NEWS

Welcome Ellen Felsheim to SSCC's Staff

Welcome Ellen Felsheim to SSCC's staff. Ellen joins us as the new Financial Specialist, taking the place of Chithra Kamath who has transferred to another University department. Except for a two year break to serve as a volunteer for the Hurricane Katrina disaster response efforts, Ellen has worked in the Department of Pediatrics since 1994. Ellen will be in charge of software licensing and many other tasks that keep the SSCC running.

Home Directory Quotas Increased

Quotas on Windows and Linux home directories have been increased to five gigabytes of space. If you need more space, we will increase either quota (or both) to twenty gigabytes. If you need more than this, consider requesting a project directory. You can request additional space in your home directory by filling out a web form. For more information, visit our KB article, Network Disk Space at the SSCC.

SSCC's Spring Training

There are still several SSCC training opportunities available this semester including Matlab, SPSS, and Nvivo. Remember that all SSCC training sessions require preregistration.

In case you missed last month's announcement, we now have a qualitative analysis specialist, Christian Schmieder, to teach our NVivo workshops. Due to inclement weather the dates for the Nvivo training have changed. Please visit SSCC's training page for the new dates and time. Those of you who registered previously for these sessions are still registered. Please cancel if you can no longer attend.

Need to learn a statistical package but missed the class? The SSCC Knowledge Base is always available, and includes Stata for Researchers, Stata for Students,SPSS for Students, Multiple Imputation in Stata, and much more. QSR also has a set of online NVivo tutorials.

32-Bit SAS to be Removed From Winstat in August

For some time, 64-bit SAS has been the default on Winstat. In August we plan to remove 32-bit SAS from Winstat entirely. Having a single version of SAS installed will reduce opportunities for confusion. Most people will be unaffected by this change. However, removing 32-bit SAS will affect you if you import Excel files into SAS or have catalog files that were created using 32-bit SAS.

If you are currently using 32-bit SAS because you import Excel files, we have now identified ways for 64-bit SAS to read Excel files as well. Please read SAS and Excel Files on Winstat. The commands you use may change slightly, but you'll be able to do everything you're doing now and possibly more.

If you have catalog files containing formats that were created by 32-bit SAS, they will need to be converted to 64-bit. Instructions can be found in Converting SAS Formats from 32-Bit to 64-Bit. It gives several options, but all of them start with having 32-bit SAS read the formats. It is critical that you convert catalog files containing formats to 64-bit before 32-bit SAS is removed. This mostly affects projects with data that have been archived and not used for some time. If you've used a format recently and didn't have problems opening it using 64-bit SAS, then it's in 64-bit format already.

The SSCC's statistical computing specialists will be happy to assist you if needed. If you have any questions or concerns about this process, please contact the Help Desk.

SPSS to be Removed From Linux June 30, 2013

Campus budgets are tight and SSCC's is no exception. Nowhere do we feel this squeeze more than with software prices. SPSS is one of our most expensive software programs. We have hundreds of SPSS users on Winstat and less than ten on Linux. Because of this, we have decided not to renew our SPSS license on Linux when it expires June 30, 2013. SPSS data files created on Linux are compatible with Windows, and syntax files will only require minor changes (for example referring to V:\ rather than /project). If you have any questions or need assistance moving from Linux SPSS to Windows SPSS, the SSCC's statistical computing specialists will be happy to help. Please contact the Help Desk.