Using Worksheets in Econ600

To start, you should visit the website https://vse.syzygy.ca and sign in with your campus wide login account. When the page eventually opens (it takes a couple of seconds) you should see a panel on the left where your files will be stored. On the right there will be a panel that shows the various software options you have. Python3 and R will give you most of the statistical software you need for wrangling data, drawing graphs. Julia is for computation. Sagemath is for symbolic algebra, and (at the moment) uses python 2, so you can wrangle data and draw graphs with it as well.

When you start, you should click on the 'terminal' symbol at the bottom part of the right hand pane. A terminal will open in that pane.

To use the data associated with the courses I teach, you should start by creating a few directories. First create a directory for Econ600 by typing the command mkdir Econ600 then typing enter. If you want to use notebooks from the course Econ515 then you can make a directory for that course as well with the same command (except of course, change 600 to 515).

Next, change in that directory by typing cd Econ600. Now you can retrieve all the notebooks for the course by typing the command

svn co https://montoya.econ.ubc.ca/svn-econ/Econ600/notebooks

In order to get updates, you need to give a username and password. For this step you just use the username student and the password student. This will create a directory called notebook for you and download some files. The new files will appear after a few seconds in the file pane on the left. You can also see them by typing ls in the terminal.

When you do this for Econ600, you will find a file in the directed_search directory called directed_search_2.ipynb which you can open by clicking on the file list on the left until it appears, then double clicking on it. You'll see some preliminary remarks, some equations and a collection of code blocks. Click the menu item at the top that says Run, then click run all. After a few seconds, the notebook will process all the code blocks for you and show you the solutions to the equations.

If you double click on a code block, you can change it. To re-run it, press ctl-enter within the code block.

Try writing your own code blocks. Click on the text blocks to edit them. Add some latex enclosed in either single or double dollar signs. Ctl-enter to process the text block and mathjax should render your latex for you. If it doesn't do it immediately it will usually work if you just do a ctl-enter command within the block with the latex in it.

If you want to save what you have done on your own computer, left click on the file you want to save and download it. If you have made changes but want to go back to the original version of the file, go to your terminal and delete the file. The run the command

svn update

and it will restore the file for you. You would also use that command any time you want to add new files that have been added to the repository.

If you want the data and code files for Econ515, the return to your terminal. Make sure you are no longer in the Econ600 directory, then create a directory for Econ515 by typing the following commands:

mkdir Econ515
cd Econ 515
svn co https://montoya.econ.ubc.ca/svn-econ/Econ515/notebooks

Again, use the username student and the password student. Then you will have a whole bunch of data and code files in the directory associated with Econ515.