Paul Boyer Leaving the SSCC
We’re sad to announce that Paul Boyer, who has served the SSCC as one of our PC Support staff, is leaving at the end of November. Paul is taking the next step in his career by joining his alma mater, the Wisconsin School of Business, as a Windows System Administrator. Paul will be sorely missed, but we are thrilled for him to continue his career path to new horizons. With Paul’s departure, Cody Gerhartz will certainly be busy, but we are looking to hire a replacement for Paul as quickly as possible. While we do our best to provide excellent service to our members, members may encounter some delays in response times.
Need to Learn Statistical Software?
Being able to manage and analyze data is essential for a quantitative social science researcher, but necessary statistical software and data wrangling skills are rarely taught in official classes. SSCC’s statistical consultants went through the pain of figuring all that out on our own and we don’t think you should have to.
If you need to learn Stata, R, or Python, you can start today by working through our online training. We’ll also be teaching all three the week of January 18th (one week before the semester starts). These workshops will be taught via video chat, so you don’t have to be back in Madison to take them. We also have a full schedule of training opportunities during the Spring semester.
Thanks to the pandemic we’re seeing an increasing number of graduate students who think they are ready to dive into research, only to find they don’t have the skills needed to work with real-world data. Learn those skills before you need them with SSCC’s training.
Lab Reservations and Software Requests
We are currently accepting lab reservations for Spring 2022. Please let us know if you would like to reserve one of our computer labs or mobile labs to help make sure everyone gets the resources they need for this spring.
We are also finalizing our software list for our Winter Tech update, so if there is any software that is needed for the spring semester please contact the SSCC Help Desk as soon as possible so that staff can plan accordingly.
Data Science Research Bazaar
UW-Madison’s Data Science Hub seeks lightning talk, poster, interactive discussion, workshop and art submissions for its third annual Data Science Research Bazaar. Focused on the theme of Data and Communities: Sharing and Protecting Data, the Research Bazaar will include in-person and virtual options throughout February 2022. Proposals are due November 30.
Windows 11
SSCC staff have tested the new Windows 11 and, while we haven’t found anything particularly wrong with it, there’s no particularly compelling reason to upgrade either. Thus, we will not be installing it on UW-owned computers we manage at this time. If your personally owned computer wants to install it automatically there’s no reason to block it from doing so. Everyone will need to switch to Windows 11 eventually and we anticipate beginning to install it on UW-owned computers we manage sometime next year.