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.
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)
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.
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.
The paper recently published online on Holocene pollen data from the Central Alps is available to free download for 50 days (up to Jan. 16th 2015) here.
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:
Continue reading →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 🙂 ].
Continue reading →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.
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