Do not trust the protocols provided by automated equipment. Make sure that the inputs are what is required. Use a spreadsheet of your own making to check the results of the product. The same applies to other products that provide stereological results. Should that tape claim to provide a measure of the mean diameter and you did not know better then you would move forward with the wrong understanding of the measurements being taken.
If you buy a tape for forestry it is marked as described above. The value that is measured here is always greater than the mean diameter except in the case of a circle. This simple stereological procedure does not provide the mean diameter of the tree trunk. At pi centimeters write 1, at 2pi centimeters write 2, and so forth to make a tape where the measurements taken do not require the additional step of dividing by pi. Another way to do this is to make a tape measure that is in units of pi. Divide that by pi to obtain the mean diameter of the tree trunk. The method selected to determine mean diameter is to wrap a tape around the tree and to read off the length. A question that can be asked of the trees is the mean diameter of the trees.
There is a tract of land with trees on it. Most people do not understand what is required but are able to enter some numbers and then see one or more numbers spit out by the black box.Ĭonsider the follow simple problem. For many people stereology is a black box.