Dr Chad Paton
October 1, 2013
As noted in the last post we’re all buzzing after Goldschmidt (of course from the workshop, but also from a whole week of stimulating discussions), and we’re now busy working on Iolite 3 among other things. But in the midst of all of this looking forward it occurred to us that this might be a…
Dr Chad Paton
May 3, 2013
As with the last post, this is a follow-up to a question posted on the Iolite forum, this time by Jiri Slama (the forum thread can be found here). To summarise, he has previously used a raster pattern when measuring U-Pb ages in zircons, and wanted to know whether there is a best practice when…
Dr Chad Paton
April 6, 2013
I was recently asked on the forum to explain the downhole-corrected ages produced by the UPb DRS, and Luigi suggested that I turn my reply into a blog post – so here it is… To give a bit of context (the original forum thread can also be found here), Luigi noticed that his downhole-corrected ratios…
There are some noteworthy improvements in the latest release of the UPb DRS (U_Pb_Geochronology3), so I thought I should post a description of what’s changed. One of the biggest changes is that flexibility has been added in which isotopes have been measured – previous versions required 206, 207, 208, 232, and 238 (with an option…
Dr Chad Paton
March 20, 2012
We’re getting a lot of users that want to customise the way Iolite processes their data, which is really exciting as it’s exactly why we built Iolite in the way that we did. But we realise that there may be many more that just find getting into the programming code a little too intimidating, or…
This is just a quick tutorial to show you how to add more global variables or global strings to a DRS. These globals are useful because they’re acessible via the Edit Settings window, which means that people not comfortable with the code can quickly and easily view and modify them (e.g., the “ReferenceStandard” global string).…
Dr Chad Paton
November 21, 2011
We’ve had a bit of interest in propagation of uncertainties in Iolite, so I thought I’d try to do two things in this post and the next. In this post, I’ll have a go at describing our protocol for propagating uncertainties. There is a description of the method in Paton et al. (2010), but I’ll…
Dr Chad Paton
October 31, 2011
In this post I’m going to give a description of how someone making or modifying a DRS can take advantage of the DRS support functions included in Iolite for working with splines. I’ll use the existing “Sr_isotopes_REE” DRS as an example – it’s distributed with Iolite, which should make life easy for anyone that wants…
Dr Chad Paton
October 22, 2011
The ease with which you can rapidly switch between different elements for internal standardisation and different reference materials for external calibration (see last post) is one of the great strengths of Iolite. This can be extended to the DRS level too. If, for example, in addition to standard U-Pb geochronology, you wish to do some…
Dr Chad Paton
October 21, 2011
Those new to Iolite will notice that there are two version of the Trace elements DRS, called simply Trace_Elements and Trace_Elements_IS. Which one do I use? Well, if you are analysing a whole bunch of samples with similar major element composition (e.g. speleothems or corals where you can reasonably expect stoichiometric behaviour), or you are…
