Category: Quick Tips (page 1 of 3)

Qualtrics: The University’s Survey Platform

All Ohio State faculty and staff employees have access to Qualtrics, a robust and easy-to-use survey platform. If you are currently using SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or another product for work-related surveys, please be aware that Qualtrics is the University’s approved survey solution: osu.qualtrics.com (login with your name.# and OSU password).

Qualtrics is also a viable option for web forms. In fact, Libraries IT has assisted our partners in migrating most of our WordPress and Drupal forms to Qualtrics. It might not be the best solution for your particular use case though, so please submit a ticket to the Hub if you have questions. 

If you want to learn more, https://u.osu.edu/qualtrics/getting-started-with-qualtrics/ is a good place to start. We would also recommend Qualtrics’ own customer support portal: https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/getting-started/survey-platform-overview/ 

 

Is receiving Qualtrics email notifications important to you?

After hearing from a colleague about inconsistencies she had experienced with not getting Qualtrics’ email notifications, I started investigating this issue. I looked through a huge number of Qualtrics knowledge base articles (XM Support), confirming that we were correctly setting up our notifications however couldn’t identify or explain the cause of their failures.

Not finding any concrete answers, I started exploring the XM Community, where other Qualtrics users share tips, tricks, or solutions. I came across an entry that was surprising but also an answer to my struggles with the issue at hand since the inconsistencies were so random and well inconsistent!

“… I’ve run into a few gliches with emails not sent using the email trigger. Qualtrics support last month said the most updated and reliable email trigger is the one set in the Actions Tab…”

I used the Action Email Task and tested the submission notification and it worked beautifully. After my test results supporting the functionality of the Action feature I switched the form’s notification from Email Trigger to Action Email Task.

So I wanted to share this experience since we all utilize Qualtrics for our various survey, forms, and feedback needs and a breakdown in notifications would impact the services we provide to our colleagues and constituents.

So, please use Email Tasks for your future notifications and update your existing forms and surveys if receiving submission notices are important to you:

Getting NewsNotes posts by email

Not getting NewsNotes emails? Need to sign up? Instructions are in IT Help

Native ssh client support in Windows 10

Historically, Windows has never natively provided users with an SSH client.  And this has led to Windows users needing to look for tools like PuTTY or the SSH Client.  These were 3rd-party tools that allow users to connect to servers that require secure connections. 

Starting in the Windows 10 Fall 2018 build, Windows 10 now comes with a built-in ssh client.  For sure, 3rd-party tools like PuTTY will still be popular because they provide ways to create site profiles and save passwords – but for users that periodically need to connect to a secure server – this is really handy.

How can you find it?  It’s easy – Open the command prompt: cmd.  You can call the ssh command directly from here using the ssh command.  And the command has a number of options – type ssh -h and you get the following window:

Lots of options.  Probably the most useful is the -l [that’s a dash + lower-case “L”] command.  This sets the login name.  So, if I needed to connect to a server – I would use the following:

>>ssh [server] -l [username]

This will enable the Windows command window to work more like a traditional terminal window.  In fact, one of the things Windows 10 has added over the past year through a partnership with Ubuntu is a Unix subsystem.  This makes it possible to run many UNIX tools within the Windows environment — but that is likely a post for another time.

–tr

Hydrator: Tweet Downloader

If you ever need to get data from Twitter, and do not want to deal with coding, there is a neat application that you can use: Hydrator, a desktop application that takes in tweet IDs and returns the corresponding data from Twitter as JSON. Hydrator handles the Twitter API rate limits for you, and allows you to pause and continue the downloads if desired. Users have the option to convert the data to a CSV after the downloads are complete.

There’s just one catch: you do have to have tweet IDs to feed into the application. If you’re lucky and looking for a dataset for or from a common source, you may be able to find a set of IDs online. Otherwise, however, the Twitter API will still be your best bet to query and retrieve a large number of IDs.

REDCap vs. Qualtrics

Here at Ohio State, we can select between REDCap and Qualtrics for our survey collection needs. Are there important distinguishing factors to note between the two?

REDCap allows for more granular access rights to be granted for datasets, along with comprehensive logging and audit trails. Changes to data are more easily tracked using these features. Because of these features and on-premises storage location, REDCap is more suited to use with S4 data, and is often more suitable for research project. Qualtrics, on the other hand, offers an intuitive and easy-to-use UI. It’s often best suited for small-scale research projects and surveys.

A simple way to decide would be to decide if some of REDCap’s special functionality is necessary for your project. If not, Qualtrics may just do the job.

R has RStudio. What of Python?

It’s true: R users have a mature, well-maintained development environment — RStudio. Whether you’re an R user looking into Python, or a Python user looking for options, there are good news for you.

The Jupyter Notebook is a popular, web-based development environment in which users can write, annotate, and run code not only in Python, but also R and many other programming languages. It’s interactive, in that you can run code and view the output incrementally as you write the code. Jupyter Notebooks also support displaying visualizations inline, which is an important feature for data science and related applications. The ability to interweave comments and visualizations in a visual environment where you can write code, run it, and view the output makes Jupyter Notebooks ideal for explaining, presenting, teaching, and collaborating on code.

Example of a Jupyter Notebook

Example of a Jupyter Notebook from DataQuest blog

And more good news: it’s free and open source. You can download and run your own instance today! If you’d like to first try it without installing, you have the option to do so from the official Jupyter website here.

A free Unicode Replacement font to MS Arial Unicode

For a lot of users (at OSUL and outside OSUL) making use of Windows and MacOS systems, the MS Arial Unicode font has played an important role for users that work with mult-language materials.  At OSUL, this font is the default font use in tools like Sierra’s cataloging client and OCLC Connexion.  It’s also disappearing, and that can cause some problems. 

From the early days of Microsoft Office (1997ish), the MS Arial Unicode font has been distributed as part of the Office Suite.  Users could install the font by enabling Office’s International Support options.  And once you installed the font, it stayed with you through software upgrades and operating system changes.  However, in 2016, this changed.  Microsoft no longer makes this font directly available to users — the font is now part of a 3rd party licensing program.  This means the font no longer is part of a normal MS Office installation, and isn’t distributed as part of the Windows Operating Systems (this isn’t true of Apple’s MacOS system, which licenses this font for use in their software). 

For most users, this change in distribution and licensing shows up when they get a new PC.  Suddenly, Unicode characters stop working.  Our catalogers notice it in Connexion or Sierra — others will notice it in different ways.  So what does this mean for users?   Do we license the font separately?  Probably not.  Go back and install Office 2000 (please no). Actually, the solution is found in the open web community. 

A couple of years ago, Google sponsored the development of an open Unicode font, the Noto Font family.  This was created to be an open source font that could work on any platform and support a comprehensive set of languages.  And it does — its current language range is almost twice that of the former MS Arial Unicode font, and its free. 

You can download the font from the project page: https://www.google.com/get/noto/.  Its large, but its the most comprehensive font I’ve ever worked with, and the best part is, its free and open and doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon.

–tr

 

Where does data science fit in?

Since the emergence of data science on the mainstream, a popular visualization has been circulating in an effort to categorize where it fits in among existing subject areas. Below is an example of this visual – the “Data Science Venn diagram”, which I found on datasciencecentral.com:

Data Science Venn diagram

Data Science Venn diagram

This particular one has not commented on the intersections between the areas, but you will find other similar ones that do. Traditionally, it could be said that:

  • Computer Science + Math / Stats = machine learning, scientific computing, and certain big data applications
  • Computer Science + Domain Knowledge = “effective” software development
  • Domain Knowledge + Math / Stats = quantitative research

If you have data science related questions, we would be happy to assist you with guidance at the Research Commons.

Why hyphens and underscores in links?

Have you ever wondered why web links use characters such as hyphens and underscores over spaces? There is a very valid and practical reason for this.

While humans use spaces in text to split parts of speech to make it more readable, this practice causes all sorts of issues for computers. For computers, spaces are instead used to separate parts of code. For example, on the command line, spaces separate commands and symbols from each other. If a command were two words separated by a space, the command line interpreter would not know to process that accordingly. 

In the old days of the internet, CGI scripts were used to run code on the command line to power the Web. Often, links on a website would correspond to a file path on a server that the user would access. Because of this, the same naming conventions carried over.

Despite the fact that the Web has seen significant changes since those days, the problem with spaces (as well as some other special characters) remains, and we continue to avoid these “nasty” characters to make our lives easier by using simpler, albeit less-readable URLs.

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