Teaching Geoscience with MATLAB^®

Workshop: Carleton College- Northfield, MN

(transferring from the email listserv to the community site archive)

Risa -


You asked in the email list:
on the topic of "faculty/department buy-in," the paleontology professor in my department has expressed interest in learning to use MATLAB for making statistical type plots for his data that he has found too cumbersome to do in Excel. Let me know if you have any suggestions about how to introduce faculty to using MATLAB

I was hoping that your esteemed colleagues would respond. (hint)
In any case, if you need help on this, please let me and Loren know.

Lisa

Risa, has he done the MATLAB tutorials on line? I have my students start this way, and this might be a good introduction for him as well. At the very least it helps with basic syntax and plotting and whatnot. I invite my students to skim over some parts that are less relevant to their work, but overall I think they find them helpful. http://www.mathworks.com/academia/student_center/tutorials/mltutorial_launchp...

aloha,
Jackie

Thanks Jackie and Lisa for replying,
I understand the motivation behind viewing the tutorials, and when I was starting out I did delve into many introductions for setting up codes. The problems I encountered had to do with translating my particular modeling or visualization problem into a general problem for MATLAB and then integrating the various small parts into a whole. It kind of looks like I'm in the same boat now, except with someone else's data this time. Unless it is part of a class, it is hard to get professionals to take the time to teach themselves something new and learn how to apply it in complex cases.

Right now, the data has been handed over to me. I will need to sort through it to pose specific coding questions to the discussion group. Certainly, when I start designing a course from scratch, I plan to go through the tutorials to know how to integrate them at opportune times as problems are introduced. Hopefully course design can provide a strong foundation that generates greater autonomy into individuals' careers.

Best Regards, -Risa

Hi All,
I'm still trying to help out a friend. I have been trying to apply a version of a stacked bar plot, but his data is in Excel format and I haven't been successful plotting what he needs. He needs to be able to stack the numbers of specimens found per year within decade size bins, so that the x-axis would show decades, while the y-axis would read numbers of specimens. Within each decade, the code would need to make the years cumulative, but also show the stacks of numbers per year within that decade. If someone from the group thinks they can help, but has further questions, I can send an email with a sketch he made in Excel and cc him.

Thanks, -Risa

Hi,
After hitting upon the right key terms, I stumbled on the code to plot groups of stacked bars through Matlab Central's File Exchange. I even stumbled on a way to label each bar in each stack and sum them up at the top. My paleontologist friend might actually be able to plot his data. So, for any newcomers out there, the File Exchange might be a good place to start.

-Risa

That's great, Risa.

Can you share the link to the File Exchange submission with the group?

Hi Lisa,
Here is the link for the File Exchange submission for plotting groups of stacked bars.
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/32884-plot-groups-of-stac...

The part about customization to label the bars and sum them at the top was from an independent consultant's blog site, so I am unsure of copyright restrictions for posting that link.

This operational design really calls more for a data display code than computational code.

-Risa