Background
These are an eclectic mix of web resources that I have found either generally useful, or of particular value with respect to the contents of these pages. Please feel free to suggest others by email or by leaving a comment
Statistical
- The makers of STATISTICA (a commercial software package) have a very useful set of notes about many statistical methods, including some that are only briefly covered in this course.
- PopTools is a very versatile Excel addin from CSIRO. In addition to Mantel tests it also incorporates a range of Matrix methods and resampling techniques.
- PAST is a free data analysis package which, although aimed at paleontologists, has great potential for ecological analyses. In addition to many other techniques PAST can be used for Regression: Linear (Standard and Reduced Major Axis), lin-log (exponential), log-log (allometric), logistic; Diversity statistics, rarefaction. Dice, Jaccard and Raup-Crick similarity indices; Principal Components (with Minimal Spanning Tree), Principal Coordinates, Correspondence analysis with detrending, Cluster analysis (three algorithms, nine distance measures); Discriminant analysis; Time series and Spectral analysis; Directional statistics, rose plots, point distribution statistics
- The R package is a public domain (i.e. free) 'clone' of the very powerful S-Plus package. Although it is very powerful it is not for the faint-hearted! Using it belies its Unix heritage. If you wish to find a version for the Mac or PC follow the download link and choose the nearest site. Note this is a completely different R statistics package to that distributed from Pierre Legendre's site!
- Bill Miller has been developing a comprehensive and free statistics package call Openstat that offers a number of multivariate analyses including multiple regression, discriminant analysis cluster analysis, principal components (factor) analysis and logistic regression.
Software utilities
- Notepad++ is an excellent free source code editor (and Notepad replacement) which supports several programming languages running under the MS Windows environment. I used it to write most of the web pages. It can be downloaded from http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
- The free Firefox browser is a joy to use.
- SmartFTP is a simple an powerful FTP tool. It is free for single use and educational purposes.
- Yahoo! Geocities is the home for these pages. This site allows you to set up free web pages (15 Mb limit)
- HOT POTATOES is a very useful tool from Half-Baked software for the creation of online questions. Several of the self-assessments in these pages were created using this tool.
Other software
- Although I haven't used it with these pages Multispec is a very useful freeware Multispectral Image Data Analysis System
- Again, I didn't use it with these pages but LandSerf is a freely available Geographical Information System (GIS) for the visualisation and analysis of surfaces
Web pages
The first two are related to my research interests and I am directly involved in both projects.
- The Irish golden eagle reintroduction project
- Highland Renewal is a Scottish charity which manages a small estate on the SW tip of the island of Mull for conservation purposes.
- Finally there is the wonderful BBC site. I am listening to an England football match streamed from this site as I type. If you are involved in web authoring it is well worth looking at their disability pages.
Chance News comes out as an online resource several times a year. It is a 'sideways' look at the use of statistics in society and the media. There are always articles that are relevant to biologists.