chewxy informs me about some analysis by Jakob Nielsen of a study done by some others about web users’ habits.

The headline results for bloggers are: People spend 4.4 seconds per additional 100 words on a page. This means that readers will read about 18% of additional content.

This graph that Jakob made shows the maximum percentage of words that people could read on a page as a function of the number of words, taking account of the average amount of time that people spend on a page given the number of words that it has, at an average reading speed:

Conclusion: If you want to be read by the masses, keep it short.