Phys5053
Course material 

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Syllabus (pdf)

Home

Course outline (pdf)

Datasets

Tentative schedule of tests and quizzes

Presentations schedule

Presentation guidelines


Matlab: usage tips and programming code

MatLab tips (updated Oct 14)

Some Matlab routines in a single file

        Programming code for the Lake Temperatures dataset: elimination of outliers
        LakeTemperature.m           Main program
        sergeiRemoveNaNs.m        Subroutine. Copy file to your Matlab directory.
        sergeiRemoveOutliers.m     Subroutine. Copy file to your Matlab directory.
        sergeiRunning.m                Subroutine. Copy file to your Matlab directory.
       
Analysis of time series increments in Lake Superior air temperatures (Exercise 13)

Code for autocorrelation in Greenland-Antarctica ice cores (Exercise 14)

Fourier analysis of Lake Superior air temperatures (Exercise 15)

Analyses of time series of events (Exercises 17 and 18)

        Generator code for the Lorenz Attractor
        LorenzAttractor.m            

        Comparison of ten simultaneous Brownian walks
        BrownianWalksRace.m  

        Principal Component Analysis
        PCA.m  (Matlab Help example with rankings of US cities)
        PCAoecd.m  (example with the OECD dataset from Assignment 6)
        PCAsup.m  (Analysis of the Lake Superior air temperature, Exercise 19)
 
        Monte Carlo
        MonteCarlo.m  (Calculation of the area of a circle - as in Bevington)

Wavelets reading

Article in Wikipedia
An introduction to wavelets
Introduction to wavelets in Matlab help

Principal Component Analysis reading

PCA tutorial article

Articles for discussions and data analyses:

Levy distributions and animal foraging behaviors:
Viswanathen et al. (1996) Levy flight search patterns of wandering albatrosses. Nature 381: pp. 413-415. (accessible from campus, e.g. through the Web of Knowledge or library's e-journals.)
Edwards et al. (2007) Revisiting Levy flight search patterns of wandering albatrosses, bumblebees and deer. Nature 449, pp. 1044-1049.
Additional reading: A plain-language commentary on the same topic.


Miscelaneous topics

Middelburg, J.J. "A simple rate model for organic matter decomposition in marine sediments." Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 53 (1989): 1577-1581.

Wunsch, C., The spectral description of climate change including the 100KY energy, Clim. Dyn., DOI 10.1007/s00382-002-0279-z, 2002 (link).

Wunsch, C., Greenland–Antarctic phase relations and millennial time-scale climate fluctuations in the Greenland cores, Quaternary Sci. Revs. 22, 1631-1646, 2003 (link).

Physicists decode the Bard (Use of entrophy in analyses of literary texts). Nature News, 2001. (link with reference to the original paper)

Corduas et al. 2008. The distribution of humor in literary texts is not random: A statistical analysis. (link)

Econophysicists matter. Nature Editorial, 2006 (link)


Other resources

Collection of programs for analysis of literary texts (Memorial site of Dima Khmelev)