ETHOGRAM CREATION

In Etho ethograms, each character represents a specific time interval. The "." character indicates that no specific event was recorded in that time interval and other characters represent various user-specified events.

The increment setting specifies the length of time between adjacent event characters. A 60 second record with an increment of 0.1 sec will have 600 characters. A 2,000 second record with an increment of 1.0 sec will have 2,000 characters.

The line length setting specifies where line-breaks occur. You can set this for display convenience, or if some record feature is periodic you can set this to approximate a multiple of the periodicity to emphasize this aspect of the record. For example, the file "sample1.eth" has events with a periodicity of approximately 55 sec. If you set line length to 55 or 110 (and interval to 1.0 sec) the periodicity becomes obvious.

Set the "Pad" value to add blank characters to the start of the record (positive pad value) or to remove characters from the start (negative pad value). This can be useful to move periodic events away from the line edges where they are harder to read.

You can save the ethogram as a text file for further editing or display as part of a figure. Use a fixed-width font such as Courier to make the figure accurate. Save the ethogram without line breaks if you want to be able to use margin settings in a word processor to adjust the figure. You can also select and copy (Cntrl-C) the selection to the System clipboard. The pasted text will have embedded line-breaks.


Please email me to report bugs, especially if they cause you to lose assay data: jht@u.washington.edu

Programmer: James H. Thomas, Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington

Documenter and Chief Bottle Washer: James H. Thomas, Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington