How to set up your computer for NCIL data science

Installing the essential software tools for doing data science/stats in NCIL

In general, you should run all data analysis and other tasks involving NCIL data, directly on our compute server, https://ncil.psychology.dal.ca. This has several advantages:

• You don't need to isntall, troubleshoot, or update anything on your computer

• Our server is very likely much more powerful than your computer

• Regardless of the power of your computer, things run on the server run much faster, because it has a high-speed connection to the file server where data is stored. By contrast, if you were to run analyses on your own computer, the data would need to be transferred over the internet (this can mean the ddifference between 15 seconds and an hour when loading a set of EEG files).

• You should not have lab data on your personal computer. In many cases doing so violates our ethical and legal commitments to data protection.

With that said, if you want to set up your computer with Python, R, and all the tools we use in the lab, for educational or other purposes, by all means do so.