Demography 213 Fall 2011

An introductory course for first year Demography Graduate Students in the use of the Demography Lab. Covers basic Unix skills & computer hygiene, the Emacs editor, LaTeX and the R computing environment.

R is the common computing language of the Demography Department and as such, the mastery of R will be an important by-product of the course. The primary purpose of the course, however, is to develop general computing skills-- specifically: (1) design and implementation of algorithms and (2) good computing habits.

Weekly lab assignements will involve simulating interesting population processes and presenting the results in written and oral form. In addition to simulation, we will explore well known datasets such as historical Census, ACS, and the Current Population Survey. There is no final exam.

Since first year students are required to take Demography 110/210 simultaneously, this course complements that course in that it will provide the R background necessary for success.

The course meets once per week for a 1.0 hour lecture/demonstration. In addition there will be a 2.0 hour supervised lab weekly. Substantial work is expected outside of class. The texts for this class are

• Introduction to R by W.N. Venables and D.M. Smith. This is terse yet complete document. It is also free to download.
• R in Action by Robert Kabacoff. This is friendlier approach to learning R. It is however, considerably more expensive than the Introduction
• Getting Started with Rstudio by John Verzani. This is licensed by UCB for use by students.

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Weekly Assignments

Week 1:	The "12' Most Important Linux Commands; Introduction to R and Rstudio  |  Assignment  |  demonstration.r  |  The "twelve" most important Unix commands
Week 2:	Coming to Terms with Rstudio  |  Assignment  |  Getting Started with Rstudio (UCB library licence)
Week 3:	A simulation exercise Assignment |  demonstration.r
Week 4:	A stochastic simulation. Using loops, branches and functions in R Assignment |  demonstraton.r
Week 5:	A stochastic micro-simulation; dataframes; more programming and some ways to avoid programming Assignment |  demonstraton.r
Week 6:	Calculating TFR and Other Rates Using tapply() Assignment  |  demonstration.r
Week 7:	Making Cool Graph of TFRs and Other Rates Assignment  |  demonstration.r
Week 8:	Graphics Assignment |  demonstraton.r 2232 Piedmont cave paintings Cohort23 Cohort24 Cohort25 Cohort26 Cohort27 Cohort28 Cohort29 Cohort30 Cohort31 Code
Week 9:	Lattice Graphics Project Assignment 9 |  demonstraton.r  | A tour of trellis
Week 10:	lx and proportional hazard simulation assignment  |  demonstration |  code for reading HMD lifetable"
Week 11:	Proportional hazard simulation extentions Assignment | demonstration |
Week 12:	Cox Regression Project Assignment  | demonstration.r
Week 13:	Writing Your Dissertation (LaTeX) Assignment |  UC Thesis template (.tex) |  UC Thesis template bib file (.bib) "short" guide to LaTeX In class example of minimal paper |  .bib file for In class example

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References

CEDA/Demography/PopCenter Lab Documentation
• Getting Started html pdf
• The 12 most important linux commands html pdf
• Frequently Asked Questions html pdf

Below are some additional (free) documents. Most are slightly out of date, but since they are free it's hard to complain.

• A list of 110 other books about R (or S)
• R reference card [pdf]
• Introduction to R [pdf] The main text of the course.
• R Data Import/Export [pdf] Useful reference for moving data in and out of R
• ESS-Mode by A.J. Rossini, R.M. Heiberger, K. Hornik, and M. Maechler. ESS stands for "emacs speaks statistics" it is the emacs mode that you will use to edit R/Splus SAS and perhaps STATA program files and to run R/Splus in. It assumes you are familiar with how the emacs editor works--you aren't now -- but you will be. [pdf 49 pages]
• Official GNU Emacs Manual In addition to the online tutorial, which is a bit out of date, Free Software Foundation makes this HTML manual available via the Web.
• Emacs Quick Reference This is the official Free Sofware Foundation Emacs cheat sheet.

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carlm@demog.berkeley.edu