In the actual experiment, I gave Basil the following three essays:

Essay 1:
At first it was a way of keeping in touch with friends after I’d moved away. But I made more new friends throughthe online gaming community that occurs around the game. I’ve met a good number of my fellow guild members, including my guild leader and most of the other officers. To me, game has always been about exploring, storylines and the exotic locales presented therein. That’s all secondary to killing bosses, and trudging through raids really.

Essay 2:
I play WoW and other MMORPGS for the simple reason that I’m intrigued by the online community and game play aspects. WoW is my particular favourite that I return to again and again. I believe the reasoning behind this is the friendly community that has matured to quite a size over the number of years I’ve been playing. In addition to the community I find the story lines within the game interesting, challenging and sometimes, dare I say it, exciting. By exciting I mean, that like a good book, you want to see what is going to happen next!

Originally I started playing WoW for the simply reason it was an MMORPG. I was intrigued by the genre and WoW was really one of the first to be highlighted through the media, etc. As I progressed in the game, I discovered that it was a great way to relax after a busy day. As a form of escapism, it helped with relieving stress.

Now I rarely get to play WoW or any other MMORPG for that matter, however, for the same reasons of relaxation, online community, exciting stories, I still try to play as regularly as I can.

Essay 3:
Originally I moved to WoW simply because the majority of my guild had moved from DAoC, when WoW was released it was the next game that the existing guild members were collecting in. Ironically even though I followed my guild to the game I am actually motivated by the personal achievement.

I am the kind of player that likes to explore every location, complete every quest before moving on to the next zone and maximise trade skills. With each expansion, I spent most of the time solo’ing to the level cap, then exploring group content with my guild or raiding alliance.

With access to the raiding alliance I get to try challenging content which often require a level of skill and co-ordination. Currently I am motivated with the challenges of raiding with the aim to have completed as much as possible before the next content patch.

I know there is a sigma [sic] attached with gamers, but when you consider some people will return from work and just sit passively in front of a TV for 5hours. Similarly you see people sit all night on online chat channels. Given how some spend their time, how can spending your time problem solving and socialising with others with similar interests be so wrong.

Basil was asked to summarize the main ideas that occurred in each essay. Unfortunately, he was somewhat influenced by the question and noted down what people said their initial impetus for playing World of Warcraft was and then why they continue to play. I had to send him off to do it again. Table 1 illustrates our responses.

When I looked at essay 1, there was a bit of a question about things being “secondary to killing bosses , and trudging through raids…” Secondary implies that the other things were of lesser importance, but the negative tone implicit with words like “trudging” would seem to bely that, so I didn’t include the raiding. In talking to Basil, I know he had the same problem, because he asked me about it and I told him I would not give him an answer. As a result, he included raiding, whereas I did not.

On the whole, we don’t seem that different. If we had gone through the essays in advance together and agreed on some themes, I suspect the coding would have been similar. What do you think?

I know people are very curious about the results of my recent E-Mail in the Cloud: An Open University Survey. Time is a bit short for me, so I decided to write up this quick and dirty post outlining the key result. An analysis of the comments people left about why they made the choice they did will be covered in a later posting, as those comments proved to be extremely interesting.

In a more formal report, the order of detail presented would be different. I’ve started with the results first, as that’s likely to be of interest to most people, and then discussed the methodology, survey deployment, and motivation.

Table of Contents

• The Respondents
• Key Findings
• The Specifics
• Caveats
• Motivation
• Methodology
• Conclusions

The Respondents

533 people participated in the week-long survey. This is broken down visually in Figure 1. Of those:

• 71.1% declared themselves as students (379 people)
• 22.5% declared themselves as associate lecturers, academic conference moderators, or script markers (120 people)
• 3.4% declared themselves as permanent members of staff, either academic or support (18 people).
• 3.0% chose the “other” category (16 people).

Figure 1: Graph representing numbers and percentages of respondents, broken down by role

Of the 16 others, 7 were alumni. 3 others should probably have been in the AL category but politically considered themselves permanent members of staff. 3 were combinations of ALs/students, 1 was an AL/external contractor, 1 was a student but hoping to become an AL, and 1 claimed to belong to all three categories.

In this quick and dirty analysis, I have not assigned the “others” to appropriate existing categories, so their input is being omitted for the moment. I’ll leave that for a subsequent post.

Key Findings

1. Microsoft Live@edu is the preferred choice of very few people overall (11.63%)
2. A large number of people don’t know enough to make a choice between the two (36.21%)
3. An even larger number of all surveyed respondents (43.52%) would choose Google Apps Eduction Edition.
4. If a choice had to be made, Google Apps Education Edition was the most preferred by at least 40% of the respondents of a given role, with the exception of the 16 “Other” respondents.
5. If the “don’t care either way” respondents (46) are considered, Google Apps Education Edition would be the choice of 50.28% of all respondents and Microsoft Live@edu 20.26%.
6. If Microsoft Live@edu was chosen, it was by a student, far above any other respondent role (14.78% vs the next closest of 6.25%).

The Specifics

The following data table and graphic illustrates the specific choices of different respondents by role. If you’re examining Table 1 visually, bolded cells indicate that the majority of respondents in that row choose that option. For example, in the first row, which is Google Apps Education Edition, the cells for students, permanent staff, and response totals are all bolded, indicating those groups preferred Google Apps Education Edition over the other choices available.

Figure 2: Graph representing the preferences for a system by role.

Figure 2 shows a cylinder for each role in the survey. Each cylinder shows the percentage of respondents who chose Google Apps Education Edition, Microsoft Live@edu, don’t care either way, and don’t really know enough to make a choice with different colours. Google is red, Microsoft is blue, don’t know is yellow, and don’t care is green. While specific numbers aren’t shown on this graph, the total number of respondents in that category is indicated at the bottom, so you can either consult Table 1 for the number of respondents or do a quick calculation yourself.

Caveats

This was an unofficial survey that was designed and released on very short notice. Although I made a good effort to advertise it widely, the number of respondents is relatively low when compared with the Open University’s population of associate lecturers, permanent staff, and students.

While I specifically advertised in places where I knew Open University community members would see the information, I cannot guarantee that everyone who responded was associated with the Open University. I cannot see a reason why external people would participate, but I cannot preclude the possibility.

SurveyMonkey attempts to prevent the same person from completing the survey multiple times. However, that is based on the respondents’ IP addresses. Therefore, if a respondent changed location or has changing dynamically assigned IP addresses, it is possible they could have completed the survey more than once. This could have been avoided by collecting unique Open University identification information for each participant, but that would also have meant needing more stringent data handling and an increased reluctance to participate.

The rest of this post takes a step backwards and considers motivation, deployment, and survey design.

Motivation

According to David Wilson, director of strategic planning in LTS, a choice is being considered between Google Apps Education Edition and Microsoft Live@edu and should be made shortly (in Snowball 36 – November 2009). Students are definitely migrating. A decision is still being made about what to do with e-mail addresses for associate lecturers.

I thought it would be useful to survey interested parties about their preference if they had to choose between the two systems. I was especially interested in obtaining some indication of preference from students, who are guaranteed to be affected. The Business Steering Group, the group responsible for making the decision, will be meeting again soon and I will forward the findings of the survey to them for consideration.

Methodology

The survey itself was very simple, consisting of only three questions:

1. Which one of the following roles best describes your main role at the Open University? Your main role will be where you spend the majority of your time or where moving your existing FirstClass e-mail to the cloud will have the most impact.
2. Which cloud-based system would you prefer, if you had to choose one or the other? Choices are randomised.
3. I confirm that I am associated with the Open University as a student, associate lecturer, permanent staff, or in some other capacity.

The first question was intended to categorize the different respondents by their role at the university. It was recognized that some people have more than one role. They were asked to choose the one where the change would have the most impact. The role was then used to organize the results of the second question.

The second question is the heart of the survey. Respondents were give four choices:

• Google Apps Education Edition
• Microsoft Live@edu
• Don’t care either way
• Don’t really know enough to make a choice

The choices were randomized to avoid any suggestion of bias on the part of the survey giver.

There was also an opportunity to add some brief free-form comments on their choice. From comments in this section and comments received by e-mail, I know many people wanted the ability to say “Neither”. That was not a realistic choice given that one of the two systems will be adopted. That is also why it is worded as “if you had to choose…”

The third question was where the respondent agrees that they are associated with The Open University in some way. The survey is not very useful if it is completed by parties not affected by the outcome.

The survey was prefaced with some brief information about the motivation for the survey and how the survey results would be used. Respondents were also given two links from Google and two links from Microsoft on their respective products. Respondents were also given links to two articles from independent bloggers or education organizations reviewing the two products.

Respondents were assured that the survey was unofficial and no personal details, including computer IP addresses, were being recorded or stored with the survey. They were also assured that I would only be using the data for providing indicative preferences to the Open University and I had not sought or received permission from the Open University to conduct the survey. Contact details by e-mail or Twitter were included.

Survey Deployment

The survey questions were presented and answered electronically via the cloud-based SurveyMonkey poll service. The survey was open between Sunday, November 22nd, and Sunday, November 29th (23:59). Respondents were initially directed to the survey by one of three methods:

• A microblog entry on Twitter with a shortened URL leading to a blog post with a bit more background information on the survey and slightly expanded commentary on the survey than in the actual survey itself. I made several postings throughout the survey period, each time asking others to also pass the information on, which several people did.
• Postings in several FirstClass conferences consisting of a little background information about why I was doing the survey, how it would be used, and how to contact me. The posting included the URL for the a blog post as well as a direct link to the SurveyMonkey survey. The message asked readers to pass the message along to other interested parties, which resulted in it being posted to an unknown number of OUSA and course conferences. I personally made postings in the following FirstClass conferences:
  • MCT AL Discussion Forum
  • AL Common Room
  • Technology Cafe
  • Science Chat
  • Social sciences Cafe
  • R01 Arts Cafe
  • R03 Arts Cafe
  • OUSA Mac General
  • OUSA Open Access
  • OUSA Office Applications
  • OUSA Linux
  • OUSA London
  • OUSA Chat
  • OUSA Moderators
• A posting was made in the “Lounge” section of Platform, the Open University Community site. The posting was made the 25th of November and Platform claims “0 views”, but that seems to be an error as all threads have 0 views even when they have responses.

Conclusions

Even considering the various caveats in place, I think it is clear there is a strong preference for Google Apps Education Edition if people have to choose between one or the other. Examining the free-form comments, I know there is a belief from many people that e-mail should be kept in-house or that a choice of “none of the above” would have been preferred. Many people are concerned about keeping .open.ac.uk addresses for academic hardware and software purchases. Many people also expressed concern about security and data privacy issues with their e-mail being managed by either Google or Microsoft. I’ll examine these in more detail in a follow-up report.

Thank you to all those who took the time to respond and comment. I would also like to thank those people who reposted or re-tweeted the survey information. As promised, I will be passing this information along shortly to the Business Steering Group who is making the decision.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave a comment here, message me as @Eingang on Twitter, or e-mail me as mah383 on FirstClass server 2 (tutor.open.ac.uk).

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The requirements to complete the “Insane in the Membrane” achievement.
Image from WoWWiki (2009)

I want to say something about the kinds of motivations people have for playing World of Warcraft. Specifically, I want to enumerate factors that motivate players to persist in the game even when it involves tasks that are repetitive, boring, or seemingly impossibly long.

For example, there’s an achievement in World of Warcraft called “Insane in the Membrane” that gives the completer a reward of an in-game title of “The Insane.” This achievement requires you to raise your reputation points with different game factions to exalted, the highest level. Generally, you need about 21,000 points to reach exalted. Points are gained by completing quests, collecting and turning in items, or sometimes killing certain types of things. If you only had to gain exalted reputation with one or two factions, this would not be difficult. However, you need to do this with eight different factions, most of which are not factions you would be accruing large amounts of reputation with during the normal course of play.

To increase the difficulty, several of the factions involved have rival factions. With those factions, as you gain reputation with one, you lose reputation points with the rival faction, making the process of completing this achievement complex in addition to time-consuming. The WoWWiki (2009) page describes some strategies for completing this achievement and the complexities of the faction-rival relationships.

Most tasks players undertake are not going to be as complex, time-consuming, or mind-numbing to complete as the aptly-named “Insane in the Membrane”. There are, however, many smaller day-to-day activities necessary for successful raiding or to get some particular piece of gear, such as doing daily quests to earn gold, or harvesting materials for potions or enchantments, or completing instance and after instance to get badge rewards or reputation rewards. I’m making it sound like getting achievements or gear is the be-all, end-all, but I think the situation is more complex than that. It’s that hypothesis I want to verify.

Other things I would like to be able to comment on include the relationships between gender and motivation, or motivation and age, or possibly even motivation and nationality. I do not necessarily believe there will be a relationship between motivation and nationality necessarily, but how can you definitively say if you do not look for the correlation? That gives me the following questions I want answered:

1. What motivates people to play World of Warcraft?
2. What motivates people to persist in very boring or difficult tasks?
3. Is there a relationship between gender and stated motivations? If so, what is it?
4. Is there a relationship between age and stated motivations? If so, what is it?
5. Is there a relationship between nationality and stated motivations? If so, what is it?
6. Is there a relationship between character roles and classes and motivation?

With those six questions in mind and the original study idea of determining motivation via analysis of free-form essays about motivation, I can now go ahead and develop the specific survey questions that will help elicit data to answer those questions.

Going back to considering my approach-whether I should start with planning versus start with survey question-it was not as clearcut as I expected. By starting with some potential survey questions and then thinking about the answers I would get from them, I gained a better idea about what answers I wanted, a kind of iterative development process. Sometimes putting the horse first helps you know where and how to put the cart!

References:

WoWWiki. (2009) Insane in the Membrane, [online] WoWWiki. Available from http://www.wowwiki.com/Insane_in_The_Membrane (Accessed November 6, 2009).

Anal1a, in terms of clumping, doesn’t look very good, at least not anymore. That was not previously the case, but I had revised my algorithm to make it symmetrical as per the insructions of a computing statistician here at the University of Sussex. He claimed that the Procrustes Rotation needed symmetric data and my nonsymmetric data, where Doc1 vs Doc2 didn’t have the same similarity as Doc2 vs Doc1, was not going to work. That change has, I believe, altered the efficacy of the algorithm and things are no longer clumped together as promisingly as they were previously. The clumps should be a two- or three-letter short code followed by a digit. Therefore, ac1 and ac2 belong together. Pl1, pl2, and pl3 belong together, and so on. The clumping is significantly better in the already symmetric cosine normalization algorithm (anal2a). The two speech processing documents are clumped together (sp1 and sp2), all of the Power PC and G4 documents are together (pp1, pp2, g4c), and the three Pine Lake tornado stories are clumped far away from everything else (which is all computer-related) and together on their own. Excellent clumping, in fact. So the hypernym hypothesis looks like, on these short documents, it is working well with cosine normalization.

Here’s the final bit of loveliness: comparing one MDS cluster diagram against another. MDS output is mapped to the vector space independently. That is, the same data will produce the same visualization or mapping, but different data is mapped to a different vector space, so you cannot just compare one MDS matrix to another directly. That is where Procrustes Rotation comes in. It applies a series of intelligent matrix transformations, trying to map the second vector matrix onto the source vector matrix. As a side benefit, essential in my case, it always provides a fitness measure to tell you how close the two were. on a scale of 0 to 1. So these two, as you can see (see above image), even after the transformations, were not that close together. As it happens, though, this is not particularly useful information to know. I am currently more interested in assessing how close the two algorithms are to human classifiers.

This recent success gave us plenty to discuss, particularly with respect to metric and non-metric data. The MDS community calls source data metric when the similarity or dissimilarity data is symmetric. That is, the value at row 2, column 1 is the same as the value at row 1, column 2. Classical multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) is designed to only work with metric data. SPSS includes the ALSCAL and PROXSCAL MDS algorithms which can work with non-metric data, but MATLAB’s classical MDS does not because it treats things as Eucledean distances–another reason why I had to alter the Anal1a algorithm. The primary reason I now had metric data for everything, however, was because the computing statistician had told me I needed it for the Procrustes. Hawever, as we were examining my output, it occurred to me that Procrustes did not really care if the data was symmetric, so long as the dimensions of the data were the same (the same number of rows and columns). Which leads us to question whether the application of the method is statistically sensible or not. To that end, I need to track down a new computing statistician and perhaps a mathematician and discuss the process with them. My original computing statistician has retired.

Earlier I said that comparing one machine to another, to see how they fit is not useful information, but what would be interesting is to prepare a matrix of all the possible combinations of human judgements, cosine normalization, and weird formula:

cosine   wrd form.   human
cosine (anal2a)		x
weird formula (anal1a)           x
human                                        x

So that is my task for my next meeting (on the 16th of June). Before then, I need to figure out how to get MATLAB to take multiple tables as data. In SPSS, I could paste in several tables (representing all of the people’s individual data, for example) and it would work with that. That is necessary in order to aggregate the peopel to do the comparison. Onward ho, then! Progress at last!

Doc1	Doc2	Doc3	Doc4
Doc1	100	76	18	91
Doc2	76	100	22	35
Doc3	18	22	100	65
Doc4	91	34	65	100

This is not too dissimilar from the labelled diagram, part of the MATLAB documentation on data importing. Except that, if you look at the table below it, which describes which functions to use, they don’t have a function with a similar example to their labelled diagram. Early on I thought I should be able to use dlmread, which allows you specify rows/columns for starting points or a range. My idea was just to have a range which excluded the non-numeric troublesome labels. No matter what I did, though, I could not get it to work. It was frustrating, because I could paste the data into the Import Wizard and that could handle the data fine. I wrote people, I researched on the web, and I tried all sorts of things.

Eventually, I came full-circle back to dlmread and experimented by making a small data file with unrelated data in it. That worked fine. So I then copied half of one of my data tables into the test file and tried that. That also worked fine. I copied the whole data table into the test file and used dlmread on it. It worked fine! What was the difference between the two identical data files other than their filenames? When I uncovered the answer to that, I kicked myself. My data files were generated years ago and stored on my Mac OS 9-based laptop. My laptop and the data have since migrated to Apple’s swoopy BSD-based UNIX goodness and that’s the environment that MATLAB runs under. So… Have you guessed the problem? Yes, it was linefeeds! The data files had original Mac linefeeds and MATLAB wanted UNIX linefeeds. D’oh! It just goes to reaffirm that the things you don’t see can really hurt you.

Once that was solved, work proceded rapidly apace as I was now able to finish automating the whole comparison process from start to finish.

function  [Anal1Raw, Anal2Raw, Anal1MDS, Anal2MDS, fit] =
processEinCiteData(firstFile, secondFile, runName, labels)
% Read in the similarity matrices from the two data files
Anal1Raw = dlmread(firstFile, '\t', 1, 1);
Anal2Raw = dlmread(secondFile, '\t', 1, 1);
% Set up default document name labels if we didn't get any
if nargin < 4
labels = {'g4c', 'pp1', 'pp2', 'msc', 'pl1', 'pl2', 'pl3', 'sp1', 'sp2', 'ac1', 'ac2', 'bws'};
if nargin < 3
runName = '';
end
end
% Set up labels for the filenames
fileName1 = regexprep(firstFile, '\..*$', '');
fileName2 = regexprep(secondFile, '\..*$', '');
% Convert the similarity data to numbers below 1 for use in MDS
Anal1Raw = abs(100 - Anal1Raw)
Anal2Raw = abs(100 - Anal2Raw)
% Calculate the MDS and prepare a diagram showing the
% clusterings for the first document
[Anal1MDS, eigvals] = cmdscale(Anal1Raw);
figure(1);
plot(1:length(eigvals),eigvals,'bo-');
graph2d.constantline(0,'LineStyle',':','Color',[.7 .7 .7]);
axis([1,length(eigvals),min(eigvals),max(eigvals)*1.1]);
xlabel('Eigenvalue number');
ylabel('Eigenvalue');
plot(Anal1MDS(:,1),Anal1MDS(:,2),'bo', 'MarkerFaceColor', 'b', 'MarkerSize', 10);
axis(max(max(abs(Anal1MDS))) * [-1.1,1.1,-1.1,1.1]); axis('square');
text(Anal1MDS(:,1)+1.5,Anal1MDS(:,2),labels,'HorizontalAlignment','left');
hx = graph2d.constantline(0,'LineStyle','-','Color',[.7 .7 .7]);
hx = changedependvar(hx,'x');
hy = graph2d.constantline(0,'LineStyle','-','Color',[.7 .7 .7]);
hy = changedependvar(hy,'y');
title(['\fontname{lucida}\fontsize{18}' fileName1 ' MDS']);
xlabel(['\fontname{lucida}\fontsize{14}' runName ' on ' date], 'FontWeight', 'bold');
% Calculate the MDS and prepare a diagram showing the
% clusterings for the second document
[Anal2MDS, eigvals] = cmdscale(Anal2Raw);
figure(2);
plot(1:length(eigvals),eigvals,'rd-');
graph2d.constantline(0,'LineStyle',':','Color',[.7 .7 .7]);
axis([1,length(eigvals),min(eigvals),max(eigvals)*1.1]);
xlabel('Eigenvalue number');
ylabel('Eigenvalue');
plot(Anal2MDS(:,1),Anal2MDS(:,2),'rd', 'MarkerFaceColor', 'r', 'MarkerSize', 10);
axis(max(max(abs(Anal2MDS))) * [-1.1,1.1,-1.1,1.1]); axis('square');
text(Anal2MDS(:,1)+1.5,Anal2MDS(:,2),labels,'HorizontalAlignment','left');
hx = graph2d.constantline(0,'LineStyle','-','Color',[.7 .7 .7]);
hx = changedependvar(hx,'x');
hy = graph2d.constantline(0,'LineStyle','-','Color',[.7 .7 .7]);
hy = changedependvar(hy,'y');
title(['\fontname{lucida}\fontsize{18}' fileName2 ' MDS']);
xlabel(['\fontname{lucida}\fontsize{14}' runName ' on ' date], 'FontWeight', 'bold');
% Apply Procrustes to the two MDS results to map them
% into the same vector space and prepare a plot of the
% result
[fit, Z, transform] = procrustes(Anal1MDS, Anal2MDS);
figure(3);
plot(Anal1MDS(:,1), Anal1MDS(:,2), 'bo','MarkerFaceColor', 'b', 'MarkerSize', 10);
hold on
plot(Z(:,1), Z(:,2), 'rd', 'MarkerFaceColor', 'r', 'MarkerSize', 10);
hold off
text(Anal1MDS(:,1)+1.5,Anal1MDS(:,2), labels, 'Color', 'b');
text(Z(:,1)+1.5,Z(:,2),labels, 'Color', 'r');
xlabel(['\fontname{lucida}\fontsize{14}' runName ' on ' date], 'FontWeight', 'bold');
ylabel(['\fontname{lucida}\fontsize{14}' 'fit = ' num2str(fit, '%2.4f')], 'FontWeight', 'bold');
titleStr = ['\fontname{lucida}\fontsize{18}' fileName1 ...
' compared to ' fileName2];
title(titleStr, 'HorizontalAlignment', 'center', ...
'VerticalAlignment', 'bottom');
legend({firstFile, secondFile}, 4);

At the end, I had a quantitative number, the degree of fit, between two diagrams after applying the Procrustes Rotation to them. Finally! On a whim, I fed in the same data table as both arguments to my comparison program. That is, I compared the same data file to itself. My hypothesis was that the resultant degree of fit should be either 0 or 1 (depending on which the fitness was measured). Much to my surprise, no matter which data file I used, the result was never 0 or 1. My previous Procrustes Analysis code was taken from some sample code in the MATLAB documentation and looked like: [D,Z] = procrustes(Anal1aMDS, Anal2aMDS(:,1:2)); That last bit in () is some kind of MATLAB scaling, which, being a novice to MATLAB, I didn’t realize. So, in fact, my two diagrams weren’t the same which is why I wasn’t getting a 100% degree of fit. I do not want to say how long it took me to narrow that down. Once I did, though, it looked like I was basically set and I was able to quickly produce some comparisons between my “weird” half-baked metric and the cosine normalization one. One small step for EinKind.

This is a delayed entry from May 12th, 2004.

As I haven’t met with Thufir since receiving the e-mail, I haven’t discussed it with him to see if he’s willing to cough up £525 (~930 US/780 €) plus £210 (~370 US/310 €) for the software for me. The lab manager stopped by my office today to see if somebody was going to pay for it and we entered into a discussion about the licensing arrangements. The academic license is only available for installation on university-owned equipment. I don’t have any university-owned equipment. He doesn’t want to be breaking the law by violating the terms of the licensing agreement which is fair enough. That does leave me in somewhat of a quandry: I don’t qualify for the student edition; I’d be in violation of the license for an academic version; and I can’t afford the £1625 (~2900 US/2400 €) commercial base software price plus an additional £600 (~1050 US/895 €) for the toolkit I need.
Why do I need my own copy? Can I live without my own copy? I can possibly do without my own copy as I can run it on campus, but I’m not on campus all the time. I do return to Canada for extended periods of time and we are investigating an option of moving back to Canada and having me commute out every quarter or so for a month as that would be cheaper than actually living here. Just last year I spent 6 months in Canada. Even if I am here, it’s a problem if I just want to work from home. It would therefore be nice to have my own copy, but at what price?
I’ve told the lab manager that I’ll get back to him. I’m meeting with Thufir on Friday. I also e-mailed MathWorks to ask about my situation and licensing arrangements for it. It does seem strange that their academic license is restricted by machine ownership rather than by reported use for the software. Their customer service auto-responder promises a response within 24 hours, but so far all I’ve received is the automatic response and a response from their database that my e-mail address has been updated in my profile. I have no idea what that’s about. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

David L. Jones had a series of MATLAB pointers which included links to toolboxes for non-metric multidimensional scaling. The latter toolkit, developed by Mark Steyvers, doesn’t come with any documentation and includes some DLLs, so I wonder if only works in Windows somehow? I couldn’t find any other reference to it on the web.
I was waiting for the Mac support person to come install a new version of MATLAB for me. The demo installation and toolkits I installed last fall have long since expired. I’m also still waiting to hear back from the UNIX software support people in the department about acquiring one of the pool licenses for use with a copy of MatLab on my Macintosh off campus. Latish on in the day, I found the Mac support person and acquired a valid license file. It didn’t work right off the bat. I had to edit the file and change the linefeeds from Macintosh ones to UNIX ones. After that, it worked great and it looks fantastic. So I should be able to start doing something with that soon. It also works from home, surprisingly enough, as long as I have an Internet connection, so that will be quite convenient. Hurrah! I am moving ahead.

This is my current revised program:
% Import anal1ahyp.txt into anal1a matrix variable. Do this first! It’s not done
% automatically here. Need first to do something like anal1a = abs(100 – anal1a) to
% get proper dissimilarity values to work with. The default ones in the files don’t
% work as is.
docs = {‘g4c’, ‘pp1′, ‘pp2′, ‘msc’, ‘pl1′, ‘pl2′, ‘pl3′, ’sp1′, ’sp2′, ‘ac1′, ‘ac2′, ‘bws’};
[Anal1aMDS, eigvals] = cmdscale(Anal1aRaw);
plot(1:length(eigvals),eigvals,’bo-’);
graph2d.constantline(0,’LineStyle’,':’,'Color’,[.7 .7 .7]);
axis([1,length(eigvals),min(eigvals),max(eigvals)*1.1]);
xlabel(‘Eigenvalue number’);
ylabel(‘Eigenvalue’);
plot(Anal1aMDS(:,1),Anal1aMDS(:,2),’bx’);
axis(max(max(abs(Anal1aMDS))) * [-1.1,1.1,-1.1,1.1]); axis(’square’);
text(Anal1aMDS(:,1),Anal1aMDS(:,2),docs,’HorizontalAlignment’,'left’);
hx = graph2d.constantline(0,’LineStyle’,'-’,'Color’,[.7 .7 .7]);
hx = changedependvar(hx,’x');
hy = graph2d.constantline(0,’LineStyle’,'-’,'Color’,[.7 .7 .7]);
hy = changedependvar(hy,’y');
% Import anal2ahyp.txt into anal2a matrix variable. Do this first! It’s not done
% automatically here.
Anal2aRaw = abs(100 – Anal2aRaw);
[Anal2aMDS, eigvals] = cmdscale(Anal2aRaw);
% do procustes
[D,Z] = procrustes(Anal1aMDS, Anal2aMDS(:,1:2));
plot(Anal1aMDS(:,1), Anal1aMDS(:,2), ‘bo’, Z(:,1), Z(:,2), ‘rd’);
text(Anal1aMDS(:,1)+0.5,Anal1aMDS(:,2), docs, ‘Color’, ‘b’);
text(Z(:,1)+0.5,Z(:,2),docs, ‘Color’, ‘r’);
xlabel(‘East of the Sun’);
ylabel(‘West of the Moon’);
legend({‘Anal1a’, ‘Anal2a’}, 4);