Are you a Social Scientist who works with data? Would you like to learn more about shell, git, data management best practices and data cleaning and R? If so then register now for the Data Carpentry workshop for Social Sciences 30 - 31 March.

The next meeting of 'R at University of Manchester' (RUM) will be held on Monday the 13^th of March, at 11:00-12am in The Congregation, Vaughan House. RUM is open to all staff and students using R at The University of Manchester, providing an open and relaxed forum for R users of all levels to exchange ideas and knowledge.

The second meeting of the University of Manchester R user group (R.U.M) will take place on the 5th December, at 11:00am-12pm in Vaughan House. Paul Johnston from Research IT will be presenting on ‘Text mining in R’ and Heather Robinson from Health e-Research Centre (HeRC) will discuss ‘Enhancing your research with public datasets- an introduction to WORLDCLIM’. The session will be followed by a R clinic for troubleshooting problem code.

Introducing "R at University of Manchester" (R.U.M.), a group open to all staff and students using R at The University of Manchester. The R.U.M Group exists to bring together R users of all levels, with interests in diverse fields from across the University to exchange tips, ideas and knowledge for the benefit of all.

Do you use the statistical language R? If so there is a new university wide user group for those interested in learning and applying statistics in the program R.

And be in with a chance of winning £250, £150 or £100 of Amazon Vouchers!

The demand for visualization of datasets through the creation of meaningful and attractive representations of data, and to provide insight and greater understanding of data is rapidly growing. There are many existing applications, ranging from Excel to more sophisticated and complex software like Matlab, Python, R, Mathematica, and STATA.

From feedback, we have identified a need for an application that falls in between these two extremes and we would like your help in evaluating potential applications. This evaluation will help select an application for wider adoption across the University, along with training, support and central licensing.

We have selected Tableau, Qlik, Spotfire and IBM Watson Analytics for a more detailed evaluation by the community.

Microsoft Research is offering free, hands-on, cloud computing training courses for university faculty, researchers, and PhD students in the UK and across Europe. Whether it is big data, big compute (HPC), or analysing data streaming from devices for an Internet of Things (IoT) project, see how easy it is using Microsoft Azure to speed up your research.