Igor Demonstrations?

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Sun, 03/15/2009 - 12:27 pm

I would like to propose a new Forum, tentatively titled "Igor Demonstrations" or possibly "Education". Over the years, I have used Igor Pro in my courses to illustrate various points, and perhaps others will find these useful. Further, I imagine that others have done similar things, which could also be useful more generally.

I include an example here (on the formation of beliefs in the Bayesian paradigm) to illustrate the general idea and leave it to the organizers and community to decide on the best format for such contributions.

It may be useful to point out a similar site: http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ BayesFlip.pxp
Thanks for the idea. I like what Wolfram has done with their demonstrations site, and it would be cool to do something similar on IgorExchange.com, but that would be more elaborate than just creating a new forum. There also might be the potential for a fair amount of overlap with the WaveMetrics Igor gallery at http://www.wavemetrics.com/products/igorpro/gallery.htm.

Keep in mind that right now all registered users can create code snippets (http://www.igorexchange.com/node/add/code-snippet), though these don't actually have to be code.

I've added this idea to my list of things to look into. It probably will be a few months before I have the time to spend on it, but I'll keep it in mind.

Thanks

March 15, 2009 at 01:11 pm - Permalink

One difference between the WaveMetrics Igor gallery and a "demonstrations site" is that the former is designed to show people the range of problems that Igor can tackle, while the latter would have code (using Igor) that might be of direct or indirect use, e.g., for a University course. In other words, the Igor gallery focuses on the program itself, while the demonstrations site focusses on the applications. The "code snippets" section has the applied aspect, and I even see that there is an "education" category, but it seems a bit lost among all the other, more technical categories.

March 21, 2009 at 10:30 am - Permalink

John Bechhoefer wrote:
I would like to propose a new Forum, tentatively titled "Igor Demonstrations" or possibly "Education". ...


I agree with you about expanding IgorExchange to include demonstrations. I see it though less appropriate being a Forum topic rather than another "cloud" under Projects or an additional TAB with its own requisite "clouds".

In the meantime, are you aware that Projects has an Education subcategory? This would seem to be a very appropriate place for your cool BayesFlip experiment (and similar such). You can dress up the Project posting with a reasonable snapshot picture (see the example I posted on the Planck distribution function) as a step toward presenting it as a "demonstration" of sorts.

--
J. J. Weimer
Chemistry / Chemical & Materials Engineering, UAH

March 21, 2009 at 11:57 am - Permalink

jjweimer wrote:

In the meantime, are you aware that Projects has an Education subcategory? This would seem to be a very appropriate place for your cool BayesFlip experiment (and similar such). You can dress up the Project posting with a reasonable snapshot picture (see the example I posted on the Planck distribution function) as a step toward presenting it as a "demonstration" of sorts.



The Planck distribution demonstration is another nice example for an education category. But the other two examples currently in that category, though fine in their own right, are qualitatively different in that they concern Igor techniques. The point would be to collect programs of interest to people who don't care about programming per se but just are interested in the application. I have in mind the Mathematica site as one example. (There are nearly 5000 examples currently, and utility programs are just one subcategory.)

When the semester ends, I'll try to clean up the Bayes demo for the present education subcategory.

March 29, 2009 at 05:55 pm - Permalink

bech wrote:
... The point would be to collect programs of interest to people who don't care about programming per se but just are interested in the application. ...


I understand. This sounds to be best as an additional TAB for the site ... (Demos) ... with limitations that only .pxp (experiment) files can be posted and only if they are essentially "self-contained" (ie, can run under the demo version of Igor Pro without needing additional packages).

In such a case, I would also motion to change the name of the Projects tab to Packages.

bech wrote:
... When the semester ends, I'll try to clean up the Bayes demo for the present education subcategory.


Semester's end is when most good things tend to happen :-)

Anyway, the demo looked fairly clean to post as it was, especially with the idea of that updates to it can always be added as time goes on.

--
J. J. Weimer
Chemistry / Chemical & Materials Engineering, UAH

March 30, 2009 at 12:52 pm - Permalink

bech wrote:
But the other two examples currently in that category, though fine in their own right, are qualitatively different in that they concern Igor techniques. The point would be to collect programs of interest to people who don't care about programming per se but just are interested in the application.


As one of the authors of a very technical contribution to the "education" category (Interactive Dartboard), I would agree that my snippet is not in the spirit of what you had in mind, and probably misplaced there. I have thus deleted the "education" tag for my project.

Wolfgang Harneit

March 30, 2009 at 03:56 pm - Permalink