E1n1verse

MATLAB & MDS

I need some help in using MATLAB and MDS, so I looked to Google to find resources. There seem to be more MDS resources than when I last looked quite some time ago. I found a useful page with links and pointers to MDS-related resources at http://www.granular.com/MDS/. From there, I obtained most of the resources for a pyschology course organized around MDS taught by one of the MDS's primary researchers Forrest Young. I downloaded all the notes in PDF format and stored them away to browse through. Young is the same researcher responsible for developing the ViSta software (Visual Statistics System), which looks a lot like that Canadian object-oriented, icon-based programming language. I remember looking at ViSta before, but I don't think it supported doing things like MDS and it hasn't been recently updated for anything other than Windows.

David L. Jones had a series of MATLAB pointers which included links to toolboxes for non-metric multidimensional scaling. The latter toolkit, developed by Mark Steyvers, doesn't come with any documentation and includes some DLLs, so I wonder if only works in Windows somehow? I couldn't find any other reference to it on the web.

I was waiting for the Mac support person to come install a new version of MATLAB for me. The demo installation and toolkits I installed last fall have long since expired. I'm also still waiting to hear back from the UNIX software support people in the department about acquiring one of the pool licenses for use with a copy of MatLab on my Macintosh off campus. Latish on in the day, I found the Mac support person and acquired a valid license file. It didn't work right off the bat. I had to edit the file and change the linefeeds from Macintosh ones to UNIX ones. After that, it worked great and it looks fantastic. So I should be able to start doing something with that soon. It also works from home, surprisingly enough, as long as I have an Internet connection, so that will be quite convenient. Hurrah! I am moving ahead.