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.
I’ve been writing so much last days on several manuscripts at the same time that, paradoxically, I haven’t taken time to write something on my weekly report. So here it is: I’ve been writing a lot in the last days 😛
I am currently preparing some more samples to analyze during the long wintery quiet Saturdays, and I will be back to writing during “weekdays”.
Additionally: I enhanced a lot my age-depth model plots with R!
I gave today a relaxed “hands-on” course to R, to introduce some colleagues to the syntax of this reference software for statistical analyses and production of peer-reviewed-journals quality graphs. After a brief explanation of what R is, I explained the major elements of the R language, and guided my colleagues to produce a live linear model and graph on a simple dataset. Then they replicated by their own the procedure on another dataset (according to the scientific method), and presented the results and conclusion to the audience.
The goal before being really back to work is to finish the corrections of a manuscript, so as to submit it in first days of January. Then I’ll focus on writing my final thesis. My Christmas reading of ggplot2 gave me a lot of nice ideas.
I also have to finish the introduction course to R that I’ll give to colleagues next week. It’s going to be funny!
Since exactly two years, I write a summary once a week to keep track of what’s happening, mostly about work matters, but occasionally about personal events also. I decided to write them here instead, as a public short lab notebook.
But, there is no much to say currently! I tried to achieved many things during the last days to get ready for Christmas Holidays. I’m finally back in France for two weeks, but you can still reach me by email 😉 More will come in the next weeks. In the meantime, I’m getting better with Illustrator.
This Alfred workflow converts BP times (Before Present) to BC/AD years, and reversely. The BC times have to be given as negative years. The result is copied to the clipboard, and alternatively as “cal. BP” or “cal. BC” when holding the action modifier Alt.
I often need to calculate the mean and ± error of two numbers, like for instance of a radiocarbon date. Here is a workflow (and below the AppleScript it includes) to calculate these two parameters based on two numbers input in Alfred.
set FirstNumber to first word of q as integer
set SecondNumber to second word of q as integer
set NumbersAverage to (FirstNumber + SecondNumber) / 2 as integer
set NumbersError to (SecondNumber - FirstNumber) / 2 as integer
set q to NumbersAverage & "±" & NumbersError as text