How to Create & View 3D Graphs in MatLab (with 3D glasses)

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Lewys Jones

     MatLab already has the ability to produce three-dimensional (3D) visualisations of array data such as ‘surf’ or ‘mesh’, but these still produce flat two-dimensional figures. Sometimes the best way to interpret these data is in genuine 3D with depth. I needed this capability for my own research and finding no clues online I’ve written some code myself.

     This post will show you how to create your own figures in 3D (sometimes called anaglyphs) that can be saved, shared and viewed with 3D glasses. For this post I’ll be using red/blue 3D glasses (with red over the left eye) and the MatLab ‘peaks’ example data set. Continue reading →

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Open Education and Open Courseware

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Lewys Jones

<< Legal Issues around Open Access | Open Education Resources >>

Anka Mulder addressing the LERU 2012 Workshop

Anka Mulder addressing the LERU 2012 Workshop

     The sixth seminar of the LERU 2012 Open-access workshop was delivered by Anka Mulder, Secretary General of Delft University of Technology and President of the OpenCourseWare Consortium.

     Open courseware is a combining of (generally) online materials into an educational course. These usually include lecture notes, videos, homework  assignments and textbooks. One of the first organisations to make such content available was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Their Open courseware portal opened in 2002 with just 32 courses and is considered by many as the beginning of the OCW movement. Once MIT started giving educational materials away for free,  it seems that barriers and objections from others (mainly about content copying) gradually started to be eroded. Now one decade on over 280 organisations are sharing open content with around 22,000 courses open to the online community (as of July 2012). Continue reading →

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Legal Issues around Open Access

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Lewys Jones

<< Repositories and Open Access Journals | Open Education and Open Courseware >>

Raquel Xalabarder addressing the LERU 2012 Workshop

Raquel Xalabarder addressing the LERU 2012 Workshop

     The fifth seminar of the LERU 2012 Open-access workshop was delivered by Dr. Raquel Xalabarder discussing some of the legal issues surrounding the publishing and dissemination of open access content.

     The seminar included some general guidelines but all under the proviso that the laws of different countries (even within the EU) affect the definitions of terms and rights or parties.

     In the most general terms copyright laws allow an author to protect a piece of their work. An author can be a natural person or a ‘legal person’ such as an organisation / company or university. A piece of work has to be an original creation of the author and could be literary or artistic. Importantly it is only the expression of the work that is protected, not the facts, raw data or ideas. These require different types of legal protection if necessary. Continue reading →

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