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Free Scientific Software for Developing World?
FlashBoltzmann asks: "I'm a physics student in the US working with a group
of physicists, mostly from Africa, who are interested in helping their colleagues on the continent obtain free software for
scientific and educational use. Often, many science
departments in Africa have little or almost nonexistent
funding to purchase new software packages, especially for
scientific research or education. Some know of the free
software available but say it takes up large amounts of time
over often slow internet connections to find and obtain it. I am asking for any recommendations on freeware or open source software, for any operating system, that anyone knows about. We are looking at the Debian version of Linux for a lot of the great software
that comes with it but resources for MS Windows would be
helpful as well."
"Free educational software of any level is appreciated though we prefer college and graduate level software. Also, field specific software is great, e.g. software for condensed matter physics. Eventually we'll probably combine the software on CDs to be distributed to these scientists. Any help is appreciated especially with programs that perform simulations, mathematical and statistical analysis and plotting, compilers, lab software, etc. The users of the software will most likely be physicists or mathematicians."
...is TeX.
This typesetting program was originally aimed at the scientist. I don't know of any other software that produces nicer documents.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Was Are you ready for Calc III. This, and alot more math software can be had from the UofA Math Software Page.
Well there's always this.
/. running a story about NASA donating some stuff to this site...
I recall
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
I know this isn't entirely the point of your question (and more than a little bit of this is motivated by my anger towards MS's recent settlement), but I just thought I'd put forward the idea that you shouldn't bother with Windows at all.
If you're hurting for cash for software, the outlook is probably not all that great for hardware too, right? The cutting edge of Linux and the various BSDs all run well on hardware that the latest Windows versions cough and sputter on.
Also, providing a Windows learning environment is only going to encourage use of Windows down the line, which will require further investments, software AND hardware upgrades etc.
If you're working with a blank slate, and these people need training anyway, might as well put it towards something that won't come back and make serious demands on your checkbook. Save the money for additional learning resources, a CD burner to replicate software for yourself (this is legal with the Linux and BSD OSes), etc. Don't go down the proprietary road, or else soon enough you'll be dealing with the same MS-driven crap the entire Western world is trying to handle right now.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I worked for a little while in a government research library, and about half the people in the building were both scientists and programmers. They developed a lot of their own tools, and most of them were coding for some *nix, many on Linux.
They didn't care about other people getting their code. I would expect universities to be the same way.
As for bandwidth, that's much less of a problem now with CD burners. I'm assuming your Third World people have CD-ROMs, but given that, if you can talk to some First World scientists & get them to burn and ship, it might well be cheaper.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
will be enough to put them off computers for life.
I know this isn't entirely the point of your question (and more than a little bit of this is motivated by my anger towards VA's recent settlement), but I just thought I'd put forward the idea that you shouldn't bother with Linux at all.
If you're hurting for cash for software, the outlook is probably not all that great for hardware too, right? The cutting edge of Windows and the various DOSs all run well on hardware that the latest Linux versions cough and sputter on.
Also, providing a Linux learning environment is only going to encourage use of Linux down the line, which will require further investments, software AND hardware upgrades etc.
If you're working with a blank slate, and these people need training anyway, might as well put it towards something that won't come back and make serious demands on your checkbook. Save the money for additional learning resources, a CD burner to replicate software for yourself (this is legal with the Windows and DOS OSes), etc. Don't go down the proprietary road, or else soon enough you'll be dealing with the same VA-driven crap the entire Western world is trying to handle right now.
If you have no resources for purchasing scientific software, where did you get the money for purchasing MS Windows licenses?
Moderators: THIS IS NOT A TROLL. The question is simple: if you're already w4r3zing Windows, what refrains you from w4r3zing your scientific software also, and in the process saving us from these terrible Ask Slashdots of late?
Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/
SAL is a good resource for finding science apps that run on Linux. Worldwide mirrors, many apps are free.
Rather than let these scientists continue to work where they lack any kind of facilities, why not bring them over here to the US to work instead?
After all, even with this initiative the fact remains that these people will remain lacking the best tools of their trades - a lot of this software is most definitely not free! And by being stuck in places cut off from the rest of the world they lose out on the chance to engage other scientists and join in the scientific process.
No, it would be much more beneficial to let them come and work in the US at some of our wonderful research facilities. Not only would it help their scientific skills to flower in the right environment, but it would also offset the brain drain our great nation is suffering thanks to the perception of science as being less important than greed.
Debian distributions have a separate "scientific computing" task (group of packages) that can be installed. It includes lots of useful stuff - linear algebra solvers, symbolic math (maxima - similar to Mathematica), ODE code, etc.
This is most likely the most complete site out there when it comes to science on linux. http://sal.kachinatech.com/
linux.box.sk
They may not all be the best but as a physics student some can be kinda cool to play around with.The standard resource for free scientific software (unfortunately mostly written in Fortran) is Jack Dongarra's netlib: http://www.netlib.org/
It's best in linear algebra (matrix problems etc) but there's other good stuff in there - FFT routines, statistical stuff, some deep mathematics, and more... Also, not free, but good, is the standby Numerical Recipes book, which includes source code for a large variety of uses, particularly solution of nonlinear optimization problems.
Other stuff is available free from the supercomputer centers - at least they used to give stuff away free, though NCSA at least seems to have tried to make money off their things lately...
Energy: time to change the picture.
It is actually not that easy to find free physics software.
For professional astronomy software, I recommend http://star-www.rl.ac.uk/
Some nice but steep stats software in the R project http://www.r-project.org/
And you can use Octave & gnuplot for basic maths. (admittedly not as good as mathematica,matlab or some other maths package.)
This URL http://www.seul.org/sci/seul-sci10.html has a review of linux & GPL packages that are useful to scientists.
It is also probably worth asking some of the software vendors if they would like to donate something, as really, you never know! (if the cause is good...)
Good luck!
fz
yours ever, fz.
Developed at CERN
Great for graphical representation, and statistics. Released under GPL.
I remember using it about three years ago under Red Hat for reconstruting cosmic ray showers. Can't see any possible problems with Debian...
It was great for what I was doing.
Matt.
grüt5! here are the linx you need:
s ht ml
/science:
y =s citech
scientific applications for linux:
http://sal.kachinatech.com/sal1.shtml
for ee:
http://www.drzyzgula.org/bob/electronics/linux.
scilab (math&calc. like matlab):
http://www-rocq.inria.fr/scilab/
texmacs (kickass easy wysiwig scientific document editor):
http://www.texmacs.org
(and also has a lot of links to other scientific software)
scigraphica:
http://scigraphica.sourceforge.net/
linux apps
http://www.linuxapps.com/?page=category&categor
I am a student of Physics at the University of Tokyo and my superiors have instituted a plan that accomplishes many of these aims.
We have correspondence programs with several universities in Africa in which we will provide to them our outmoded hardware. It is unfortunate that often, we are not able to replace our hardware as often as we would prefer, but when we do, we attempt to find a physics department without adequate hardware.
Also in the course of completing their theses, graduate students must write various software tools to assist them. The copyright to these tools belongs to the University if I am not mistaken. Although my University does not distribute these freely as some would prefer, they are sometimes provided to the other universities which have the hardware necessary to run them (with the consent of the programmer student of course).
Yes, there is more that may be done, but I believe that we are working to genuinely assist other physics programs which are less fortunate that we are in some respects. Does anyone else know of similar programs?
R. Suzuka
See: http://archive.comlab.ox.ac.uk/formal-methods/hol. html amongst other pages.
Python with Numeric Python and Scipy make for a fine numerical computing environment (www.python.org, www.pfdubois.com/numpy/, www.scipy.org).
l ib/ipl/
l ib/spl/
The GNU scientific library (GSL) can be found here: http://sources.redhat.com/gsl/
Intel Image Processing Library (C): http://developer.intel.com/software/products/perf
Intel Signal Processing Library (C): http://developer.intel.com/software/products/perf
VTK is an *extensive* visualization toolkit (C++): http://public.kitware.com/VTK/
Now here's something where the average joe without coding skills can help promote free software. How about offering to burn distros & RPMs/DEBs and mail them to africa or other places where the infrastructure isn't so great? The costs shouldn't be too horrible ... maybe we can set up a network of volunteers for something like that? I myself don't have a CD-burner at the moment (relocated from US->EU recently), but I can punch out a simple database-driven website quickly ... if anyone's interested, mail arminh(AT)usa.net ... maybe we can get something going?
If you're in need of a package to draw electronic circuits and do general schematic capture stuff, check out Pulsonix. These guys have made a fully-featured electronics schematic capture program freely available to anyone who wants to download it. The only downsides are (a) it's 19MB, and (b) it's Windows-only. Highly recommended.
The package also contains a PCB design package and other good stuff; however, you have to pay to unlock these (not excessive amounts by the standards of most design packages, but £1-2K is a lot for someone in a developing country or your typical hobbyist). If you're on a real budget, just use the schematic capture part to produce netlists, and then use an old DOS/Win3.11 PCB layout program such as BoardMaker for the PCB design.
Grab.
For graphing:
For Numerical Analysis:
-
GSL ( Gnu Scientific Library ):
language bindings for perl,python, and C++ for GSL are also available.Check out the Scientific Computing FAQ: which I've been having trouble reaching so you might want to try the Google cache of it.
After finding the differences between octave and matlab too much as pointed out I tried finding the unix/linux version. The student version is only sold in the US and the full version was going to cost more than a car. So I got desperate and with minimal tweaking found matlab Student Edition 5.3 ran quite happily, though slowly, under linux with WINE. Just another option for those on a budget :)
gnuplot! with Latex/gnuplot combo everything you can imagine is possible, and even more... these tools have helped me sooo much, I never touch that excel or any other spreadsheet program when i have some serious plotting to do.
GAP is a powerful software system for computational abstract algebra and discrete mathematics, especially group theory. See http://www.gap-system.org for details (including mirrors) and download. It's distributed under a "copyleft" not too different from the GPL.
If you want to use GAP for research or teaching and can't download it (we've had people whose bandwidth is too low, and people whose countries do not allow arbitrary internet downloads for political/religious reasons) let us know (mail one of the addresses on the Web site) and we can usually manage to send a CD.
Steve Linton
They have a scientific/engineering Visualization section that has a lot of cool stuff. Here are some examples:
i nk auf/ipc/ipc_d.html
/
;P
K-3D modeling, rendering and animation software (Win32 as well):
http://midas.psi.ch/
Isotopic Pattern Calculator (Link may be wrapped):
http://www.uni-duesseldorf.de/MathNat/pc1-AK_We
MayaVi (Visualization Software):
http://mayavi.sourceforge.net/
MIDAS (Data acq software for particle physics):
http://midas.psi.ch/
GraphThing (Graph Theory tool):
http://members.optushome.com.au/davidsymonds/gt
GNU TeXmacs (Technical writing tool, great for technical docs with formuli):
http://www.texmacs.org/
There are 130 projects on Freshmeat, which is probably just the "tip of the iceberg".
I am not a troll.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Also try the ROOT package. It's also developed at CERN (by the PAW people) but is in C++ (with a built in C++ interpreter) and has much more to it than PAW.
It's aimed at the Particle Physics community but is currently in use in a wide range of fields from Astronomy to banking!
Oh yes, runs on Linux and Windows...
Octave is a matrix manipulation package, released under GPL - basically a clone of MATLAB. It has scripting capabilities, which allow development of simulation software.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Ironically, with Bin Laden a) being suspected of having advanced weapons and b) being a millionaire, I don't think for-pay software is an impediment to him.
Frankly, when for-pay software is still cheaper than a few rifles, any third-world arms program isn't going to be hurting. Remember, warlords and tyrants skim the cash first-- and if they can afford to build the stuff, the software costs are negligible.
No, free scientific software really benefits education, schools that can't afford resources.
A.
It does excellent job on its part. There is also some documentation on the site, including one of the creators' Ph. D. thesis that explains some of the theory behind the software. On Linux it requires gcc and GNU Fortran complier to compile (compilation is pretty straightforward).
I also found GNU awk extremely useful at numerical data analysis. You also would want to include Python and NumPy - python extension for numerical computations.
HTH
Alex
I'm sure that this was thrown out as flame bait, but I will rise to the provocation anyway. bin Laden and other terrorists feed off of frustrantion, hunger and hopelessness. The best way to eliminate support for terrorists is to attack the factors that drive hopeless people to support terrorists for lack a better choices. I am not saying that all terrorists are motivated by economic and social factors, but that enough of their support depends on this to make third world improvements a good way to improve live for everyone.
A recent survey (essay) in the Nov 10-16 Economist (www.economist.com) discusses the surprising spread of technology into third world contries, and of the benefits to the inhabitants in terms of better diet, better governments, and a longer lifespan.
If we can assist and encourage the scientists and leaders in the third world to improve life in all countries, I think that terrorism will slowly whither away.
I managed to get my Physics PhD using almost entirely free tools.
The thesis was written in LaTeX, using emacs, and made printer friendly with dvips.
The data plots were done in gnuplot.
The simulations were written in c with gcc or Fortran with g77. For the matrix analysis algorithms I used LAPACK. For minimization routines I used some of the Numerical Recipes routines, which aren't free software exactly, but Numerical Recipes is an easy book to buy used off Amazon.
I know that all of this stuff is really old-skool, but, it all works fine.
- VTKis a very good package for scientific visualization.
- Maxima is a Free computer algebra system, a bit like Mathematica. It can solve equations, do calculus, plot things, produce TeX output of what you've done, and lots more. Incredibly useful for long tedious bits of algebra.
- gnuplot is a versatile graphing package (2D and 3D, but maxima or VTK are IMO better for 3d stuff). As well as graphing, it can try to fit arbitrary functions to your experimental data.
- LaTeX -- it's very hard indeed to typeset equations better than LaTeX can.
If you're interested in condensed matter physics (or a few other areas), then you should have a look at the Los Alamos E-print server, which contains preprints of a lot of scientific papers.2. For volume rendering i recommend VTK the visualization toolkit. A bit high on overhead required to use it, but quite powerful when you learn. In addition to volume rendering, supports isosurfaces (via marching cubes), segmentation algorithms, and many other image classifications. Delauney triangulation, and many of the elements needed for production visualization pipelines.
3. BLAS and LAPACK are absolutely essential. Basic Linear Algebra and Linear Algebra subroutines for everything from optimized matrix-matrix operations to Singular Value Decomposition and cholesky factorization of band diagonal symmetric yadayada. I use this stuff daily and the LAPACK subroutines would be one of the first things I would compile in a new environment. The LAPACK subs call BLAS subs. Note that I have these in fortran but called from C/C++. I dont know if they have been ported to C yet.
4. Stay away from those fancy "data explorer" deals. Complete waste of time. Chances are with a little more work you can do a better job, in a smaller package, with a *ton* less overhead by writing a bit of code. Learn a command line parser (you could prolly use getopt) and write your own library. I recommend brewing up 1D 2D and 3D storage classes that are reusable via C++ classes. For 2D/3D we use files with an ascii header and binary data, and have written utilities to do math on or between them. We also spent the time to write our own plotting software direct to postscript, so I have not had to struggle with the crap that is the freely available plotting software. GNU plot is simply pathetic. And if you pay for something like NCAR it is at least as bad but costs a hell of a lot more.
5. As far as those fancy environments go, I have used AVS, KHOROS, IBM explorer, and the SGI IRIS explorer. One of these that was free and probably the easiest to use is now not free (khoros). The IBM data explorer is also free now, but it is a total piece of crapola in my not so humble opinion.
6. Finally. Get the numerical algorithms book for your fav language. You wont regret it.
Having to be a testicle, I am happily the testicle of a spork.
How about the US government? Why would I trust the people who killed hundreds of thousands of people with a nuclear bomb in 1945, killed even more Vietnamese people for no obvious reason, bombed innocent people in Bagdad and killed many innocent people recently in one of our worlds poorest nations??
dumbass, if it's so much of a mess in these countries it's because they are poor, and they are poor because undereducated. Only through education their situation can be improved, and by this the worldwide situdation.
You've really done it now... you posted a question to /. in which you referred to "the Debian version of Linux". Sorry, no relevant answers for you, all you get now is flames and trolls pointing out the difference between Linux distributions and versions of the Linux kernel.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
I say keep the third world in the dark ages.
So we will live in perpetual fear of madmen like Bin Laden?
Until we have enlightenment on a global basis, we are all in danger of falling from civilization.
This can be obtained by practicing good software engineering techniques: Good plan, sticking to said plan, good colaboration, consistent design, consistent and COMMENTED code, modular design and coding, and DOCUMENTATION....
Package maintainers and creators... this falls in your domain more than anyone, because the code is often good, the system is mediocre to well designed and followed, yet your packages are horrid. ATTENTION RED HAT!!! Fix your system of horrible packages, a package is more than just a binary, it is basically an 'install' of the binary and tools, and a default configuration. Also, you should use Q&A processes to test the packages and if defunct, fix them... but at the VERY least provide some good documentation on how to get around the problems.
as an example: Why on RH 7.1, when I install Apache, mod_perl, PHP and Postgres do they not work properly 'out of the box'? Why must I dig and dig and dig to find the problems for each and every one of them? It is easier for me to start from the source and build it myself, then THAT is documented and I can know what to expect and do in sequence. If I get a package I expect it to WORK. YOUR PACKAGE SYSTEM IS MORE TROUBLE THAN COMPILING SOURCE YOURSELF!
The time it takes me to troubleshoot this, means less development and deployment. That means my boss will not use your software now or in the future. I strongly advise that if you want to stay competetive that you concentrate less on marketing and more on engineering.
"We are looking at the Debian version of Linux..."
Debian is readily available for a modest price on CD from vendors such as Cheap Bytes. Since all the software in Debian is Free you can purchase a few sets of CD's and then duplicate them as needed. You can even resell the duplicates to help defray your costs.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If Message Oriented and Peer 2 Peer Middleware would help them distribute complex calculations / simulations then Nirvana from my-channels is provided free of charge for Academic and non-commercial use. Its written in Java so any platform they choose would not be a problem
The Perl Data Language
PDL turns perl in to a free, array-oriented, numerical language similar to such commerical packages as IDL and MatLab.
These people have heard of and know all about free software. I'm a physics PhD myself so I'm sure that any physics dept. in the world uses GNUplot, F77 (free fortran compiler), LaTeX etc etc
The problem they have is downloading the software over crap pipes you say?
Why not simply get the people they are colaberating with in the richer countries to post the software!? Its not hard, and if you are posting results and reserch papers to each other all the time, it is not as nieve as it sounds! (These guys do colaberate with other physics depts, right?)
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
Also try the ROOT [root.cern.ch] package. It's also developed at CERN (by the PAW people) but is in C++ (with a built in C++ interpreter) and has much more to it than PAW.
I wasn't aware of this but I'm going to check it out.
Also, it's possible to call CERN libraries from C/C++ but amusingly, you need to #include <cfortran.h>. Who says the scientific community is underfunded?
Joking aside, I've used far too much Fortran doing scientific stuff.
Matt.
Well, I think these countries are in need of scientists.
Nonsense, what these countries need is food, healthcare and an end to the endless brutality of tribal warlords, not some ivory tower academics sitting around pondering issues. Until they acheive stability, there is no need for these countries to bother with providing for scientists, especially ones that can't compete with Western researchers anyway due to a lack of resources.
Why not instead put all american scientists (with all their funding) in countries with less opportunities to give money to research? This would give a lot of job opportunities as well.
How foolish! Not only would we be squandering a national resource, but we'd be sending our scientists to a life of misery grubbing in the dirt for food to life, let alone engage in constructive research.
I think you need to check your facts first before posting.
is Scientific Applications for Linux (SAL), the one i use is in greece http://sal.duth.gr, but there are mirrors around the world.
..
I think the official site is at http://sal.kachinatech.com/ .
many applications there , not all free though
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
since i installed my student version of Matlab at home, i have used less my Octave. Matlab also can be bought at academic prices, which are still too expensive for cash-strapped academia.
as for linux vs. windows, if you have to leave you computer on for 10 days for a simulation, then linux stability is a nice bonus...
I found these links for linux scientific freeware on this page http://www.freepatents.org/liberty/logiciels.html
.....sorry for the lack of form....and i didn't check all the links.... hope its useful...
o me.html :8000/u/magma/ h tml
Its in French... but then again the majority of my African friends speak it.... there is a lot in there
Sciences et ingénierie
Scientific Applications on Linux http://SAL.KachinaTech.COM/
Index très complet d'applications scientifiques et professionnelles (gratuites, shareware ou commerciales) qui tournent sous Linux.
Statistiques
fiasco http://www.fsf.org/software/fiasco/index.html
xldlas http://a42.com/~thor/xldlas/
MacAnova http://www.stat.umn.edu/~gary/macanova/macanova.h
R http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/R/contents.html
Calcul formel
MuPAD http://www.mupad.de
Maple http://www.maplesoft.com/
Mathematica http://www.wolfram.com/
Macsyma http://www.macsyma.com/
Magma http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au
Macaulay2 http://www.math.uiuc.edu/Macaulay2/
Singular http://www.mathematik.uni-kl.de/~zca/Singular/
Analyse numérique
Scilab http://www-rocq.inria.fr/scilab/
Matlab http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/mlover.s
Octave http://www.che.wisc.edu/octave/
Is this a joke? Are you serious? There are lots of holes in this argument.
1. Lots of "third world" terrorists work from within Western countries. All that anthrax in your postal system is being sent from within the US.
2. There is this thing called the internet, which allows distribution of software anywhere in the world. Anywhere. You can bet that the Taliban have an internet connection, even if they don't allow any of their ordinary folks access. Scientists with evil intentions and backing from malign governments don't need our help, they can help themselves. The scientists with good intentions working in under-funded third world universities deserve our help.
3. Why should third world nations necessarily be any more evil than western ones? The most advanced country in the world at the time, Germany, didn't acquit itself very well in WWII.
4. If you set out to keep people in the dark ages you foster the kind of resentment that much of the Islamic world currently feels for the US.
5. Science progresses through the sharing of information. Who is to say we can't benefit from third world-based science?
Why not get the African countries to prosecute Microsoft for anticompetitive practices and force MS to just give them the software to pay penalties?
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
I'm a student at a magnetic resonance research centre and we're looking for a new development platform. We've been using IDL but they've announced they won't be supporting Mac OS X. The leading candidate right now is Python with Numerical Python, Scientific Python and VTK.
there is a free software package for teaching ecology available from
http://www.cbs.umn.edu/populus/
it teaches some of the basic differential equations, some cellular automata, an "interaction engine" wherein you can enter your own diff eq's and view their outputs (only 2 or 3 can be viewed simultaneously), and a bunch of other things...
it is currently being developed in Java, and is available for all operating systems (that have Java)
check it out! it's "fun for the whole family!" you will see models that you have done in your school years (simple population growth) and a lot you probably haven't.
yorick is a great tool. It similar to IDL, but not nearly as mature. It's fast, and has it's own prog. lang. that is similar to c, and similar to fortran90. It comes from Lawrence-Livermore ftp://ftp-icf.llnl.gov/pub/Yorick/doc/index.html
Its at http://www.members.home.net/europax
Rob.
yes, MS sells campus licenses at EXTREME discounts (like $20 for Office and less for the OSs), but the hardware requirements are heavier.
most people in academia are not swimming in cash, so this means old hardware, and an array of diverse machines connected to a server. linux is the ideal software partner for a small research group, in my opinion.
the other factor, as somebody else pointed above, is that GNU or public tools are used by almost everybody. most papers are swapped in
still, the crucial factor that made me wipe out windows for linux was stability. when you do not have a double Xeon crunching numbers, you appreciate the fact that linux will not crash during the 3 days it must be ON.
Terrorists exist because they come from uncivilized, barbaric nations.
Before oil was discovered, the Arabs were a nothing but a bunch of tribesmen fighting for whatever scraps of wealth that existed in their homelands. (Much like the Afghans today) Wealth was measured in access to water.
Once oil was discovered and began to be exploited, the more important tribesmen declared themselves "Kings" and had the money to purchase arms and artillery from Western nations so their rivals could be quickly squashed.
Terrorism of the Middle East variety is a problem because we send billions of dollars to uncivilized religous zealots with the social sophistication of someone from the Dark Ages. The petty kings of these countries live in splendor, while the regular citizenry live in oppressed squalor.
If you want terrorism to go away, don't do business with the Middle East. Buy oil from Texas, Alaska and Russia and encourage the government to give tax incentives for development of alternative fuels.
When the oil princes are bankrupt, terrorism will cease.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Just look in the /usr/port/science folder on any BSD derived system. Sorta makes this question look silly. For Finux user I guess you have to look on www.freshmeat.net, or some other pain-ass method. For Windows, well... yo shouldn't use windows for science stuff considering that OS is not having the acuracy, nor precision to do any real-time applications. Most science folks use *nix becuase thier computer math coleuges dont' program on windows.
Terrorists exist because they come from uncivilized, barbaric nations
Like the Unabomber you mean?
http://twitter.com/onion2k
The Stony Brook Algorithm Repository
Terrorists exist because they come from uncivilized, barbaric nations.
I can think of British terrorists, Irish, German, French, Spanish, American, in fact I think you'll find ALL countries have produced one sort of terrorist or another.
Terrorists do not come from uncivilised barbaric nations. Rather they are uncivilised barbaric people. An important difference, and one which we should all remember if the civilised majority, from all countries, is to oversome the terrorists from whatever place.
Use Warez!!
I'm surprised no one has mentioned LyX,
http://www.lyx.org
an excellent free GUI for LaTeX. Writing my dissertation would have been even more painfull without it.
I use an open-source data analysis package called Weka.
It was developed in Java, and it's quite easy to modify and extend as you see fit. Solid documentation available on the website. Excellent CLI, decent GUI, decent graphics. Really useful for doing basic statistical analysis and using some of the more interesting machine learning techniques.
The Unabomber was a lunatic.
There is a signifigant difference between a lunatic and a terrorist.
Terrorists are fighting for a cause. They see their acts as strikes against their enemies. Examples of this include the IRA, Timothy McVeigh and Hamas.
The IRA was supported by financial contributions from Catholic Irish in the South and Irish in the United States.
Tim McVeigh did not really have a movement behind him when he bombed Oklahoma City. He thought he did, though.
Hamas (and Osama bin Laden) is a terrorist movement who receives direct support from states like Syria, Iraq, and Iran as well as financial and other support from rich Saudi princes and other oil billionaires.
The Unabomber was a solitary maniac. He was a smart guy with a few screws loose who became totally unhinged when the woman he wanted to marry rejected him. His political agenda didn't develop until much later in his bombing career, and was mostly incoherent. The agenda of Bin Laden or Hamas is very clear and very coherent -- they are organizations at war.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I wonder if a company like wolfram would donate mathematica for an endevour like this. It's unrealistic to try and make money of third world developement.. and if the ultimate goal here is to move these countries out of the third world, getting them hooked on the product would be great for the future.
being a physicist myself (theory/computational physics) i have noticed that the main trend is to get rid of the expensive sun workstations and geat cheap pcs with linux on them. while we can have endless fights of what distro is the best, it seems that (at least in america) redhat (7.2 is highly recommendable and available via cd) is the choice for most scientific groups.
...) and many more. Institutions like CERN, or space telescope provide full packages with tools to analyze all kinds of data.
not only is it a free os, it also provides ALL the core tools you need to do research! for example you have TeX (+ several excellent text editors), the whole gnu compiler suite (and debuggers), excellent plotting tools for data and image manipulation (gnuplot, gimp, xgrace,
there are a lot of other scientific applications you can get for free for linux if you are in an academic environment and which are awesome tools to use for researchers. i have seen many responses already with good pointers to different places (SAL, freshmeat, CERN, IBM Open DX).
finally, once can also make computational clusters with linux -- really inexpensive ones!
Take al ook at mupad
It's some sort of mathematica lookalike, superior in some cases and they have free versions.
It's been a while since I used it, but it was great.
Grass is a very powerful, free GIS system which is quite useful to scientists. A good GIS application can be used for any number of things such as terrain and weather modeling, migration pattern tracking, etc.
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
http://www.fisica.uson.mx/Linux/linuxlist/linuxlis t-s.html
;-)
It is more detailed than SAL, and maybe a bit more messy. For instance: in this page for "S" software, you'll find SciLab ( which is probably more interesting than octave when you are not so interested in reuse of legacy matlab code), but there is also Samba, which has little to do with science (and probably a lot to do with clever reverse engineering
Hell, many here could spare a burner and send you many and only charge sh/h (if we can find a way to make this tax deductible we would do it as well). There are debian sites that do this as well plus a dollar for burning and stuff.
.edu focused distro before our government turned even more idiotic than normal and sent the project to the freezer. Debian has many .edu focused packages as well....
The kind of apps you need are really easy to get, get in touch with schollarnet guys (check with some of the gnome people, Arturo Espinosa in particular), they were making an
No windows please, your country (mine neither) cannot afford this anymore, and we cant keep pirating can we?
Alex
NO SIG
FlashBoltzmann also wanted to know if any of these programs we free and available on a microscoft windows platform. Ya, ya I know winblows sux monkey sphinkter and yadda yadda yadda...
Yeah, the US paid money to the IRA.. they paid money (and weapons and training) to the Taliban in the 80s (weapons now being used against US troops in Afganistan) and you're saying the US is feircely antiterrorism? Rubbish. You lot pay for it if it helps your objectives. Just wait till Dubya goes up against Iraq. World War 3 anyone?
I was referring to Mideast terrorists in particular. They are a particular breed of terrorist movement and cannot be compared directly to terrorist organizations in Spain or Ireland. Unfortunately, I cannot edit my previous comment and clarify it.
The difference is that Mideast nations are RUN by the uncivilized, barbaric dictators and petty kings.
Western democratic governments are accountable to the will of the people. While organizations like the CIA have supported rotten regimes in Central America and Asia, that support rarely lasts a long time, since administrations and political power shifts every few years.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
There is an organization called MERLOT. It's more of an online system where professors from Canada and the US submit links to sites with learning tools and programs.
Anybody can submit links but each link is graded by professors from Universities and Colleges that pay a fee (a really big fee). This system ensures that only the good tools get online. It takes a minimum of 3 stars out of 5 to be linked. This encourages improvements (rejections get feedback) in tools to become easier to use and more educational.
It's FREE (no registration at all) to and layed out into easy to navigate catagories (Arts, Biology, Math, Physics, etc...)
internet like monkeys'
opencollector.org- advertisement-cashflow-with-our-brainwash-flashgiz mo"
A bit aside pure science but probably useful for the development of acquisition boards and other handcrafted electronics for the lab. It s rather OK, even if there s not enough analog to my taste. At least it s not one of those "communities" websites that smell like "let-ride-the-trend-of-freestuff-and-turn-it-into
( And that s a strong smell, since I almost barf everytime I stumble on one of those sites. )
I never said anything about US anti-terrorist activity.
Unfortunately, you are a selective reader who rarely reads a non-tabloid newspaper and accepts the soundbytes of news pundits as absolute truth.
US funding for the IRA came from private citizens of the USA, mainly in New York City and Boston.
During the Afghan-Soviet conflict in the 1980's, the US provided arms and training to tribal guerilla fighters -- not to the Taliban. The Taliban did not exist as an entity until 1995 or so. And after almost 25 years of conflict, most of the weapons provided during the 80's are worn out, sold or destroyed.
Look at the TV next time. Do you see militiamen armed with M-16, M-14 or Enfield rifles? LAW or SMAW rockets?
No, you see men walking around carrying AK-47's and RPG-7 rocket launchers. These weapons are produced in China and Eastern-Bloc European nations and are widely available on the Black Market.
Are US helicopters being shot down by Stinger missiles? No.
Be a little more discerning and read before opening your trap.
Find free books.
http://iraf.noao.edu/iraf-homepage.html is the standard data processing package in American/British astronomy (and possibly Europe too these days). I just noticed it is packaged inside Debian...
Although aimed at astronomy, it would be useful general image processing (particularly good at automating procedures over many images).
http://www.acooke.org
This isn't going to help them as far as the bandwidth problem goes, but Intel now offers their Fortran compiler free for unsupported noncommercial use. This includes F90, which opens up a lot more opportunities. It does need a (free, still) license, so it's a little tricky to obtain, but still very worthwhile. As far as I've seen it's the only free F90 compiler for Linux and the only free F77 compiler besides g77, and it's likely to be far faster than g77 as well.
"I'm sure that this was thrown out as flame bait, but I will rise to the provocation anyway"
Whew! Thank god for that!
$5 for MathCAD is a much better deal than my $100 for Matlab
nevertheless, outside the US where universities have less muscle to get good deals, student licenses are still expensive for the less-priviledged students. therefore, people go the GNU/Linux way.
Ptolemy is a good tool if you want to model and simulate systems.
From their website:
"The Ptolemy project studies modeling, simulation, and design of concurrent, real-time, embedded systems. The focus is on assembly of concurrent components. The key underlying principle in the project is the use of well-defined models of computation that govern the interaction between components. A major problem area being addressed is the use of heterogeneous mixtures of models of computation."
What a noble cause...
R comes with Woody (Next Debian release).
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
A note to FlashBoltzmann (admittedly a bit of a digression)--I notice that you point out that a lot of these folks have slow connections. I suspect that's true in a direct sense, but isn't it true that continental bandwidth to/from Africa is still pretty limited as well? It seems to me that there's a chance that an archive of related software, located on the African contient, might help the downloading time issues and give you a place to put a bunch of related software to make it easier for folks to find....
I'm a nature photographer.
http://gri.sf.net instead of gnuplot
For doing math. It understands matricies of
arbitrary dimension so you can multiply
a 6 x 4 x 8 matrix by a 4 x 8 x 2 matrix and
end up with a 6x2 matrix (I think). Advantages
are c-like syntax (scilab/matlab are UGLY),
Graphing, and MPI interface. Downside is
that it doesn't have that big a user following.
You can find out more here:
ftp://ftp-icf.llnl.gov/pub/Yorick/doc/index.html.
Or hit up google.
-- cary
just a test...
MIT has a page "System Dynamics in Education" that includes a lot of resources for learning and teaching system dynamics concepts. Their page contains links to some free software. The software is great for learning about dynamic systems. It gives you a graphical way to model systems of ordinary differential equations, by connected boxes that represent "storage locations" using arrows that represent "flows." Typical systems dynamics models include predator-prey models, cooling down of a cup of water, chemical systems, and etc.
http://sysdyn.mit.edu/
There is a massive collection of free Mathematical software at www.netlib.org. Since you are working with physicists in the United States, you should have access to a DSL connection. Download all of Netlib. If you do not have a writable cd rom, get one. They are cheap. Make your own cd rom of software. Make several copies to give away to contacts in Africa.
/
I once suggested to Walnut Creek that they make a cd rom of Netlib. They did, and they sent me a free copy. Several years ago I saw a copy for sale in Microcenter computer store. I have not seen it since, and Walnut Creek no longer lists it for sale. I guess it did not sell well and they discontinued it. Anyway, you might contact Walnut Creek and ask if they have any of their old Netlib cd roms lying around. Offer to buy it. They will sell it cheap. Perhaps, they will make a copy. Surely they did not delete the files that went into making their cd rom.
The back of my Walnut Creek Netlib cd rom lists the contents as: slatec, blas, linpack, eispack (eigenvalues), lapack (linear systems), elefunt (elementary functions), fftpack, fitpack (curve fitting), minpack (minimization), odepack (ordinary differential equations), quadpack (quadrature), and random (random numbers).
Another great site is the Core Math Library at:
http://sunsite.univie.ac.at/statlib/cmlib/index
There is a tremendous overlap with Netlib, but there is also a lot of routines that are not in Netlib.
Good luck. Please help spread free software to Africa.
One of the issues I've often run up against when doing scientific programming is the desire for a *real* programming language to support the number crunching. This often caused huge frustration for me when I used Matlab and IDL. One of the nicest solutions I've found for numerical programming is the Numerical Python package. (http://www.pfdubois.com/numpy/ ) You get the numerical expressiveness of Matlab or IDL with the power of Python as a programming language for the half of your program that *doesn't* deal with crunching numbers. (In my experience it's actually usually more than half, even in heavily numeric code!)
Here are a few more links:
The Python website: http://www.python.org
The Scientific Python Project: http://www.scipy.org
Cheers,
-DA
yacas (Yet Another Computer Algebra System) is a rather nice program, limited, but useful.
It is geared for high energy physics data analysis, but it has many useful tools for doing things such as histogramming data and plotting data, as well as many other numerical routines. MINUIT, the minimization package that comes with CERNlib is the best around.
The package is FORTRAN based, and works with g77/Linux as well as other systems.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
A lot of people are providing excellent links to free scientific software resources, but one of the key points mentioned was the lack of a high speed Internet connection. FlashBoltzman also specifically said they were looking at Debian because of the applications bundled with it.
Based on this, I think what would help the most would be hard copies of the scientific software people have mentioned. I would also recommend looking at SuSE's boxed distribution, because it contains 7 CDs or 1 DVD worth of software. Spending a few hundred U.S. dollars to get a box into every organization is probably much cheaper than the amount they would have to spend on their slow Internet connections to download several GB of data to each organization.
However, those scientific and research packages mentioned aren't going to be part of any distribution. FlashBoltzman can post the resources listed here to a web page, but maybe he should routinely grab software and then each month or quarter burn a few CDs or DVDs to send to Africa.
The main resources are the reports (2 per month on the SEUL/edu group) and the mailing lists where new software and case studies are announced and discussed.
BURKS, the Brighton University Resource Kit for Students is an excellent CD-based resource kit intended for computer science students, though available to anyone. Only £7.50 GBP (+ postage) for 4 CDs, including Mandrake Linux 8.0, Windows compilers, tools and utilities, copies of FAQ files and the Dictionary of Computing, and much more. The whole contents is available on-line so you can see what you are getting.
Andrew Yeomans
There's plenty more where they came from. Most distrbutions come with a lot of these things anyway. These are mainly analysis or document tools, there's plenty of other things for both these areas and any other which plenty of other posters have shown. I've written a little guide for my local group. Some of it's out of date (and some of it's wrong but I have better things to fix) but it does have a list of common tools we use. And, of course, SAL is a pretty comprehensive database of unix tools. HTH.
"Don't get mad, get a monkey!"
Also, NumericalPython and the Python Imaging Library are good packages and integrate with VTK. NumericalPython is better than Matlab, IMO.
Try it out! the best open-source program for scientific graphics and data analysis, featuring spreadsheets and plots in a very friendly interactive environment. Super cool under Gnome (and without Gnome as well). 2D, 3D, and polar charts with publication quality PostScript output, XML native file format, Python interface and more! You'll find it at http://scigraphica.sourceforge.net Enjoy!
Scientists in Africa, for the betterment of the world, would best be encouraged to leave. Their talents would be better spent in a country that can use those talents -- a country like the USA.
The following are the average IQ's of the polulations of sub-Saharan African nations. The upper limit for mental retardation is IQ 85. Every sub-Saharan African nation's population has an average IQ below this threshold:
Zambia 77
Congo (Brazz)73
Uganda 73
Jamaica 72
Kenya 72
South Africa 72
Sudan 72
Tanzania 72
Ghana 71
Nigeria 67
Guinea 66
Zimbabwe 66
Congo (Zaire)65
Sierra Leone 64
Ethiopia 63
Equat. Guinea59
These are not developing nations. They are incapable of developing. These nations can contribute nothing to the information economy and those few talented individuals who live in them would be helping themselves and the world if they would leave for a nation with a modern infrastructure that can support the kind of work they are capable of.
-nukebuddy
I have recently been trying to find a replacement for origin which has become the standard ploting/data manipulation program in our research department. Unfotunatly it is very expensive and we don't have to budget to buy the number of licenses we require.
I tried many free linux ploting programs many of them holding themselves up as origin replacements, and none of them had anywhere near the features or intuitive interface of origin.
I think the closest one I found was Grace (previously xmgr) which is great for generating plots but doesn't help much with the correlation and sorting of large amounts of data the way origin does. Several students in our department have used grace to produce the figures for their thesis's, mainly because the postscript file output works well with latex.
Any suggestions as to a better program would be greatly appreciated.
Martin
For nuclear magnetic resonance experiments, a good free program for Linux is NMRView. Related free programs are NMRPipe for initial data processing and CNS (Crystallography/NMR System) for data analysis. The molecular modeling program MolMol was also useful. See linuxnmr.org for more NMR software.
I'd like to add to the above support for LaTeX -- wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on it and it formats equations extremely well.
Scientific Applications on Linx (SAL)
It's pretty pathetic when somebody can't post a contrarian opinion without being drowed out by mindless "moderators".
Statistics
R-Project
Solid software, similar to Splus with possible linkage to C, C++ and Fortran.
Image Analysis
UTHSCSA Image Tool
Functional image analysis with script language.
Fortran
VFort
Stadnard MDI app and g77 compiler. Good environment for inexperienced Fortran programmers.
-.sig sauer-
Since I haven't seen it, here are several free programs useful for computational chemistry:
GAMESS Free Electronic Structure Package
ViewmolMany types of visualization
gOpenMolVisualization and property Calculation
RasMolVisualization
EgoMolecular Dynamics Program
TinkerMultifacited Package
X-PLORMolecular Dynamics Tailored for Biological Systems
PARI-GP, most excellent Mathematical package,
and I really mean it. Distributed under GPL.
http://www.parigp-home.de/
Enjoy!
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/egs/
Above address is for the EGS (electron gamma shower)Widely used by physicists and medical physicists.
http://www.openchannelsoftware.com/
Agreat collection of open source programs. The real bonus many are in FORTRAN.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more. - Albert Camus
Wow,
/. and we can all rejoice as BeOS, MacOS, BSD, Tru64, AmigaOS and what have you gets the same treatment.
reminds me of a couple of years back when marketing people first were introduced to the amazing concept of filling in fields in a word processor document with any given name and went nuts.
"Hi, John Q. Public,
We are delighted to announce that you, John Q. Public, have been selected to win a prize. Not many are chosen, but you, John Q. Public was one. On our list of candidates, John Q. Public ranked high."
Now it seems the same trend has hit
I have been using a scientific visualization package called OpenDX. It is a complicated, but very powerful tool, and well worth the effort to learn if you have piles of data to look at. The documentation is good, and the mailing list has been newbie friendly. I used PV-WAVE in grad school, and spent a long time afterwards looking for an open source alternative - this is it. The only real downside is that it is a Motif app.
It used to be IBM's Visualization Data Explorer; they made it an open source project a couple of years ago (wow - go IBM). Available on a variety of Unix/Linux platforms and Windows (if you run an X server). We have it on two Linux machines and two W2k machines (latter using Cygwin/XFree86-4.1.0); 3D hardware acceleration is supported on the Linux machines - and presumably on windows too if we shelled out the $$$ for a commercial X server.
Please add links to the following webring http://A.webring.com/wrman?ring=freeeducationwar&a ddsite
thank you
Okay,
www.r-project.org
www.keduca.org ???