CourseWare downloads

Each courseware module consists of a documentation plus a program:

• Worldmodel 2
• Worldmodel 2 Tiny
• Drosophila
• Stability / Stabilität
• Euler Animation
• MatLab
• SciLab

 

Depending on your system you may need some additional software to actually run the courseware available from this site. Due to copyright reasons access to this software is restricted to members of ETH Zurich only. The needed additional software is available from here (Find more hints and details on this topic here).

 

Worldmodel 2

"Worldmodel 2" lets you experience the sometimes surprising
responses of a dynamic, complex system. You can influence the fate of
humanity
by various measures such as boosting or damping the economy, birth
control,
or reducing pollution. While attempting to steer humanity towards a
sustainable
future, this hands-on-experience lets you gain new insights into the
principles
of modelling, analysis, and simulation of complex systems.

• License: Freeware
• Type: Double-clickable Application; Documentation
• Language: German
• Requires:
  • Platform: Macintosh (min. 1MB RAM) or IBM PC Windows
  • System: 2.4 or newer (Mac) / 3.1 or newer (Windows)
• Filename: World_Model_2_v1.0.sea.hqx (Mac) / WM206.exe.zip (Windows)
• Download Size: 1,043 KB (Mac) / 623 KB (Windows)

"Worldmodel 2" attempts to describe the behavior of the human population on Earth by modeling certain processes such as industrial growth, consumption of non-renewable resources, agriculture and environmental pollution. Starting with the year 1900, it rebuilds first the conditions in the past until the present, and then projects among many other variables the future human population, the world economy, remaining non-renewable resources, agriculture, and the environmental conditions until the end of the 21st century. Besides, "Worldmodel 3", a slightly refined successor, served as the basis for the well known report "Limits to Growth" written for the "Club of Rome" (Meadows et al., 1972).

Download a copy of "Worldmodel 2" together with a full documentation:

 

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Worldmodel 2 Tiny

Small variant of Worldmodel 2 which runs even on a Mac 512K:

• License: Freeware
• Type: Double-clickable Application; Documentation
• Language: German
• Requires:
  • Platform: Macintosh 512K and newer
  • System: 2.4 or newer
• Filename: Worldmodel2_0.1S.sea.hqx
• Download Size: 421Kb

Download a copy of the small "World Model 2" application together with a full documentation:

 

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Drosophila

• License: Freeware
• Type: Double-clickable Application; Documentation
• Language: German
• Requires:
  • Platform: Macintosh or IBM PC Windows
  • System: 2.4 or newer / 3.1 or newer
• Filename: Drosophila_1.4.sea.hqx (Mac) / Droso_13.exe.zip (Windows)
• Download Size: 200Kb (Mac) / 136Kb (Windows)

"Drosophila" simulates the growth of a population of Drosophila melanogaster. A laboratory is simulated where you can quickly breed drosophilas in great numbers. You are then asked to build a mathematical model solely on the basis of the provided raw data (number of flies per day), as if you would have performed the growing experiment yourself. What law governs the population growth?

 

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Stability/ Stabilität

• License: Freeware
• Type: Double-clickable Application; Documentation
• Language: German (Mac, Windows) and English (Mac)
• Requires:
  • Platform: Macintosh or IBM PC Windows
  • System: 2.4 or newer / 3.1 or newer
• Filename: Stabilitaet_1.6.sea.hqx (D) and Stability_1.6.sea.hqx (E) (Mac) / Stabil.exe.zip (Windows)
• Download Size: 4.2 MB (E/D) (Mac OS X) / 492Kb (D) and 680 Kb (E) (Mac Classic) / ~400Kb (Windows)

The term "Stability" ("Stabilität" in German) represents a fundamental concept in ecology and many other disciplines, but is often not clearly understood. Many 'living' systems are capable of regulating themselves, but how? You learn about the difference between equilibrium and stability and how to analyze stability properties of non-linear ecological systems. Courseware "Stability" introduces also three classical predator-prey-models.

 

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Euler Animation

• License: Freeware
• Type: Double-clickable Application; On-line Documentation
• Language: English, German
• Requires:
  • Platform: Mac 512K and newer
  • System: 2.4 or newer
• Filenames: Euler_Animation_1.2.sea.hqx (German) / Euler_Animation_1.2e.sea.hqx (English) / Euler_Animation.dmg.zip (English, German)
• Download Size: 132 KB / 4.9 MB

"Euler-Animation" demonstrates the principle of numerical integration of differential equations based on the integration algorithm by Euler. "Euler-Animation" lets you analyze characteristic problems related to numerical integration, such as the effect of local errors on the global error and demonstrates that a discretization which may produce results with an acceptable precision for one equation may no longer do so when applied to another set of differential equations. You may experiment by changing the size of the integration step and by choosing the equations to be solved.

Download a copy of "Euler-Animation":

 

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MatLab

• License: Freeware
• Language: English
• Requires:
  • Platform: Mac 512K and newer
  • System: 2.4 or newer
• Filenames: MATLAB.sea.hqx (English)
• Download Size: 132Kb

This "MatLab" is a public domain (freeware) variant of the popular tool for matrix computations. See the "read me" for further information.

Read
Me

Download a copy of "MatLab":

Scilab

• License: Freeware

Similar to MatLab and a free scientific software package.

Check it out >>