links for 2010-04-01: NoSQL = Manual vs Auto; Automated Journalism; Scatterplots with R; Will the cloud rain cash?; Bing killing OpenOffice?; Logarithms

• The NoSQL Debate: Automatic vs. Manual Transmission - A good metaphor.  Perhaps NoSQL should really be abbreviating "Not Only SQL" and not "No SQL"?
  
• Automated Journalism: In the US, algorithms are already reporting the news - Reposted from a comment to yesterday's links, very interesting.  "do algorithms steal the work of journalists - or help them to cope with information overload?"
• "Different" by Youngme Moon - Great way to promote a book, and piqued my interest in it.
• How to: make a scatterplot with a smooth fitted line - I did not know about R (probably should have), but appears to be a cool tool for working with data.  Love it.  And provides a source for unemployment data should you want it.
  
• When will cloud computing start raining cash? - "... there's a tremendous amount of trial and evaluation happening right now, which should translate into paid engagements in the very near future."
• Lawson ERP on Amazon Web Services - An example of the move to the cloud.
• Bing trying to kill OpenOffice? - An update at the end of the story says it is a technical issue, but this makes one think about the control we give to the search engine we use.
• Apple: Simplicity taken too far? - "I've heard a growing chorus of open-source voices shifting from Microsoft as (open-source) public enemy No. 1 to Apple."
• Opinionator - Power Tools - If you never understood logarithms in school, this is a good read.

Amazon Public Data Sets

I follow the Amazon Web Services Blog and recently saw several announcements about new Public Data Sets being available.  What is a public data set you ask?  From the web-site:

Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications.

What is cool about this is that it greatly simplifies getting access to large sets of data that while public in the past, were difficult to work with as you had to download, install, load, and otherwise provide the infrastructure for and manage all the data yourself.

The one that caught my eye was the Daily Global Weather data set.  Now, I haven't used this yet and there are other great resources for local weather station data like the Weather Underground (where I upload my station data by the way), but this is a great way to gain access to a bunch of historical weather data.  Other data sets include census data, Wikipedia data, geographic data, and more.

One drawback for data sets that are continuing to be updated each day, like historical weather data, is that you aren't accessing a continually updated data store, rather you are creating your own EBS volume from a snapshot.  This means (if I understand all this correctly) that if you need the most recent data, the snapshot must be updated regularly and you would have to update your EBS volume from it manually.  Or perhaps there are tools to assist with that.

All in all, a useful service, and a great move by Amazon to drive more users to EC2.