Please complete the following tasks prior to our first meeting.
Task 1: Acquire portable data storage device
Please bring a USB flash drive to our first meeting. These devices are small, cheap, and abundant.
In fact, I suspect two or ten of these things are kicking around the bottom of your book bag right now.
If you do not have one, they may be purchased for less than $5 here, here, or here.
Please ensure you have a USB A-Male (rather than USB C-Male) drive. USB 2.0, 3.0, or 3.1 drives should all work fine (these generational designations tend to indicate differences in file-transfer rates, not system compatibility).
Portable HDDs and SSDs should also will work fine.
There is no need to wipe existing drives in preparation for our workshop. Both the datasets with which we will be working and the files we will generate are relatively small. For our purposes, 1GB of free space should be more than sufficient. In fact, even 250MB or so of free space should be fine.
But as you begin pursuing your own statistical projects, you may want to organize a data storage workflow involving one or more dedicated drives as well as backup protocol. We will discuss this further during the instructional series.
Task 2: Download datasets
Please download the following files to the portable drive you plan to bring to the workshop.
These are direct download links to a .csv file (Comma Separated Values format), an .xlsx file (native Excel dataset format), and a .dta file (native Stata dataset format), respectively.
