Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Some more musings to manage my communications through wave

Following this morning's try with ubernote, here are some more thoughts on using note taking applications and their sharing functionalities to use for collaboration among partners and colleagues.
While email still remains the primary media for

* sharing thoughts and streaming them to wave and blogs (as I have done here)
* sharing ideas and files on one to one
For larger group collaborations, I think I will be inclined to use wave more often.
One area where Wave can be very useful is in replacing my watched groups. This is the plan:

1) Create a separate email account and subscribe to the groups through that email
2) Configure that email to receive the group mails in digest mode that gets delivered once a day to that email address
3) Further configure that email to divert all digest emails to the preferred note taking email address
4) The digest mails show up as a note in the note taking app gadget
5) From here, two things - copy and paste some of the notes as appropriate to waves and share with the world, and with friends
5b) open the note in full mode in a separate tab and comment if necessary to the group or to specific individuals or archive in blogs so that the ideas do not get lost

I guess the benefits of such an approach is archiving of important knowledge base that does not get lost in the vapor of internet yet not clogging of my mailbox. Not that with seven gigs of space available I should worry too much about space in my mailbox, but it's always good to be clean and run an inbox zero attitude.

I think it's not a bad idea to see all the group mails in one stream of mails all coming to one place from where I can then redirect as needed.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Using ubernote to communicate from within and out of google wave

Using note taking applications like ubernotes to email from within and out of google wave

Communicating with people who do not have google wave account from within wave becomes an important issue at times. While there are a few implementations of emailing options from within Wave (both receiving and sendng emails from within Wave), these options are either at the stage of being developed and not in a stage of fully implemented or not working well. I have used emaily-wave (emaily-wave.appspot.com, or more details here

http://emaily.dlux.hu/

Another implementation is mail to wave robot.

However, it seems to me that the idea is to see that emails and waves remain separate. I'd use emails for my private conversations but would use wave for projects and collaborations. I'd also like to read all my other information (eg search results and search bot findings, interesting blog posts, wiki posts that come to me by RSS, interesting RSS feeds, anything else that I find on the wave but not easily retrievable or forget otherwise) on wave. As well as that, I'd like to be able to email this stuff from within wave.

I think using note taking gadgets within wave may addess this problem to some extent. I have used ubernote gadget (here's their gadget url for your use,

http://www.ubernote.com/webnote/webtools/gadgets/ubergadget.xml

Which if you can add as a gadget as URL to any blip will let you use the ubernote from within wave. You need to register with ubernote which is free (http://www.ubernote.com)

Apparently they have unlimited note storage at the time of writing this, so it helps.

How to email stuff from blips to someone outside wave using ubernote

For quick emailing any interesting information from a blip to someone outside of wave, the steps might be as follows:

1) install the ubernote gadget (one needs to have a username and password set up for ubernote or pre registration) from the gadget xml

2) start a new note and copy paste the contents of the blip into the new note and save it

3) double click the newly created note and click on the full edit button

4) In the full edit mode (which will be a new tab), expand the message or add attachments, etc and send out the note by attaching others emails as shares

How to receive emails as ubernote notes and create blips

Email any content that you think important to your ubernote assigned emaiil address and it will show up in the blip containing the ubernote.

There are a few issues around it though, like:

Lessons for using ubernote

1) Forward only text messages if forwarding from emails (do not forward websites or wikis)

2) check with google reader forwards

3) With webpages even with password protection, it works well

But these are minor issues compared to their real utility value.

I'd be interested to learn from you of other note taking applications and other approaches to communicate and integrate information from within Wave and outside. 


Requiem for wave services - 1

Wishlist for waves

  • Some sort of a webservice that says "Push to wave"
  • Clicking on push to wave will push webpages, photos, mails, text, data to wave
  • The push to wave box will have an option for a title (which will be the title of the wave)
  • Anotehr text box that will have some accompanying text to go with it
  • A gadget or a robot that will pull in stuff from anywhere in the web and start a blip or a wave (option)

Why wave and email must be separate

Email and wave are separate entities, the way I see it

  • Email is personal, wave is public (seems to me a philosophical issue, deliberately keep them separate)
  • Email is for limited commuications with friends and colleagues, wave is set up for collaboration
  • Very frustrating to connnect wave through emails - wonder why they never built in gmail in wave?
  • How can I push stuff from all over web to wave and from wave to all over web?
    • emaily bot does not work well, 
    • mail to wave does not work well
    • Rss y bot is down now
    • Evernote is a solution to push stuff from all over web to evernote
    • Take from evernote copy and paste to other blips and waves for the ones to share (at least for now)
    • Use twitter gadgets to see tweets in wave and push them around
    • wave --> web services --> email --> email others --> web services --> pull in to wave
    • I want to use wave for keeping and reading all my non-response related email archiving and messaging
    • Wave is a sounding board from blogs/wikis/concepts shared with others

Fwd: Power for repeated measure count data - single group

Here's a link to Asad's problem on finding the sample size for repeated measure quasi experimental study designs suggested by John.

 "Sample size formula for randomized controlled trials with counts of recurrent events" by T Tangoa (2009), Statistics & Probability, 79(4): 466-72

Here's the link:

Created a drop for it

Think this gives a good solution to the problem. Will write the R code for it later.







Sunday, December 6, 2009

Power calculation for repeated measure count data - single group

I found this query from someone in Australia in a discussion group. 

Subject: Power for repeated measure count data - single group
To: anzstat@lists.uq.edu.au


Hello listmembers

I was looking for references to compute sample size for count data in a repeated measure observational (single group) study. For example, a cohort of people will be followed on 'x' occasions over a period of 'y' years to investigate number of falls over the time period.  Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks

Asad Khan
University of Queensland

This is a difficult question to really answer. 

First, resources:

1) Steve simon runs a great set of pages called pmean (http://www.pmean.com/). He even discussed a two sample scenario with two different population comparing test trends but not exactly this problem
2) Here is a list of power calculators (online) http://statpages.org/#Power
4) 
Brisbane



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One unified stream of information source

Can google wave provide a way to unify all information streams in one place?

Google wave is quite exciting. It combines features of email (threaded discussions and allowing attachments), wikis (one can edit in real time), blogs (write and post), instant message, even voice mails and video conferencing. The multipliciity of media in Google wave excites me and I'd like to use it to put all my information bits in one place I have not been very successful at it so far. I hope there be a robot or a gadget that can take in emails (emaily-wave does that but it' s still very clunky; I cannot seem to get my emails show up consistently some do and some don't); so is the case with mail to wave. RSS bot does not work at the time of writing this. I am stranded. 

I had in mind was one service where I could simply push anything I want to my blips and it'd neatly blip and show all feeds and aggregated news that came its way. thats not happening any time soon. I guess I need to be happy with my email integrating everything. 






"There's a crack in everything, it's how the light gets in." (Leonard Cohen)