Tool of the Week: GitHub

Posted on by mrsoltys
In any sort of research, chances are you're going to have to write some code, be it in Matlab, R, or Javascript, or some other processing language.  Having the ability to share your codes with others, and truly collorabirate is extremly useful in being productive.  You could share your codes via a file sharing service like Dropbox, but at least...Read More

Tool of the Week: Making Animations in Matlab

Posted on by mrsoltys
Once you've made a pretty plot in Matlab, making an animation might help you understand temporal phenomena.  Making an animation is super easy in matlab, weither you're working with figures or images.  There are two methods to do this, but the most robust is using the VideoWriter class.  It's compatible with all versions of quicktime on both Mac and PC.  Here's how you do it: 1)...Read More

Tool of the Week: Running Multiple Instances of Matlab on Mac

Posted on by mrsoltys
[caption id="attachment_605" align="alignleft" width="249" caption="Notice There are two Matlabs Running!"][/caption] My research often involves running Matlab Code that can take hours to run. Admittedly, Matlab isn't the fastest language out there, but it has super powerful debugging tools, and image processing packages that make it really easy to use for a non-computer scientist. While matlab is running a bit of...Read More

Tool of the Week: Pretty(er) Matlab Plots

Posted on by mrsoltys
Matlab can generate some notorisoly ugly plots... but for many grad student's it's our bread and butter. So here are a couple tricks I use to generate better looking matlab plots: 1) Use Matlab's built-in LaTeX interpreter for your figure titles and labels It produces really nice looking titles and axes labels, even for non-math text. title('$rho=frac{left< c_1^prime c_2^prime right>}{sigma_1...Read More