September 2018 – GEOS F436/636: Beyond the Mouse

BtM2018, Week 5

Week 5 will be different from weeks 1-4. We’re taking a small break from programming and taking a wider look at the environment in which we write code and organize our files. The big topic is version control and project organization.

Download slides as PDF.
Make sure to review at the videos posted in week 3!
BEFORE STARTING THE LAB: You need to make sure you can log into the UA Enterprise GitHub and have GitHub Desktop installed. Instructions are in the slides You can do this before starting the lab. If you can’t log in, see your instructor or TA right away.
The lab instructions are on the UA Enterprise GitHub here: https://github.alaska.edu/Fall2018-BtM/Lab05/

Extra reading:

Excuse me, do you have a moment to talk about version control? by Jenny Bryant, who is a professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia
When it comes to reproducible science, Git is code for success by Jeffrey Perkel, NATURE technology editor

BtM2018, Week 4

Welcome back! With week 4, we conclude a first cycle through MATLAB that will provide you with enough elements to write a lot of useful scripts. The documents are:

Slides with notes
MATLAB files (zipped) for lecture and lab portions.

What else can you do? The readings:

Hahn & Valentine ch. 8.1, 8.2, 6.1 (review), or Attaway ch. 4, ch 5 (review)
Before next session, review the videos in the Week 3 post.

BtM 2018, Week 3

Week three will be largely dedicated to getting a lot of practice with what we’ve learned so far:

Practice with vectors and other variables
Practice writing functions
Practice reading code and making small changes
… and a main topic: conditional statements (if-elseif-else-end and switch-case-otherwise-end)

Things to do:

Download (and read) the updated slides with notes
Download the code files (updated: lecture and lab)
Readings for this week: Hahn & Valentine ch. 2.8, 10.4, 10.5 (, 13.1) or Attaway ch. 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 , 3.5, 3.7, 8, 13.1, 13.2 (Attaway doesn’t have a good in-depth chapter on random numbers beyond

In addition we’ll also be preparing to look at how code files are organized. One key tool to help programmers organize and manage their code is a version control system (VCS). VCSs also help share code and collaborate via web-based repositories. A popular VCS is called git, and a popular online repository site is Github. UAF has its own internal enterprise installation of Github, which we can use just like the public free Github site, but without having to share our code with the rest of the world.

To prepare, here are two things you can do:

Try to log in at the UA Github with your UAlaska credentials.
Watch the following 5 min video:

Confused? Never heard of such a thing before? Want a more gentle intro? I like this one too (14 min).

BtM 2018, Week 2

Good to see you back for week 2!

Our goals this week are:

Review / clean up for week 1
More on data types
Matrices, vectors and cell arrays (and a sneak peek preview of structs)
Relational operators

Things to do:

Download the extended slides with notes.
Download the lab file.
Do the readings
- Hahn & Valentine ch.2 through 2.6, ch. 6.1, 6.2, 6.3. or Attaway, ch 1.4, 1.5, 3.1, 5.2, 5.3
- For more on representing real numbers with fixed and floating point notation, see https://www.science.smith.edu/dftwiki/index.php/CSC231_An_Introduction_to_ Fixed-_and_Floating-Point_Number

During lab this week, I will meet with the grad students to discuss their projects. Projects will require: A problem description; a dataset; data processing; data visualization; an online report / web page (several options for that!); and a 10 min presentation in class. It would be a good idea to start thinking about your interests.