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What are the differences between PySAL and spatstat?

I've been working with spatstat in R for quite a while now and am curious what the big differences between the packages (PySAL in python and spatstat in R) are functionality-wise. Is either more potent or faster, does one have more pre-set functions?
Thanks loads

This is not really an appropriate question for this forum.
However, the main differences between the two packages can be seen by reading their documentation: spatstat is designed for analysing spatial point patterns, is written by statisticians following statistical principles and conventions, contains current techniques from the statistical literature, and does not handle file input/output directly. PySAL is designed for spatial data in general (with relatively less functionality for spatial point patterns), is written by geographers, and includes capabilities for reading spatial data file formats.

Response Surface Modeling and Optimization in Python: Analogous to rsm in R?

I wonder if there are modules in Python that support Design of Experiments, Response Surface Modeling and Optimization. R has a number of libraries, such as rsm which helps you define a Design and then evolve it given outcomes to approach closer the optimum using the Response Surface Modeling approach, producing visualizations as well. Still since I have begun using Python I would like to explore native possibilities to Python as well.

Yes there are.
Use pyDOE for experimental design; or sobol_seq to generate a sobol sequence
Scikit-learn regression algorithms for the response surface. Most response surfaces are ordinary least regression for a polynomial surface. They can be developed using Python as demonstrated HERE.
The advantage here is that Python is completely free and there are loads of examples available as demonstrations on the internet.
Hope this helps.

Wave Simulation with Python

I want to simulate a propagating wave with absorption and reflection on some bodies in three dimensional space. I want to do it with python. Should I use numpy? Are there some special libraries I should use?
How can I simulate the wave? Can I use the wave equation? But what if I have a reflection?
Is there a better method? Should I do it with vectors? But when the ray diverge the intensity gets lower. Difficult.
Thanks in advance.

If you do any computationally intensive numerical simulation in Python, you should definitely use NumPy.
The most general algorithm to simulate an electromagnetic wave in arbitrarily-shaped materials is the finite-difference time domain method (FDTD). It solves the wave equation, one time-step at a time, on a 3-D lattice. It is quite complicated to program yourself, though, and you are probably better off using a dedicated package such as Meep.
There are books on how to write your own FDTD simulations: here's one, here's a document with some code for 1-D FDTD and explanations on more than 1 dimension, and Googling "writing FDTD" will find you more of the same.
You could also approach the problem by assuming all your waves are plane waves, then you could use vectors and the Fresnel equations. Or if you want to model Gaussian beams being transmitted and reflected from flat or curved surfaces, you could use the ABCD matrix formalism (also known as ray transfer matrices). This takes into account the divergence of beams.

If you are solving 3D custom PDEs, I would recommend at least a look at FiPy. It'll save you the trouble of building a lot of your matrix conditioners and solvers from scratch. It uses numpy and/or trilinos. Here are some examples.

I recommend you use my project GarlicSim as the framework in which you build the simulation. You will still need to write your algorithm yourself, probably in Numpy, but GarlicSim may save you a bunch of boilerplate and allow you to explore your simulation results in a flexible way, similar to version control systems.

Don't use Python. I've tried using it for computationally expensive things and it just wasn't made for that.
If you need to simulate a wave in a Python program, write the necessary code in C/C++ and export it to Python.
Here's a link to the C API: http://docs.python.org/c-api/
Be warned, it isn't the easiest API in the world :)

Simulation of molecular dynamics in Python

I am searching for a python package that I can use to simulate molecular dynamics in non-equilibrium situations. I need a setup that can handle a fairly large number of molecules in a primarily kinetic theory manner, and that can handle having solid surfaces present. With regards to the surfaces, I would need to be able to create arbitrary shapes and monitor pressure and other variables resulting from the molecular action. Alternatively, I could add the surface parts myself if I had molecules that could handle it.
Does anyone know of any packages that might be suitable?

Have you considered SimPy? SimPy is a rather generic Discrete Event Simulation package, but could feasibly meet your needs.
Better yet the Molecular Modelling ToolKit (MMTK) seems more specialized...
I have used neither, but this sounds like fun. Python, as a language, seems to be in privileged position for use in simulation software, whereby people can script the specific details of their model while relying on the framework for all the common logic, such as scheduling, visualization, monitoring etc. The unknown is how well such toolkits scale when fed with agent counts commensurate with biology models (BTW, how "big" is that?)

Lampps and gromacs are two well known molecular dynamics codes. These codes both have some python based wrapper stuff, but I am not sure how much functionality the wrappers expose. They may not give you enough control over the simulation.
Google for "GromacsWrapper" or google for "lammps" and "pizza.py"
Digital material and ASE are two molecular dynamics codes that expose a lot of functionality, but last time I looked, they were both fairly specialized. They may not allow you to use the force potentials that you want
Google for "digital material" and "cornell" or google for "ase" and dtu
Note to MJV: Normal MD-codes take one time step at a time, and they move all particles in each time step. Most of the time is spend calculating the total force on each atom. This involves iterating over a list of pairs of neighboring atoms. I think the best idea is to do the force calculation and a few more basics in c++ or fortran and then wrap that functionality in python. (But it could be fun to see how far one can get by using numpy matrices)

The following programs can be used to run MD symulations:
Gromacs
AMBER
charmm
OpenMM
many others...
The following Python packages are useful for preparing and analysing MD trajectories:
MDtraj and the OMNIA ecosystem
MDAnalysis
ProDy
MMTK

Another generic simulations framework is my own GarlicSim. You can try that. I could help you get a simpack up if you're serious about it.

I don't know if that programs does all the features you need but there is avogadro in the kde programs, i think it is extendable and since it is open source you could do anything with it. http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Avogadro?content=59521
It is really advanced and programmed by a friend of mine

I second MMTK, but take a look at VMD, which is the best MD software I'm aware of, and is Python-scriptable (in addition to Tk). See this for examples and tutorials.

I recommend to use molecular dynamics software to run MD simulations like Gromacs. This software is highly optimized for that particular purpose. You can also run on GPU's and you will be able to run larger systems in less time.
Afterwards, you run only the analysis with python packages using the generated trajectories.
mdtraj
pmx

Machine vision in Python

I would like to perform a few basic machine vision tasks using Python and I'd like to know where I could find tutorials to help me get started.
As far as I know, the only free library for Python that does machine vision is PyCV (which is a wrapper for OpenCV apparently), but I can't find any appropriate tutorials.
My main tasks are to acquire an image from FireWire. Segment the image in different regions. And then perform statistics on each regions to determine pixel area and center of mass.
Previously, I've used Matlab's Image Processing Tootlbox without any problems. The functions I would like to find an equivalent in Python are graythresh, regionprops and gray2ind.
Thanks!

OpenCV is probably your best bet for a library; you have your choice of wrappers for them. I looked at the SWIG wrapper that comes with the standard OpenCV install, but ended up using ctypes-opencv because the memory management seemed cleaner.
They are both very thin wrappers around the C code, so any C references you can find will be applicable to the Python.
OpenCV is huge and not especially well documented, but there are some decent samples included in the samples directory that you can use to get started. A searchable OpenCV API reference is here.
You didn't mention if you were looking for online or print sources, but I have the O'Reilly book and it's quite good (examples in C, but easily translatable).
The FindContours function is a bit similar to regionprops; it will get you a list of the connected components, which you can then inspect to get their info.
For thresholding you can try Threshold. I was sure you could pass a flag to it to use Otsu's method, but it doesn't seem to be listed in the docs there.
I haven't come across specific functions corresponding to gray2ind, but they may be in there.

documentation: A few years ago I used OpenCV wrapped for Python quite a lot. OpenCV is extensively documented, ships with many examples, and there's even a book. The Python wrappers I was using were thin enough so that very little wrapper specific documentation was required (and this is typical for many other wrapped libraries). I imagine that a few minutes looking at an example, like the PyCV unit tests would be all you need, and then you could focus on the OpenCV documentation that suited your needs.
analysis: As for whether there's a better library than OpenCV, my somewhat outdated opinion is that OpenCV is great if you want to do fairly advanced stuff (e.g. object tracking), but it is possibly overkill for your needs. It sounds like scipy ndimage combined with some basic numpy array manipulation might be enough.
acquisition: The options I know of for acquisition are OpenCV, Motmot, or using ctypes to directly interface to the drivers. Of these, I've never used Motmot because I had trouble installing it. The other methods I found fairly straightforward, though I don't remember the details (which is a good thing, since it means it was easy).

I've started a website on this subject: pythonvision.org. It has some tutorials, &c and some links to software. There are more links and tutorials there.

You probably would be well served by SciPy. Here is the introductory tutorial for SciPy. It has a lot of similarities to Matlab. Especially the included matplotlib package, which is explicitly made to emulate the Matlab plotting functions. I don't believe SciPy has equivalents for the functions you mentioned. There are some things which are similar. For example, threshold is a very simple version of graythresh. It doesn't implement "Otsu's" method, it just does a simple threshold, but that might be close enough.
I'm sorry that I don't know of any tutorials which are closer to the task you described. But if you are accustomed to Matlab, and you want to do this in Python, SciPy is a good starting point.

I don't know much about this package Motmot or how it compares to OpenCV, but I have imported and used a class or two from it. Much of the image processing is done via numpy arrays and might be similar enough to how you've used Matlab to meet your needs.

I've acquired image from FW camera using .NET and IronPython. On CPython I would checkout ctypes library, unless you find any library support for grabbing.

Foreword: This book is more for people who want a good hands on introduction into computer or machine vision, even though it covers what the original question asked.
[BOOK]: Programming Computer Vision with Python
At the moment you can download the final draft from the book's website for free as pdf:
http://programmingcomputervision.com/
From the introduction:
The idea behind this book is to give an easily accessible entry point to hands-on
computer vision with enough understanding of the underlying theory and algorithms
to be a foundation for students, researchers and enthusiasts.
What you need to know
Basic programming experience. You need to know how to use an editor and run
scripts, how to structure code as well as basic data types. Familiarity with Python or other scripting style languages like Ruby or Matlab will help.
Basic mathematics. To make full use of the examples it helps if you know about
matrices, vectors, matrix multiplication, the standard mathematical functions
and concepts like derivatives and gradients. Some of the more advanced mathe-
matical examples can be easily skipped.
What you will learn
Hands-on programming with images using Python.
Computer vision techniques behind a wide variety of real-world applications.
Many of the fundamental algorithms and how to implement and apply them your-
self.