This month I’ve attended the seminar organised by the Laboratory of Maths of Besançon about Scientific informatics. There was nothing about directly related to my research topics but I was curious and thought I would eventually get interesting pieces of information. I did. The talks about rights and ownership of data and databases provided me useful insights regarding a personal project of mine (I hope I can write more about this very soon). There were a couple of talks about Python as well. Python is a language I want to get familiar with since long (more information here), and these talks motivated me. The syntax is similar to R, actually. I’m currently writing a little converter, slowly learning. I’ll probably use it with Alfred for punctual needs, but I’ll do larger scale conversions with R, and I’ll share it as it’s ready 😉
Year: 2015
Pollen Symphony
During a trivial conversation with colleagues, we came to imagine what a counting session could sound like if PolyCounter would play a different music tone every time a key is pressed (i.e. a pollen is counted). With a counting history, and with Processing, I was able to produce such a pollen symphony.
About Persicaria maculosa-type
I recently found a pollen of Persicaria maculosa-type. I didn’t know about this type before, and as the grain was not well preserved and folded, at first I thought about Armeria. But I wasn’t convinced about that, specially given the details provided by the Flora Helvetica, which didn’t fit with the study site at all, even long time ago. Hopefully, thanks to colleagues, we came to identify it as the old Polygonum persicaria-type. Looking in tela botanica, I found that Polygonum persicaria is now known as Persicaria maculosa, and is common at my study site. And finally, I found the Persicaria maculosa-type in Beug (2004)!
Reference Beug, H.-J. (2004). Leitfaden der Pollenbestimmung für Mitteleuropa und angrenzende Gebiete. München: Pfeil.
Giving lectures
I’m intensively preparing the next course I will give to Master students. It requires a lot of documentation, yet a synthetical mind. Finding a logical line in various topics, to keep the student’s attention, is also a challenge. But giving lectures is a great feeling, and sharing with students this knowledge I got when I was at their place before is thrilling to me.
PhD Defense – Live broadcast
Great news for guests who won’t make it to Innsbruck or Besançon: the defense I will give of my PhD thesis will be available as a live stream! You will find the stream directly on defense.benscoat.eu 8)
PhD Defense
I will defend my PhD on September 3rd at the Institute of Botany of Innsbruck (Austria). This will conclude 4.5 years of a fascinating work, which consisted in palaeoecological analyses from Alpine peatlands, in great archaeological context.
PolyCounter and Windows 10
Great news, PolyCounter (this amazing software from Takeshi Nakagawa) works fine on Windows 10! More precisely, it works fine on the current Technical Preview of Windows 10 (final version available at the end of July). It actually works better than on Windows 8.1, since all sound files now play nicely.