Computers in Academia

• Communication: email, newsgroups
• Accessing information: the World-Wide Web
  The WWW provides (1) an easy way to access information which is available in different formats on different kinds of machines. It also enables information of different types (text, graphics, sound, animation) to be displayed. The WWW is accessed using a program called a browser. The browser we will use in this course is Netscape.
• Word processing
• Scientific computation
  Scientists use computers to perform calculations that they could not do by hand. There are many programs available for doing this. In particular, there is special software for doing statistical analyses of the results of an experiment.
• Visualization
  In order to understand the problems they are dealing with, scientists often need to be able to visualize the problems in a novel way. Plotting a function is a simple example. Computer graphics permits very sophisticated visualization techniques.
• Running experiments
  Computer programs are often completely in charge of the administration of experiments: presenting stimuli to subjects, recording subjects' responses, and analyzing the results.
• Computer modeling
  A model of some phenomenon in nature, that is, a kind of explanation for the phenomenon works, may be tested with a computer program. The model is implemented (realized, made concrete) in the program. Then the model can be tested by running the program starting with inputs which are similar to those found in nature and observing whether it behaves like the natural phenomenon actually does. If so, this is evidence that the model may be right. We will see several examples of models in the class.