New forum under Other Ubuntu Support ?!

[kleeman]

Math and Science SubForum sounds like a good idea to me. The present forum is enormous and hard to wade through for relevant ideas to improve productivity. Breaking this out would help with the filtering issue. There already is a wiki entry btw.

[akniss]

I really like this idea. There are many things that folks in science fields share, regardless of their field. We are all involved in many (if not all) of the following:

Present results at scientific meetings
Use statistics in one form or another
Publish results
Design experiments or surveys
Teach

It would be nice to have a place to discuss related issues.

Example: I'm in the agricultural sciences where the use of Latex is not common. I've learned a lot about Latex from a few individuals in the physical sciences, where its use is widespread.

Example: I use R for statistical analysis of complex experiments. I searched for a really long time to find a good R script editor that was in the Ubuntu repositories. A forum like this would be a good place to discuss things like this.

Example: We all have a need for a good bibliography manager. This forum would be a good place to post a howto on getting Bibus to work on ubuntu since it isn't in the repos. Or a place to talk about a new program that someone has found and thinks highly of.

Example: I haven't yet found a good program in Linux to create posters to present scientific results. I have to boot into windows to use powerpoint when I need to design a poster. A science or university forum would be an excellent place to start a thread to discuss the benefits/negatives of different packages.

At this time there is really no good place to discuss things like this, because it would be difficult for interested parties to find, while just cluttering up areas of the forum.

Just my $0.02.

[neoflight]

it seems like there are people insterested in having a specific section to university stuff.
here is one additional testimony

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...ight=engineers

Let me propose a name:

"University"


the good thing on that broad a catagory is that several groups including engineers, physicists, biologists, mathematicians etc could be included

it seems also that.....there a space where we could put that right below installation and upgrade help

[LaserJock]

I would also support a Science related (especially University level) forum. I am the Universe dev leading the MOTU Science Team. I would like to see a total ubuntuforums.org (subforum) / wiki.ubuntu.com (UbuntuScientists) / Mailing List / and dev (i.e. MOTU Science) solution for scientists using Ubuntu.

It would be helpful from a dev standpoint to have a forum to post interesting items (pleas for help ) and interact with users a little more. It is hard for me to wade through all the forums trying to find science related posts. Searches often times are not very helpful.

Anyway, just my $0.02

-LaserJock

[phen]

i am with laserjock for that matter. linux is really widespread among scientists. in fact, that is why i use it.

a lot of topics are so special that they don't fit in any "desktop application" categories. they don't even fit in application categories. science on linux is about: applications, servers, programming languages, parallel computing (and therefore hardware/driver support), scripting etc etc.

linux is very very mighty in scientific areas. but it lacks a forum

kai

[punchy]

Hello,

I studied physics and am now working in biophysical chemistry. every one of our graduate students is sitting at a PC running Ubuntu (Breezy right now).

I generally use the following programmes (no particular order):

octave
its a matlab-like environemnt, very nice, but i have since moved on to python, which has modules which you may load into your programmes and which fulfill exactly the same things as matlab.

gnuplot
especially since ver. 4.0 its very usable, very nice. script oriented, but to my mind thats a bonus. mind you 'lapbplot' (from kde) looks very promising.

openoffice
heres the biggest problem: compatibility to microsoft office. secretaries and the like (the prof. heading the research group i am in) use microsoft office to write papers. i loaded their work into openoffice, worked on it, and exported into .doc format. it doesn't matter whether the result is 99% ok. it needs to be 100% ok. in my case all the references had to be reworked. the best answer to this little problem: set up one windows pc amongst the ubuntus and use those office programmes via remotedesktop to make sure you stay compatible.

scribus
in order to make posters for conferences, i found 'scribus' to be very useful.

kile (latex frontend)
i wish i had had kile (or lyx) when i was writing my theses with latex.

python
heres software with immense promise fro the scientific world.. check around the www. it has great graphics modules, matrix oriented commands, built in fit procedures and what not. and as far as i can see, it'll only get better.

pymol
great for looking at protein structures

thats it for now.

Punchy.

[nsa_767]

This is an excellent idea! Though I believe it will be mostly used by scientists, calling it "university" will allow for those in the social sciences also to participate.... (I.e. economists making use of GRETL and R for econometrics/statistics won't feel left out )

[David Valentine]

I'm all for this idea--I'd like to interact with other academics to learn how to use Linux most effectively in teaching and research. Using the term "university" for our forum might be a bit misleading to some as "Ubuntu University" sounds like a place to learn about advanced Ubuntu or something. I'd suggest instead something like "Academe", "Academia", or "Scholar" to denote the research/teaching emphasis that I think we're after.

[bernardfrancois]

I think a science forum is a good idea. But I don't think there's a need for any other related forums, all I hear here is 'biology, physics, math, ...' which are all sciences. Even other subjects like philosopy can be categorised under 'science'.

Being an engineering student, it's likely that I'll be following the threads in that forum.

Adding a science forum will cause conflicts with the application support forum; some people will still post their questions or recommendations about science related programs in the application support forum.
I also noticed something similar with the application support forum and the programming>compiling forum.
Maybe posts should be able to be member of multiple forums, not just one.
Anway, this remark is way offtopic, but maybe someone will pick up the idea and post it somewhere else

[ssam]

is the someone who needs to be asked to make this happen? i think we have demonstrated that there is enough interest to make this worth while.

if the lack of a subforum moderator is holding up this idea then i would volunteer.