Year: 2014

The software Tilia, well known from palaeoecologists, needs the user to specify a group code for each taxa. The obvious question after that, is to sort all these data so that taxa with the same group code are gathered together. One could use the custom sort fonction from Excel, or use this AppleScript:

Browsing large dataset in Excel can be tricky sometimes, as one almost always wants to refer to row and column names. Excel provides a feature for this, called “freeze panes”, but the interface is not practical at all (Microsoft…). Here is a handy AppleScript to activate/deactivate on-the-go this feature. Just select the cell from which you want to freeze the panes, and run the script [I would suggest, from Alfred 🙂 ].

Many palaeoecologists and other scientists working with stratigraphical data use Tilia as a software for production and visualization of quality time-series graph. This software from Eric C. Grimm needs you to present your data in a particular way, so as to work properly. There is nothing difficult here, just something to pay attention about.

I’m starting an exciting and elegant new personal project. You’ll know more about this in the next weeks/months, but here is something I can tell you already. One of the major prerequisite for this project is something I named Interactive and Dynamic Event Assessment, and Julien is currently “cracking the code” for this.

Otherwise, you probably heard about my new online paper. Next are coming soon!

I already wrote about PolyCounter, this software that I like so much to count pollen and other objects within palynological slides. PolyCounter comes with 3 layers of 45 keys (i.e., taxa) each, so as to say a potential of 135 taxa to count. It’s a lot! But sometimes it’s not enough. For instance, it took me several months of counting to design and improve my template. The taxa are ordered in a meaningful way to me, ensuring a faster counting. The counterpart is that I want to always use the same template, and some rare or ephemeral taxa are not included. There is a solution for this. It’s actually a tip directly from Takeshi Nakagawa: just open a second PolyCounter! You now have a potential of 270 taxa! Of course pay attention to save your data in a different file, and when all your countings are done, simply merge your data together.