Announcements

Important announcements will be posted here to avoid our inboxes getting clogged up.

If you have questions - direct them to us via Slack. There's a 'Direct Message' feature so you can contact us individually as needed, but where possible post messages to a channel that all participants can see.

Assignment Information

Date Posted: 2017-09-21 Some people have asked for more detail about the course assignment:

  • Due date: Friday, October 20 at 23:59. (We gave you an extra week)
  • Discuss with one of us your proposed assignment before you start
    • We can evaluate whether it is do-able within the time frame
    • Don't try and be too fancy, it's more important that it works
  • Submission format: Invite @lachlandeer to collaborate on your GitHub repository by the due date. He will potentially allocate another instructor to assess your work.
    • This means, we expect well version controlled work.
    • Tag your final submission using the following git command git tag -a v1.0 -m "submitted version"
    • You must have a README.md in the main directory with instructions on how we can build the assignment & what it does.
  • Explictly document somewhere what packages we need to install so that your assignment runs on our machine with no issues.
  • Your assignment must execute with either:
    • snakemake all (preferred)
    • Pressing Run all or Knit at most 5 times (5 notebooks), that each cannot be too long.
      • Make it clear which order they should run in your README.md. Import functions you write into the notebook rather than clogging them up with a lot of functions.
      • If you want to run knitr or your Jupyter notebooks from snakemake, contact @lachlandeer for some code to get it to work
  • To pass the course:
    • Your code must build without errors (unless we find something really weird, then we will reach out to you)
    • Must be version controlled, with each contributor making commits. One final commit is not enough.
    • Inputs and outputs must be in separate folders
    • There must be a short writeup of the results you obtain, max. 4 pages
  • Ask us for help as needed. We rather a simple assignment that builds first time than something complicated that throws us error messages
  • If you want to keep your work private so the whole world cannot potentially see it, apply for unlimited private repositories [as a researcher] on github here: https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-education-for-educators-and-researchers/

We are done!

Date Posted: 2017-09-18

The 2017 edition is now over. Thanks to all who attended, and the rest of the instructional team who made it a success. Some important pointers:

  • An archived version of the installation guide is permanently available here.
  • An archived course syllabus is here
  • This website, and the course materials repo will remain indefintitely.
  • The course material repo may evolve some more over the next week or so as we upload final versions of some files. Use your git pull-ing powers to check you have the latest files.

See you around!

Lachlan

Schedule Updates

Date Posted: 2017-09-10

Due to some meetings we cannot avoid, we have pushed the schedule around a little bit. Check out the updates here

Knabenschiessen

Date Posted: 2017-09-10

We will teach Monday afternoon through Knabenschiessen until 1700. Lunch may be hard to source, we may decide to order as a larger group.

Ch-Ch-Changes in the Room allocation

Date Posted: 2017-08-31

We have again been moved for the Thursday class.

On Thursday, September 7th we will again be in RAK-E-6.

Room re-allocation

Date Posted: 2017-08-31

It seems we are not important enough in the University system, so they double booked us.

Today, 31 August, we are in SOF-E-17 instead, which is the ground floor of the Department of Economics.

Extra Packages for R

Date Posted: 2017-08-22

We added some additional packages for the R sessions.

If you have already completed the installation guide: open RStudio and enter the following into the console and press Return:

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2
extra_packages <- c("multiwayvcov", "RSQLite", "dbplyr")
install.packages(extra_packages)

If you have not yet completed the installation guide: we have added these packages to the instructions, so you can follow it as is.

Welcome Message

Date Posted: 2017-08-18

Welcome to the course "Programming Practices for Research in Economics" - 2017 edition.

Please take a look around the course website before the course begins. All the latest information about the course contents, schedule and course locations (which vary day-by day!) are available on these pages.

We particularly draw your attention to the:

  • Installation Guide. These pages walk you through the steps needed to install all the software for the course.
    • We expect you to have completed it before the course begins.
    • We are offering help to individuals struggling with the steps involved in the installation guide in a 'Help Session' before the course begins: Friday, August 25th, between 9.30 and 12.30 in SOF-E-09.
      • Note that we expect you have tried to complete the guide yourself, and we will not be there to do it all for you.
      • The guide is modular in nature - with most steps being independent of those before and after.
      • Learning to install software for scientific research on your own machine is an important task in itself - and we want to help you become self-sufficient in this regard.
  • Pre-Course Survey.
    • Please fill this out before the course begins.

To avoid clogging up everyone's inboxes with course email, all future important information will be posted on the course's Announcements page - be sure to check in there regularly. Smaller pieces of information and course chat will take place inside a chat enviroment, called Slack. Sign up to join the conversation here.

We look forward to seeing you for Monday, August 28th at 9.30am.

Best,

the pp4rs team