CourseWare downloads
Each courseware module consists of a documentation plus a program:
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:
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.
"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).
- License: Freeware
- Type: Double-clickable Application; Documentation (English and German)
- Language: German
- Requires:
- Platform: Macintosh (min. 1MB RAM) or IBM PC Windows
- System: 2.4 or newer (Mac) / 3.1 or newer (Windows)
- Download Size: 1,043 KB (Mac) / 623 KB (Windows)
- Files:
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
- File: Download Worldmodel 2 Tiny (HQX, 422 KB)
- Download Size: 421Kb
Stability/(DE) Stabilität
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.
- 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
- Files:
- Download Mac OS X Version (ZIP, 4 MB) (EN and DE)
- Download Mac Classic (DE) (HQX, 673 KB) Stabilitaet_1.6.sea.hqx
- Download Mac Classic (EN) (HQX, 673 KB)
- Download Windows Version (ZIP, 231 KB)
- Download Mac OS X Version (ZIP, 4 MB) (EN and DE)
- Download Size: 4.2 MB (E/D) (Mac OS X) / 492Kb (D) and 680 Kb (E) (Mac Classic) / ~400Kb (Windows)
Euler Animation
"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.
- License: Freeware
- Type: Double-clickable Application; On-line Documentation
- Language: English, German
- Requires:
- Platform: Mac 512K and newer
- System: 2.4 or newer
- Files:
- Download Size: 132 KB / 4.9 MB