Sign-Ons

Software Overview:

We have introductions about software that are usually used in this department includes:

Statistical Software

  • JMP is a powerful statistical package most widely used in undergraduate statistics course. It is available in Windows,Macintosh or Linux platforms.
  • R-Project is a free Statistical/Graphics Software Package similar to Splus available on the Windows, Macintosh, and Linux Platforms
  • SAS is a widely used data processing/statistical software package and is free on the university Linux  SAS server. Windows SAS is installed in the following public labs: Durham 139, Carver 205, Pearson 0113.
  • S-PLUS is an advanced statistical/graphics software package. The Windows CD Can be Checked Out from Snedecor 102, Statistics Main Office, with a photo ID). Splus is also available on Project Vincent (Unix)
  • SPSS is a statistical software package that is widely used in the social sciences and is free on Project Vincent. Windows SPSS is available from a site license at AIT and can only be installed on university owned PCs. Windows SPSS is installed on all the PCs in the Carver 205 public lab.
  • WINBUGS  is a software package used for the Bayesian analysis of complex statistical models using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods.  The project began in 1989 in the MRC Biostatistics Unit and led initially to the `Classic' BUGS program, and then onto the WinBUGS software developed jointly with the Imperial College School of Medicine at St Mary's, London.

Stat Graph Software

  • GGobi is an open source visualization program for exploring high-dimensional data. It provides highly dynamic and interactive graphics such as tours, as well as familiar graphics such as the scatterplot, barchart and parallel coordinates plots. The interactive plots are linked with brushing and identification. Also available is rggobi which is an R package that provides an easy interface with GGobi.
  • ggplot2 - ggplot2 is a plotting system for R, based on the grammar of graphics, which tries to take the good parts of base and lattice graphics and none of the bad parts. It takes care of many of the fiddly details that make plotting a hassle (like drawing legends) as well as providing a powerful model of graphics that makes it easy to produce complex multi-layered graphics.
  • Manet is a free downloadable visualization program for the Mac OSX platform. Manet provides a range of graphical tools specially designed for studying multivariate features, providing interactive tools for data with missing values.

Typesetting Software

  • MiKTeX is an up-to-date TeX implementation for the Windows operating system. It includes LaTeX and other common forms of TeX. TeX is generally considered to be the best way to typeset complex mathematical formulas, but, especially in the form of LaTeX and other template packages, is now also being used for many other typesetting tasks. To install MiKTeX, go to http://www.miktex.org/setup.html , then follow the link for installation. Note that TeXnic Center is an excellent user interface for MiKTeX. You must install MiKTeX before installing TeXnicCenter. If you update your version of MiKTeX, you may need to uninstall and reinstall TeXnicCenter to enable TeXnicCenter find the new version of MiKTeX.
There is an excellent introductory set of LaTeX lectures produced by Joe Struss of Information Technology available at http://www.it.iastate.edu/training/videos/ , you can also learn how to use LaTex by reading Introduction to LaTeX )
  • GSview is a graphical interface for Ghostscript under MS-Windows, OS/2 and Unix. Ghostscript is an interpreter for the Postscript page description language used by laser printers. For documents following the Adobe Postscript Document Structuring Conventions, GSview allows selected pages to be viewed or printed.
  • TeXnicCenter is a feature rich integrated development environment (IDE) for developing LaTeX-documents on Microsoft Windows (Windows 9x/ME, NT/2000/XP) freely available under GPL. IDE means the integration of all the tools, needed to develop documents with LaTeX, into just one application. You have the editor to write your LaTeX files with, you can start the building process just by choosing a menu item and the output of the LaTeX compiler is written to a window of TeXnicCenter and analyzed, so that you can simply jump from one error, warning or bad box to another one. Also viewing the generated output is easy with TeXnicCenter. Just choose a menu item and the correct viewer application will be started and if supported by the viewer, the output will be displayed at the position belonging to the current source position in TeXnicCenter. And the best: TeXnicCenter is distributed as open source under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is consequently available for free. http://www.toolscenter.org/front_content.php . Then choose Download-TeXnicCenter Setup, Version 1 Beta 6.21 ('Fawkes') and follow the prompts.

X-Windows Software

  • X-Win32. is a commercial Xwindows software package producted by Starnet,inc. Instructions for downloading or renewing this software are available at this link: X-Win32.
  • Cygwin/X is a freeware software package available from cygwin that enables one to access Project Vincent and Linux computers in full screen mode. It is similar to commercial products such as Xwin32.

Other software

  • Andrew File System (AFS), is the campus wide distributed file system that provides all staff, faculty, and students at Iowa State with 1 GB of file space