NEWS

Welcome Back!

We hope you enjoyed your summer. A few things you may have missed:

  • If you can't log in, it may be because you didn't renew your SSCC account last spring. If so, you can renew it here.
  • The Office 365 Clutter folder was turned off for everyone at UW-Madison on August 15, but you can turn it back on if you like it.
  • If you use Symantec antivirus software, you need to manually update it.
  • While not strictly speaking a summer development, we want to make sure you're aware of Silo, our new secure computing environment for working with sensitive data, including HIPAA data.

Welcome, New Members!

We look forward to meeting all our new SSCC members. Please be sure to attend an orientation session so we can tell you about the services SSCC provides and how to use them. We have two more orientations scheduled on 8/30 and 9/8 (visit our training schedule for details and to register).

If you're a new graduate student, we highly recommend one of our Stata for Researchers or R for Researchers classes to get you started with these important tools (pre-semester "bootcamp" versions of these classes start this week, but there's still time to sign up). If you have any questions about the SSCC and the services we provide, just ask the Help Desk.

SSCC Fall Training

We have a full training schedule this fall, including multiple sessions of Stata for Researchers and R for Researchers, Mixed Models, Structural Equation Modeling, Git, and Publication-Quality Tables. SSCC training is free for anyone with an SSCC account—visit our training page for details and to register.

Server Upgrades

Over the coming weeks the Winstat Long Jobs servers will be moved to more powerful machines with 192GB of RAM and 15 cores available. This will allow Windows Stata jobs to come much closer to taking full advantage of Stata MP16, and improve the performance of other programs that can use many cores.

Previously, if your job needed more RAM than Winstat could provide or would benefit from more cores than Winstat made available, the alternative was to use Linstat. This required learning to use a Linux server, which is not as difficult as many people think but still a barrier. With these upgrades, Winstat Long Jobs will act as an intermediate step between regular Winstat and Linstat. Winstat Long Jobs will also still be the place to run jobs that need Windows but take longer than the session limits on Winstat allow (three hours if disconnected, 24 hours if connected but with no user input).

We will also add RAM to the regular Winstat, servers, so they'll have 96GB of RAM rather than 32GB. We are investigating whether it will be possible to add RAM to the Linstat servers, but hope to do so.

New Knowledge Base Articles

We've added some important new articles to the SSCC Knowledge Base:

  • Mixed Models is a practical introduction to the theory of mixed models and the issues involved in using them. The examples are written in R, but the issues are the same no matter what language you use. This is a fast-moving area, so you may learn something new even if you've studied mixed models in the past.
  • Stata for Students is an online resource designed to give simple but complete instructions for the tasks students are asked to carry out using Stata in the most popular undergraduate methods and metrics classes. It will be a valuable resource for both students and instructors.
  • We have a new introduction to SPSS Syntax as well as an updated guide to SPSS for the Classroom and articles on other SPSS topics. This will allow members who need to learn SPSS to do so even though declining demand means we'll be teaching SPSS less often.