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(Note: Week 7 had a double dose of lecture, while week 8 had two labs. Back to normal in week 9.)

This week’s goals:

• What is an operating system (OS)? What is Unix/a Unix-like OS and why would we want to use it?
• *ix history and philosophy
• Get your own virtual Linux computer!
• Elementary Unix/Linux command line.

Documents for this week:

• How to create your Linux virtual machine
• Slides with notes
• FOSSwire Unix/Linux command reference
• Another good Linux command reference  
• Lab09 instructions

A small schedule change this week!

 

• Tuesday will be class as usual.
• Thursday   we will have class, not lab, taught by me (Chris). We will proceed more deeply into plots with MATLAB: plotting rasters, images and, finally, maps, as well as outstanding small topics I haven’t mentioned. I’ll also reserve the last 30 min for question hour in which you can ask about any open issues you have with labs.
• Next Tuesday we will have Lab 07 (taught by Andrew), which is about plotting. It will be a very guided step-by-step lab in which you apply the topics from this (last) Tuesday: creating a scientific plot, changing colors, fonts, other properties, to create a publication-ready result.
• Next Thursday we will have Lab 08 (taught by Andrew), which will be a review lab to give you the opportunity to practice MATLAB coding going back to the very first steps (variables, operators, if-statements, loops).
  I’ll be back the week after.

 

The slides are here (one document for both parts).

Also a brand new repository for this week:  https://github.alaska.edu/Fall2018-BtM/Class_Lab07

1. Go to the URL
2. Click “Fork””
3. Open GitHub Desktop
4. File> Clone Repository
5. “Enterprise”… log in …. select “Class_Lab07”

Hi students! Week 6 takes us back to MATLAB coding. The big topic is: How to get data into MATLAB and write it back out.

The basic steps in many scientific data processing task are:

1. Load data
2. Transform, clean and/or process data
3. Write cleaned data out to a new file

The material for this week is here”

• Download the expanded  slides.
• From now on, labs will use git/GitHub: the repository is here.   . (The code files are in the “examples” folder.)
• Optional reading:
  •  Allaway, ch 9;
  • The blog post “An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors” by Christopher Ingraham in the Washington Post.

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

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.