Unscrambler X

Since Unscrambler last passed this way, then in version 9, its Norwegian publisher Camo Software has launched a 'new generation' image. At its heart is Unscrambler X (currently 10.1, the third sub-version in numerical release terms; some limitations in the original 10.0.0 have been resolved at this point), with additional products to extend its reach and power in particular directions. My review is based a month’s use of the 64-bit option, although a quick run through on a one gigabyte Windows XP system showed the 32-bit alternative to be completely happy there. I’ll combine a quick overview, for those who’ve not encountered Unscrambler in its previous incarnations, with a skim of what’s new. [more...]

Maple 15

Having gone all out, over several releases, to develop a graphically ‘pencil and paper’ face for its CAS, Maple now has a polished smart worksheet interface which no longer changes in obvious ways between versions. Developments are now made behind the scenes, allowing an existing user to pick up the latest manifestation and use it without any pause to acclimatise.

A command line option remains available, and popular with many experienced Maple users. The ‘classic’ worksheet, however, has taken a back seat, documented as ‘a basic worksheet environment for older computers with limited memory’ and present in 32-bit, but not 64-bit, installations. The graphic calculator interface, so useful for quick scratchpad explorations, remains for all Windows users. Consideration has been given to making the best use of small netbook screens, and the whole package continues to run responsively and well on all systems. [more...]

Unistat 6.0

Every scientist has to be a statistician these days, but not every scientist wants to be. The ideal data analysis tool, for many, is one that does what is required whilst demanding the least possible diversion of mental energy from core concerns, the fewest possible changes to working habits and the least possible investment in reskilling. Unistat is a well-established occupant of this market segment with a proven track record, particularly in the life sciences.

As with previous releases, installation of 6.0 provides two short cut icons: one to start up Unistat as a free standing window with its own worksheet, the other to open Excel with an additional ribbon toolbar accessing Unistat’s tool set (other spreadsheet and database files can also be opened, and Unistat offers developer tools allowing add-in facility to virtually any other suitable product if required). There is remarkably little to choose, operationally, between the two options. The most demanding user will always find that the freestanding option has the edge, but those more comfortable within Excel are unlikely to notice any significant disadvantage. [more]

EndNote X4

With the recently released 14th version, EndNote continues its highly successful trick of evolving as an information manager without compromising its core rôle as a bibliographic reference handler. There is new material in several areas, major additions have been made from a functional viewpoint, and a signpost erected to future expansion potential.

[More]

Ursula, under

I've just finished what is, for me, an unusual thing: reading a book over a period of a month. I usually read fast and intensely, but something about Ursula, under made me read each separate small component, stop, think about it, and continue later. The structure of the book, I feel, encourages this: it is one of those fictions where a top level story acts as a container within which are played out a string of other stories.

The outer container, in this case, is a rescue drama: the Ursula of the title is three years old, and during a family picnic in the Michigan countryside she falls down a mine shaft. While her mother (Annie) waits beside the hole which has swallowed her daughter, the father (Justin) drives away to call for help. Hours go by, as the elements of a rescue attempt are assembled¹.

The mother, left alone to worry by the shaft, tries to keep her mind from dwelling on immediate fears by thinking of the miracle of life. From this flows, for the reader, a pair of story streams reflecting the genetic lines which led to Ursula's birth. On Justine's side, the story starts two millennia before, with unexpected birth of a child to a previously barren Chinese alchemist in his old age. In Annie's history a deaf mute woman in south western Finland, who expects never to marry, meets a deaf mute trader...

Down through the centuries, we see how each birth in the twin chains of heredity which led to Annie and Justin almost never happened. At intervals, we also see the smaller chains within their own lives which make their meeting, and Ursula's birth, unlikely in their turn. And within that, a string of "might have been" happenstance decides whether or not Ursula will survives her fall and the cold hours which follow².

Annie and Justin know almost nothing of their ancestries. Like the ropes on which the rescuers descend into the darkness of the mineshaft towards where they hope Ursula will be, these strands of story snake down unseen through time to where she now hangs in the balance.

Ursula, under³ is (in my opinion) superb story telling at its best. And beautifully written; I could take examples from anywhere, but here is just one sentence:

“ "She's my grandchild," he says, and he heads out into the morning, which is pale lavender and pierced with scattered birdcalls.”

Strongly and enthusiastically recommended.

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1. As an aside ... I started reading Ursula, under on the same day that I read Unreal nature's "Miss Perception" post⁴. Never having called an emergency service in the US, I was interested in the difference which that post showed in US and European practice. This book synchronously provided me with a longer, more details ed look at those differences – many of which arise not only from different sociopolitical philosophies but also from differences of geography: what works in small geographies is different from what works in large ones.

2. Also during the time when I was reading Ursula, under, I chanced to have a conversation with JSBlog's Ray Girvan. Both of our fathers were unlikely survivors of the second world war; but, as Ray pointed out, once doesn't need to look at large and dramatic events to find many points in any of our lives when we might have met fatal mischance. Childhood illness which could have been worse, the moment when we almost, but not quite, stepped off the kerb in front of a bus. Only later did I connect that conversation with this book. The blunt fact is that every one of us is a statistically improbable event; this commonplace is at the same time both logically trivial and emotionally powerful.

3. The title, if you are wondering, is taken from the "U" entry in Ursula's favourite alphabet picture book. On page 1 is "Annie, All About", followed by "Betsy, Beneath the Bridge", "Camilla, Collecting"; and so on, page 21 being "Ursula, Under [the kitchen table]".

4. Placement of this aside in a footnote will, by the by, exasperate Unreal nature's Julie Heyward...

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• Ingrid Hill, Ursula, under. 2006, London: Vintage. 0099479869 or 9780099479864 (pbk.) [Originally 2004, Chapel Hill NC: Algonquin. 1565123883]

Systat 13

Systat continues to evolve in both capability and usability. It was never short of the former, always occupying an undisputed slot in the top rank of statistical software systems, but the past half-dozen versions have wrought a sea change in its user interface, which continues to develop.

In the latest release (the 13th), the headline news is... [more]

Grapher 8

Golden Software's new version of its big gun product Surfer, reviewed here in June, was followed last month by an upgrade to version 8 of its page-oriented technical graphics sibling Grapher. [More]

LyX 1·6

This review began with the resolution of a need: to unify the efforts of several hundred volunteers into a single live, multilingual, frequently updated and heavily mathematical information flow from and within an ongoing study. LyX is a free, open-source document-processor system underpinned by LaTeX. No user knowledge of LaTeX is necessary (though it certainly does no harm). Once users have adjusted from word-processor habits, this greatly simplifies both content-editing and style conformity management, for both text and mathematics.

Compiled versions are currently available for Linux, MacOS and Windows, covering most users. [More...]

Knovel technical reference service

Knovel's technical reference information service, available since September through Adept Scientific, is an online catalogued library system aimed at engineers and applied scientists.

These days, any subscription portal has to justify itself against the ever swelling volume of freely available material on the open web, accessible through various general and specific search engines. Knovel does so by offering a large number of full text sources from a variety of publishers and other organisation, in one place, through a single purpose-designed interface, supplemented by useful ancillary facilities. A subscription doesn't just replicate the physical resources with a saving on storage space, access efficiency, updating, and so on, it represents several layers of value added too [more...]

Seeker

Guest posted by Donna.

Jack McDevitt. Seeker. 2006, New York: Ace. Chase Kolpath, the narrator of Jack McDevitt’s novel Seeker, is a grave robber. So is her boss, Alex Benedict. They’re good at it, too, but prefer to think of themselves as antiquities dealers. Alex and Chase have made some significant finds during their careers, and have collected both friends and enemies along the way. Now they are on the trail of the biggest find of their careers and somebody wants to stop them, badly enough to kill them. Their introduction to the case arrives with an old plastic cup with ancient lettering, brought to their office for appraisal by Amy Kolmer, a woman obviously ignorant of its true value but hoping for a quick sale. Analysis of the cup reveals it to be approximately 9,000 years old. The lettering is in an ancient language known as English, and their AI (artificial intelligence) gives an initial translation of Searcher or Explorer as the name of the ship it must have come from. Alex Benedict is a very successful antiquities dealer. If there is one 9,000 year-old cup from a ship, there is a chance of more. All he has to do is find the ship. Alex makes the decisions, but it seems Chase does all the legwork, and there is plenty of legwork involved. How did the cup come into Amy’s hands? What was the real name of the ship? Where did it sail from? Most important of all, where is it now? An historian is able to tell them the ship’s name — the Seeker, one of two ships belonging to the ancient Margolians. Nine-thousand years before, the Seeker had left an America mired in religious and political oppression for a world where “not even God will be able to find us.” They were never heard from again. Their disappearance became one of the most enduring myths of human colonization, and one cup from that lost colony was sitting in Alex Benedict’s safe. He now had an even greater prize than just a ship full of treasure. He was on the trail of the Margolians, and he intended to be the one to finally answer the question of what had happened to the lost colony. Eventually they find the ship, and another set of mysteries, and that’s where the science comes in. Chase spends several chapters hunting down clues as to where the ship currently is. Searching through old ship logs and questioning owners of the cup over the previous 30 years may not seem like science, but it is. A large part of any scientific investigation is the gathering of evidence. Among the bits and pieces Chase uncovers is evidence that the actual discoverers of the Seeker were killed in an earthquake and resulting avalanche 30 years previous. They had been with Survey, and had spent the twelve years following their retirement from Survey returning to the same location in space again and again, with no record of where they had gone beyond the incomplete memories of their daughter, a young girl at the time of the accident. Was it someplace they had found during their time with Survey? Finding the answer to that requires learning something about how to set up an efficient flight plan, then comparing that plan to possible variations that might account for a shift to study a G-class star at the end of its hydrogen burning cycle, a type that was of particular interest to them. The deviation tells Chase where to look for the Seeker. The Seeker is found, full of dead colonists, mostly children. Eric theorizes that it appears they were trying to escape some sort of catastrophe. There are no live Margolians, and the only planet that once might have sustained human life now has an extreme orbit creating long winters where humans could not survive. Investigation of the Seeker reveals that many original parts had been replaced with those from its sister ship, the Bremerhaven. An empty space dock is also found, but the Bremerhaven is not. So a new question—what happened to the Bremerhaven? What if a comet, or some other object, had hit the planet or passed nearby? Could it have caused the changes in the orbit of their suspected colony world? How big would it have to be? When would it have happened? Would the colonists have had enough notice to plan an escape? Could there have been two escape plans, one for the majority of the colonists, with another, less risky, plan to get their precious children back to Earth? If yes, where did they go with the Bremerhaven, when it no longer had star-flight capability? Where were they now? This time a friend, and her knowledge of astrophysics, provides the answers they need. How she does it, and what they find afterwards, you’ll need to read the book to learn. It’s a good read, and you’ll learn a bit about the movement of planetary bodies, too. One more mystery they solve before the end — they also find out who’s trying to kill them, and why.

Donna

[originally posted on Scientific Computing World's education pages]