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Manual for psimpoll and pscomb

Acknowledgements

psimpoll has been through many versions and changes from early days as a FORTRAN program on an IBM mainframe, through a phase in QuickBASIC on IBM PCs and DOS, and now available on any operating system with an ANSI C compiler. Over this time, it has gradually acquired the features necessary to display the complex range of forms of pollen diagrams, and the means to analyse data and display results conveniently and routinely. I am extremely grateful to friends and colleagues who have assisted in this process by making suggestions for improvements, and tolerating bugs and idiosyncrasies. I thank Steve Boreham, Jane Bunting, Alex Chepstow-Lusty, Petra Day, Julie Fossitt, Janice Fuller, Simon Haberle, Susie Lumley, Jim Ritchie, Helen Roe, Rebecca Teed, Chronis Tzedakis, and Kathy Willis for help with the program, Roger Humphry for help with rate-of-change analyses, and Tom Kelly for advice on programming in C and the mysteries of UNIX. John Birks first introduced me to the analysis and plotting of pollen data by computers, and Lou Maher has been a continual source of help, advice, and encouragement for many years. I am deeply indebted to both. If there is any merit in psimpoll and pscomb, all of these people should share the credit, but I take responsibility for all the errors and deficiencies. I also acknowledge the contribution of journal reviewers and editors who have generated the endless variety of bizarre requirements for the format of diagrams that serve to make a programmer's life unnecessarily difficult. If only it were possible to please all of them all of the time.

31 August 1995
K.D. Bennett
Palaeobiology
Uppsala University
Villavägen 16
S-752 36 Uppsala
Sweden

fax: + 46 18 55 5920
e-mail: Keith.Bennett@geo.uu.se
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Copyright © 1995-2007 K.D. Bennett

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