NEWS

Invitation to SSCC Computer Orientation

SSCC staff will be offering a hands-on computer orientation on Wednesday, August 25, from 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. in SSCC's PC classroom in Sewell Social Science 3218 for new members arriving this Fall. We want to extend an invitation to any SSCC member who might also like to attend. Maybe you've been a member for a while, but haven't used your account much, or maybe you arrived mid-year and didn't get a one-on-one orientation. Whatever the reason, you are welcome to attend. Please e-mail Caitlin Tefft (ctefft@ssc.wisc.edu) if you plan to attend so we have enough materials for everyone.

New Sociology graduate students have already received their invitations, but if you know of other new arrivals -- post docs, faculty, staff, visitors -- please extend them an invitation.

The SSCC will also have a table at the SoE Graduate Assistant Resource Fair in the Educational Sciences courtyard from 12:00-1:00 p.m. the same day.

Reserving Computer Classroom for Fall Semester Courses

Now is the time to get a jump on reserving the 3218 classroom or mobile lab for your fall semester class before your spot gets taken by someone else. Reservations are filling very quickly. Contact Caitlin Tefft (ctefft@ssc.wisc.edu) to reserve. Caitlin's office is in the 4226 office suite and her phone number is 2-0862.  Visit www.ssc.wisc.edu/sscc/instruction/ for more information about the 3218 classroom and the mobile lab.

Even if you do not need to reserve the classroom or lab, you can arrange for your students to have access to SSCC's drop in labs (3218 and 4218 Social Science) for doing their homework. Caitlin can help you with this as well.

Doug Hemken (dehemken@wisc.edu), statistical computing specialist for SSCC, is available to help students with homework and class projects. You can also arrange for Doug to come to your class and provide instruction on statistical software. Doug's office is in the 4226 office suite and his phone number is 2-4327.

Faster Network Disk Space in Place

SSCC staff have moved the most heavily used directories, especially project directories, to newer and faster disk space. Since the change we've seen fewer instances where a Linux server is slowed down by heavy disk usage, though it still happens more often than we'd like. The next generation of SSCC Linux servers, which we hope to put into production this month, have enough RAM that we plan to move most or all of the heavy disk traffic to /ramdisk and eliminate the problem entirely.

Simplified Syntax for condor_stata

When we first wrote the condor_stata script for submitting Stata jobs to Condor from a Linux server, most people whose jobs were candidates for Condor were already running Stata on Linux and typing stata -b do dofile was second nature to them. Thus we made condor_stata work the same way.

Windows has come a long way as a platform for statistical computing since then, and we're seeing more and more people go directly from Winstat to Condor. To them "-b do" is arbitrary filler, so we've changed condor_stata so it's no longer needed. Just type:

condor_stata dofile

to submit dofile to Condor. Linux users needn't worry though: condor_stata -b do dofile still works as well.

Getting Tech Support for MPlus

Muthén & Muthén will only give technical support for MPlus to the official license holders. SSCC Statistical Computing Specialists Doug Hemken and Russell Dimond have been designated as license holders, so if you need tech support for MPlus contact the Help Desk and we'll get in touch with Muthén & Muthén for you.