Instructor: Cori Mar

This workshop is an introduction to Stata, a software program for data analysis and statistics. It assumes no prior experience with Stata. It introduces the Stata graphical user interface, data types, and help pages. It covers reading in data, renaming variables, labeling variables, labeling value labels, subsetting data by variable or case, and saving a new data file.

Please register if you plan to attend the workshop.

If you are a new or veteran faculty member at UW, consider becoming a CSDE Affiliate. If you are a demographer and located in the Pacific Northwest, consider becoming an affiliate!

Affiliate applications are considered quarterly by CSDE’s Executive Committee. Once you are an affiliate, you can treat yourself and advance your scholarship with research consultations, computing accounts and software, grant support, and engagement from a productive community of scholars. The next CSDE Executive Committee meeting will be in early January. Send in your letter of application by the end of the year and be considered in the next review. Learn more about becoming an affiliate.

CSDE’s fellowship program supports and prepares promising early researchers for careers that will have a significant impact on the field of demography. Each year, CSDE awards several distinguished fellowships for predoctoral funding and additional mentoring. CSDE is pleased to offer two 12-month fellowships supported by the Shanahan Foundation that begin mid-September 2018.

Students have until Monday, December 11 (by 5 PM) to complete the online component of the application, and submit a copy of the online component along with the rest of their application materials to their department's graduate program administrator. The department should submit a cover letter and the most competitive applications to CSDE by Friday, December 29 (by 5 PM).

The “Call for Applications”  and CSDE fellowship application website provide detailed information about the application process.

Last Friday, eight CSDE trainees shared their work at CSDE’s Fall Lightning Talks and Poster Session, held in the Research Commons at Allen Library. Hailing from various departments–including Geography, Sociology, Social Work, and Statistics–each presented unique research that contributes to the field of population science.

At the conclusion of the event, CSDE Fellows Lee Fiorio and Connor Gilroy both received awards for best poster. Fiorio, a student in the Department of Geography, was recognized for his poster "Regularities in Mobility Patterns at Different Time Scales." Gilroy, a student in the Department of Sociology, was recognized for his poster "Extending the Demography of Sexuality with Digital Trace Data."

Guest speakers:
Dan Eisenberg (Associate Professor, Anthropology)
Peter Rej (Postdoctoral Research Associate, Anthropology)
Rob Tennyson (PhD Student and CSDE Trainee, Anthropology)

CSDE’s next Biomarker Working Group meeting will be Tuesday, December 12, from 2:00 to 3:30pm in 114 Raitt Hall.  We are very pleased to announce that CSDE’s resident experts in telomere length analysis, Dan Eisenberg, Peter Rej and Rob Tennyson, will provide an introduction to telomere biology and a brief synopsis of the use of telomere length as a marker of stress and health, followed by a question and answer session with working group participants.

The Biomarker Working Group provides a forum for informal discussions of practical and theoretical issues associated with collecting and using biomarker data in social and behavioral science research.  This working group is open to all students, faculty, and staff and we plan to meet about once a month. Those interested in joining the working group can contact Ellie Brindle (ebrindle@uw.edu) to be added to the email distribution list.

Alexes Harris, affiliate and Professor of Sociology, was quoted in an Atlanta Black Star article that addresses legal financial obligations (LFOs) that offenders must pay once they have served prison time, and the repercussions of failing to meet these obligations. One such repercussion is losing the right to vote, an outcome that disproportionately affects African-American offenders. In the article, Harris discusses various issues relating to LFOs, including how many obliged to pay them are not aware how failure to do so will affect their right to vote. For instance, Harris observed that in some cases, those who maintained voting rights because they kept up with their LFO obligations—which is the case in Washington—were not aware that they could vote. Furthermore, in the course of her research, Harris found that the LFO system is built on a history of racism. “Monetary sanctions were…integral to systems of criminal justice, debt bondage, and racial domination in the American South for decades,” she said.