NEWS

UW Survey Center Joins the SSCC

We're pleased to announce that the UW Survey Center has joined the Social Science Computing Cooperative. The UWSC has long had a close relationship with the SSCC, with most of their professional staff having SSCC accounts due to other affiliations, but now SSCC will take responsibility for UWSC's servers, desktops, and laptops as well.

We are currently in the process of hiring a new Desktop Support person so we can take on the additional work. Transitioning UWSC's computers to SSCC's systems will be a time-consuming project, so there may be times this semester when our Desktop Support group cannot respond to incoming tickets as quickly as usual. We ask for your patience. Once this project is complete the resulting returns to scale will benefit both UWSC and current SSCC members.

Spring Training

SSCC's spring training schedule has been posted, and the first class is less than a week away. In addition to standards like Stata for Researchers and Stata Programming, we're very excited about the new workshops we're offering:

• Data Wrangling Essentials in R is a new major class, providing expanded coverage of the R for Researchers topics Data preparation and Data exploration. "Data Wrangling" refers to all the work that must be done to prepare raw data for analysis, from reading it in to cleaning it. This class will focus on doing this work using the tidyverse, a powerful set of R packages designed for such tasks, and thus may be of interest to R veterans as well as those wanting to learn R. It will also benefit those looking to learn data science skills independent of the software used to implement them.
• Markdown for Technical Writing will teach you how to use Markdown to write documents that include formatted text as well as code and the output of that code. That code could be Stata, R, or Python.
• In Stata Workshop: Importing and Combining Large Numbers of Data Files we'll work through an extended example based on real-world challenges seen by SSCC's statistical consultants. In addition to programming tricks for tricky data, we'll cover tools for larger projects in general, including Linstat and parallel processing using HTCondor.

For details and to register visit our training page.

SSCC Resources for Instructors

If you're teaching in the Spring, don't forget SSCC's resources for instructors:

• You can use the computer classroom in 3218 or SSCC's mobile lab for hands-on instruction. Request your time slot right away—they're filling up fast.
• If your students will need access to the computer labs and/or Winstat, send your class list to Caitlin Tefft.
• SSCC staff can give your students an orientation to SSCC resources as well as a brief introduction to Stata. Our statistical consultants are also available for guest lectures. Get in touch with Caitlin Tefft to make arrangements. You can also point your students (and TAs!) to Stata for Students in our Knowledge Base.

Bring Your UW ID to the Help Desk for After-Hours Lab Access

As we announced in November, we will soon replace the (very old) door locks on our computer labs with a new system that takes advantage of the RFID chip in your UW ID card. If you have or want after-hours access to 4218, 3218, or 2470 Sewell Social Sciences Building, bring your UW ID to the Help Desk and we'll scan it in for you.

Other Reminders

Multi-Factor Authentication is coming soon for your NetID—the exact date will be decided by your department. While this is officially not an SSCC project, we'll be happy to help if you run into problems.

The Cisco AnyConnect infrastructure for connecting to the SSCC network will be shut down on or about January 22nd. If you haven't already, it's time to switch to Palo Alto GlobalProtect. (If you use AnyConnect to connect to non-UW VPNs it will presumably continue to work.)

We're now one year from the end of Microsoft's support for Windows 7.