| May I introduce myself as the new temporary editor of the ASSESS newsletter,
replacing the old temporary editor. This is a special issue because it
will be the last one that is automatically as a paper version. In the future
we will be moving to an internet based service, based at
http://assess.derby.ac.uk:100/
[Ed:subsequently changed to http://assess.derby.ac.uk]
. This will enable us to lower membership costs (well, eliminate them)
while reaching a wider audience, and gaining more publicity, and hence,
hopefully, greater attendance at the annual conference and workshops. Paper
copies of the newsletter will still be available to those who want them,
but we will have to make a small charge for this. If would prefer to have
a paper copy sent to you, please contact Dianne Phillips (address in the
contacts list).
In this issue we have tried to provide a range of articles to appeal to users of SPSS in different fields. We start off by having the next instalment of our Absolut . . . series. This time we are looking at the knowledge that you gradually build up, as you move along the long and slippery path from beginner to expert in SPSS. The second article is a brief report of a workshop that was run in conjunction with SPSS UK Ltd, at their headquarters in Woking. This workshop seems to have been a success and we look forward to more of this type of event in the future. A polite request that often comes from members (of course ASSESS members would never complain) is that we should try to move away from the focus on academic uses of SPSS, and look at the commercial world a little more. In this article we examine what happens in one company when SPSS was introduced as an analysis tool. We describe ourselves as an independent user group, and to prove this we report on a potential rival for our favours – FIASCO (Fiasco Is An SPSS COpy) or as it is now being called PSPP (you work that one out). This is a program being developed by the Free Software Foundation, to have the same functionality as SPSS. Finally we finish off with our round up of some of the things that have been happening on SPSSX-L/comp.soft-sys.stat.spss. We hope you enjoy this issue, and, as ever, if you have any comments, complaints or potential articles, please contact us, at addresses in the contacts list. Jeremy Miles
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