Information services provider Thomson Reuters, US, has expanded its news analytics service by including a new psychological analysis capability. Thomson Reuters MarketPsych Indices (TRMIs) is said to provide easy-to-interpret real-time psychological analysis of news and social media. Users can view and model the impact of investor psychology across global asset classes and regions by analysing the specific attitudes expressed within stories and tracking the macroeconomic themes that are most relevant to price movements in each asset class.
The analysis is projected to help gauge the market sentiment by analysing human emotion in news and social media in order to influence and support investment and trading strategies in financial markets. The aims is to offer multi-dimensional psychological analysis for machine readable news, including emotion and sentiment associated with specific countries, commodities, currencies and economic sectors.
Such a detailed level of interpretation is seen to help users to answer in-depth questions with quantifiable evidence to support specific hypotheses in a way not previously possible.
Developed in conjunction with MarketPsych, a consultancy specialising in behavioral economics, TRMIs are delivered to financial institutions as a series of real-time indicators. These can easily be incorporated into charting and alerting applications or in quantitative models to help support asset allocation decisions and sector rotation strategies. TRMIs are tailored to specific topics and asset classes and reflect the levels of specific psychological dimensions expressed in news and social media such as optimism, gloom, joy, fear, trust, anger, innovation, violence, conflict, stress, urgency and uncertainty. TRMIs also provide a set of metrics on common macroeconomic themes known to influence the prices of commodities and currencies, the growth of economic sectors, and the development of nations. For example, the feed quantifies such items as ‘CropDisease’ for agricultural commodities or ‘CurrencyPegInstability’ for foreign exchange markets.
TRMIs are seen as a natural complement to Thomson Reuters News Analytics (TRNA) as they provide a top-down view of market sentiment from a behavioral finance perspective relating to asset classes, sectors and countries. When the MarketPsych Indices are used in combination with the news analytics data, it is expected that users can better understand how the bottom-up signals in TRNA are affected by the psychological states of the market.
STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, has announced the launch of a new quarterly journal - International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. The journal is affiliated with the Global Risk Forum GRF Davos and will be launched officially at the 4th International Disaster and Risk Conference (IDRC) in Davos, Switzerland, August 26-30, 2012. Dr. David Alexander of the Global Risk Forum GRF Davos will serve as Editor-in-Chief of the journal.
The combination of the world’s growing population, expanding urbanisation and globalisation and now climate change, is seen to have greatly aggravated the risk potential of natural and technological disasters to all communities and nations. There is great demand for an improved understanding, assessment and management of disasters and risks that affect human safety, health, the environment, critical infrastructures, the economy and society at large. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction publishes fundamental and applied research, critical reviews, policy papers and case studies addressing these issues at all geographical scales, and from a multidisciplinary perspective.
The journal will publish research in scientific fields such as: earth sciences in its entirety; environmental sciences; engineering; urban studies; geography; and social sciences. The first year of the journal’s content will be freely available to view online until August 31, 2013 on ScienceDirect; first papers accepted for publication in the journal are now available online.
Technology research firm Gartner, Inc., US, has released a report, according to which, the desire to share content and to access it on multiple devices will motivate consumers to start storing a third of their digital content in the cloud by 2016. Gartner said that just 7 percent of consumer content was stored in the cloud in 2011, but this will grow to 36 percent in 2016. The report, ‘Forecast: Consumer Digital Storage Needs, 2010-2016,’ is available on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=1953315.
The increased adoption of camera-equipped smartphones and tablets is allowing users to capture huge amounts of photos and videos. Gartner predicts that worldwide consumer digital storage needs will grow from 329 exabytes in 2011 to 4.1 zettabytes in 2016. This includes digital content stored in PCs, smartphones, tablets, hard-disk drives (HDDs), network attached storage (NAS) and cloud repositories.
The bulk of the cloud storage needs of consumers in the near term will be met by social media sites such as Facebook, which offer free storage space for uploading photos and videos for social sharing. The report forecasts that average storage per household will grow from 464 gigabytes in 2011 to 3.3 terabytes in 2016. In 2012, Gartner believes that the adoption of camera-equipped tablets and smartphones will drive consumer storage needs. In the first half of 2012, a shortage in supply of HDDs as a result of the floods in Thailand provided an impetus for cloud storage adoption, leading to an unusual overall growth rate between 2011 and 2012.
Consumers are expected to first try the basic package that is offered free by online backup companies. These services will be offered as apps on tablets, smartphones and broadband-connected TV because of partnerships between original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and online storage and sync companies. Cloud service providers (CSPs) will also increasingly offer cloud storage. The use of cloud online storage and sync services will provide the foundational experience for consumers to start using cloud storage as part of the personal cloud.
On-premises storage will remain the main repository of consumer digital content, although Gartner predicts that its share will progressively drop from 93 percent in 2011 to 64 percent in 2016 as the direct-to-cloud model becomes more mainstream. Cloud storage will grow at an aggressive pace during this period. A majority of this growth will come from North America and Western Europe. In the Asia/Pacific region, Japan and South Korea will witness the highest growth in cloud storage, where CSPs have been offering online storage and sync services for some years.
The Parthenon Group recently conducted a survey, according to which, it is increasingly difficult for engineers to quickly find accurate and trustworthy technical information.
Sponsored by Knovel, the Engineering Tools and Information Spring 2012 Survey’ finds that navigating multiple sources of information, finding best practices, securing approvals and permissions, along with the difficulty in validating the accuracy of the information, topped the list of frustrations of engineers polled in the survey. Knovel is a provider of a Web-based application integrating technical information with analytical and search tools.
Parthenon Group surveyed more than 600 engineers working in the Aerospace & Defense and Engineering Design and Construction industries about their use of technology, their information needs as well as their satisfaction with various providers of engineering information and tools including Knovel. The survey identified a number of challenges that engineers face as they aim to improve how they find and interact with critical data.
OCLC, a US-based nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organisation, and electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) have signed an agreement to make EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) interoperable with OCLC WorldShare Management Services. The move will enable libraries to use EDS as their discovery layer and WorldShare Management Services as their library management system.
Additionally, the companies are investigating working toward an integrated solution allowing WorldCat Local users who also subscribe to EDS to search and retrieve results from EDS within the WorldCat Local service.
Libraries using the integrated EDS-WMS solution will be able to perform cataloguing, acquisitions, license management and circulation in OCLC’s next generation cloud-based management system, while providing their patrons with the EDS discovery service as a user front end. OCLC and EBSCO are working together to integrate such key WMS functions into EDS as patron identity management, item availability, circulation and system configuration. Because libraries using this integrated solution will catalogue in WorldCat, users of EDS in this configuration will have the ability to access all of WorldCat.
McGraw-Hill Education, a US-based content, software and services-based education company, is showcasing a number of new digital learning solutions at the International Society of Technology in Education's (ISTE) annual conference. The solutions are projected to facilitate personalised learning, promote college and career readiness, address assessments in the digital age and help schools meet pressing challenges, such as the transition to the new Common Core State Standards. Programs on display at McGraw-Hill School Education's booth (#4013) include CINCH Learning, ONboard Series for Advanced Placement and Reading Labs 2.0.
CTB/McGraw-Hill, an educational assessment partner, will be highlighting many digital solutions at booth #3913. These include the BrainPOP/AcuityIntegration and TerraNovaCommon Core, Form 2.
McGraw-Hill Education will offer product demonstrations, workshops and presentations by a variety of experts and authors. Conference attendees who visit both booths to experience programs on display will have an opportunity to enter a drawing to win an iPad. Additionally, CINCH Learning will be featured in the Intel Emerging Technology Hands-On Lab (Room 23C), "Sneak Peak @ the Future." Through this exhibition, Intel is inviting conference attendees to engage with some of the newest education technologies and participate in a treasure-hunt style experience for a chance to win an Intel Ultrabook. Attendees can register at http://www.tinyurl.com/IntelISTE.
Engineers and technical experts association SAE International and the Composite Materials Handbook 17 organisation have entered into an exclusive agreement for publishing the initial release of the ‘Composite Materials Handbook,’ referred to as ‘CMH-17.’ The handbook will be produced in print, electronic and DVD formats.
The handbook is a six-volume engineering reference tool, previously known as MIL-HDBK-17, that contains more than 1,000 records of the latest test data for polymer matrix (Volumes 1, 2, and 3), metal matrix (Volume 4), ceramic matrix (Volume 5) and structural sandwich (Volume 6) composites.
Composite materials are made of two or more materials that have different physical or chemical properties that remain relatively intact when combined. ‘CMH-17’ has been developed over many years by an international consortium of leading engineering organisations. It constitutes an overview of the field of composites technology and engineering, which is advancing and changing rapidly. As a result, ‘CMH-17’ will continue to evolve to reflect advances in technology. For this new edition (Revision G), several chapters were reorganised, several chapters were edited to reflect updated technology, and new content was added.
The primary purpose of the handbook is the standardisation of engineering methodologies related to testing, data reduction, and reporting of property data for current and emerging composite materials. It is used by engineers worldwide in designing and fabricating products made from composite materials, particularly in the aerospace industry.
In addition to publishing CMH-17 in print and electronic formats, SAE International will offer the volumes individually, as a six-volume set, and in other combinations of volumes to best suit the needs of industry.
The Optical Society (OSA) has announced the appointment of Tom Hausken as senior advisor, engineering and applications. In this position, Hausken will support a number of OSA’s industry focused activities, including the programmes of the Optoelectronics Industry Development Association (OIDA), a division of OSA.
Hausken, who will be based in Mountain View, Calif., has more than 30 years of experience spanning the research, government, and corporate sectors. According to Elizabeth Rogan, OSA CEO, Hausken brings a tremendous amount of experience from the optoelectronics sector and a unique skill set that will help OSA increase its portfolio of programmes for the engineering and applications communities.
He most recently served as the principal and director at Strategies Unlimited in Mountain View, where he led market research for a variety of optical and electronic components. Prior to this position, Hausken worked as a program manager for OIDA, a technology policy analyst at the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, an optoelectronics researcher with Philips and Alcatel Alsthom Research, and a lab manager at Texas Instruments.
Enterprise technology and innovative solutions provider Blackboard Inc, US, and Learning.com has announced a partnership to help teachers create high quality online courses more quickly and easily with an integration that would make Learning.com's vast catalogue of rich K-12 content and tools available directly in the Blackboard Learn learning management system (LMS).
The integration, which is currently being piloted by a number of K-12 institutions and will be generally available soon, lets teachers and administrators find, use and manage more than 200,000 digital learning resources from the Learning.com catalogue seamlessly in the course platform, rather than having to move between systems. The Learning.com catalogue includes both free and fee-based resources from leading education publishers and individual educators that are aligned to academic standards.
With access to the rich collection of material from Learning.com - including curriculum and textbook content, multimedia, assignments, quizzes and more - teachers can design a more engaging and intuitive learning experience.
The Learning.com catalogue includes a growing collection of content from premier providers like USA Today, NASA, the Smithsonian, Waterford Institute, Adaptive Curriculum, and over 10,000 learning objects created and peer-reviewed by educators. Available content covers critical educational areas including language arts, library media, math, science, technology and professional development for teachers. All of the content can be searched by subject, grade level, academic standard, and keyword.
The partnership is part of Blackboard's ongoing effort to make it easier for teachers and students to find, use and share digital content and tools. The Blackboard Learn platform supports a wide range of integrations for content from leading educational publishers and content providers.
Thomson Reuters unveils psychological analysis capability with news analytics service
Elsevier launches new journal - International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction