To Save The Science Poster, Researchers Want To Kill It And Start Over

There is a post on this blog entitled Poster Design with PowerPoint. But. There is now a new, improved design for conference posters! Here are a couple of quotes: “Imagine you’re driving down the highway, and you see billboards, but instead of an image and a catchy phrase, there’s paragraphs of text all over the billboards,” […]

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Web Mapping with Free Software Tools

Web mapping is an application of geographic information systems (GIS) that involves the creation of interactive digital maps displayed and manipulated through a web browser. This post examines several approaches to creating and publishing interactive web maps, focusing on free and open-source software tools. Some technologies involve desktop GIS software or programming environments as part of the workflow leading […]

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Poster Design with PowerPoint

This post offers some guidelines on the design and printing of academic conference posters for Holy Cross students, staff, and faculty. While it focuses on the use of Microsoft PowerPoint to create posters, it is not a general treatise on how to use PowerPoint. For that, see the PowerPoint Help Center. Here we offer a few tips […]

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Multivariate Analysis with R

Multivariate analysis is that branch of statistics concerned with examination of several variables simultaneously. This post demonstrates the practical application of several multivariate techniques, using the R programming language and computing environment. Topics include ecological and geographic distance matrices, cluster analysis, the Mantel test, multidimensional scaling, principle components analysis, and discriminant function analysis. The main body of […]

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RStudio as a Research and Writing Platform

[A revised and updated version of this post can be found here.] R (r-project.org) is a programming language and software platform for statistical computing and graphics, widely used in academia and industry (see Introduction to R). RStudio is an integrated development environment for R. RStudio makes R easier to use, and it also enables the […]

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Research Tools for Google Docs

Google Docs (google.com/docs/about) has evolved to the point where it is a viable alternative to desktop word processors (see 10 Reasons to Love Google Docs and 6 Tips for Writing Your Thesis in Google Docs). It works completely in the cloud, so that you can access your documents from anywhere, on any device, even without […]

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Introduction to Geographic Information Systems Using QGIS

A GIS (Geographic Information System) is a computer application designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographical data, in addition to composing and printing maps. It combines a traditional database with a visual display of map features, such as points (e.g. houses), lines (e.g. streams and rivers), and polygons (enclosed […]

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