Getting Started with Data Science and Analysis

I’ve been an instructor for Software-Carpentry (SWC) over a year now. It’s been a facinating experience and I’m proud to be a part of an open source movement promoting best practices. Typically when looking to start learing data science/analysis the first things people look up is something along the lines of: “learn python”, “free online r course”, “data science python”, “r jobs”, etc. Or scan through the coursera offerings. I’m a bit biased, but I think the SWC material is one of the best ways to just get familiar with the basics.

Open Source A Python Project I

I started my first open source project towards the end of summer 2014 I began working at the Social Decision Analytics Laboratory at the Virginia Informatics Institutee. The project involves creating a simulation environment where we can observe how an idea or belief spreads within a social network. The initial thought was to look for and extend an agent-based model package in Python. I did manage to find the pyabm package by Alex Zvoleff, but for simplicity’s sake I wrote my own package instead of extending his existing code base.

Setting Up Repast Simphony 2.1 in Linux

Repast Simphony is a Java based collection of agent-based modeling and simulation software. Repast Simphony 2.1 installs its library files into ~/.eclipse/ECLIPSEVERSION/plugins/ and features/ when you create the model it looks for these files in /opt/eclipse/plugins/ and /features This issue has been brought up and added to the issue tracker as of 2013-09-30 User mijael posted a solution to the Repast Interest Mailing list about creating symlinks to the /opt directory:

Installing Eclipse in Ubuntu 13.10

Adapted answer from Shubhmay and TimD on askubuntu on installing Eclipse. Extract the eclipse.XX.YY.tar.gz file: tar -zxvf eclipse.XX.YY.tar.gz Copy the extracted folder to /opt: sudo cp -r eclipse /opt Create a desktop file gedit eclipse.desktop copy the following to the eclipse.desktop file [Desktop Entry] Name=Eclipse Type=Application #Exec=eclipse Exec=env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 eclipse # for menubar bug in 13.10 Terminal=false Icon=eclipse Comment=Integrated Development Environment NoDisplay=false Categories=Development;IDE; Name[en]=Eclipse Execute the following command to automatically install it in the unity: sudo desktop-file-install eclipse.

Setting up a WebDAV Client for Courseworks

Columbia University’s Courseworks website allows you to download files for a registered class. A problem arises when multiple files needed to be downloaded simultaneously. One simply cannot just select the files and bulk download them. Courseworks have instructions to circumvent this limitation in the web interface by implementing a WebDAV client. However, other than Cyberduck under their Mac instructions, the Windows suggestion is quite limited. In this post I discuss setting up a WebDAV Client for Windows and Mac.

Setting up VirtualBox

Edit: March 31, 2014: As an assignment for Software Carpentry I made a screencast to follow along with these steps, here Installing Windows XP in VirtualBox: Files needed: VirtualBox (VB) Intaller here: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads CD or ISO of OS (for my CUMC/CU friends you can find the windows XP ISO here: http://cuit.columbia.edu/cuit/software-downloads/operating-system-software/windows-xp The VB version I am using is 4.2.6 After Installing VB. You want to click “New” in the toolbar.