Anyone interested in the history of science in general and astronomy in particular can pick up a copy of my husband Marc’s book from the Newcastle branch of Blackwell’s on Percy Street. “New Stars for Old” is a series of linked short stories featuring characters from Aristotle to Newton, bringing to life the story of humanity’s attempt to understand the cosmos.
Delighted to say it was Vivek’s first day in the lab today. And he brought a delicious carrot cake along too! It was like the old days when Jennifer would bring along cake for lab meetings :).
Vivek wasted no time getting stuck in. He hasn’t even been given his computer log-in yet, but so far today he’s helped present a workshop on insects to local teens and worked with Ghaith on getting the mantids to strike at various visual stimuli. Oh, and he got transformed into a Kafkaesque man-insect hybrid. Not bad for one’s first day in a new job…
…and I am feeling I need a lie-down! All I did today was help present three 45-minute workshops to a total of nine groups of half a dozen kids. I realise this is nothing compared to the daily workload of a teacher, so all I can say to any teachers reading this is: Respect.
Today was the first day I had seen the workshop in operation, as I was tied up with a different event yesterday, and I was blown away by what a great event Lisa and Corry had organised (see inset image of the programme).
Everything ran very smoothly with expert presentation from Helen and Mandy, and the students (aged 11-14) seemed to really enjoy the different activities.
Corry had created an incredible giant sculpture of a praying mantis from translucent green acrylic. I don’t know what’s going on optically, but it really appears to glow with an inner light! Just incredible.
Lisa had made a papier-mache mantis head to demonstrate how insects see through compound eyes, which everyone enjoyed trying on.
We were all impressed by what a natural teacher Paul is: “Right! Front row is red group, you’re with Helen doing the experiment. Middle row, you’re blue group, you’re with me over here” – friendly but with a natural authority; great stuff.
Yesterday, I gave a short talk on 3D vision as part of a set of linked talks on perception (More than meets the eye, organised by Quoc Vuong and Debbie Riby). That seemed to go well, with engaged and perceptive questions from the audience. I also had a major grant submission deadline 30 minutes before my talk started, so that together with organising my contribution to the camouflage workshop made for a busy time. Thanks everyone for rallying round — I’ve been making a nuisance of myself texting various lab-members with pleas for help: “James can you go into town and get a 3D Blu-Ray”, “Paul can you pick up my poster on insect vision”, “Ghaith argh my camouflage-breaking stereo demo has broken, please fix it!” Thanks everyone for rallying round and keeping the various shows on the road.
It is the British Science Festival (known from here as BSF) next week in Newcastle so the institute is very bustly over the last few days. Lisa on our team has done a tremendous job of organising not 1, not 2, but three timetables and stands for the BSF for our lab and affiliates to run. I’m heading up the poster and worksheet team, and hence working on it every day next week when it is on (mon – thurs). So if anybody does want to come and see the brilliance that is pure science and learn something new, come on down! I’ll be the guy with a big smile getting far too into the role.
In amongst that this week I have started the task of juggling my PhD. I say and really mean juggle, as even though I am only one month into a 36 month process I currently have two papers on the go, a mathematical modelling code to simplify, a student (Pramod) to keep an eye on for a long term piece, an online survey to collect data, a journal club to attend and various other equally important but not massively time consuming things to consider. Anybody who wants to get into science needs to have the focus and attention to concentrate on one problem for weeks on end, but also the ability to chop and change quickly between jobs and problems. How my supervisor Jenny copes is beyond me, as she (being the PI) is juggling the jugglers! that’s like juggling squared!
The modelling is taking up a lot of my time. The oblique angle study that I did for my MRES needs some statistical analysis before we can submit it to Journal of Vision, and that involves a lot of complex mathematical conversations with Jenny, something I properly enjoy! It does also require some serious matlab and more than a little bit of concentration. We have two normal (or Gaussian curves) centred around perpendicular viewing, and also on the angle for which the person is actually sat at, and we weigh the two curves accordingly, then optimise to fit the data. This is both very finicky (exact character matching and just missing a colon or a bracket brings everything falling apart) and time consuming. However it has been fun and the end is in sight. We have two options to pursue: an addition of the weighted curves or a multiplication. Looking at the fitted models in the graphs to me it appears that the addition route will give us a better fit. We then test this using bootstrap resampling (take all the data we collected, put it all together and mix it up, pick some data and random and go again) to determine how well the fit really is quantitatively.
Next week is all BSF, and hopefully a little bit of advancement on a paper on illusions I have written for the Leicester conference.
Over the past few weeks all my work has been focussed on one thing and one thing only: The looming deadline for my 7500 word dissertation on the research I have done over the past 7 months. I finally submitted it yesterday after a bit of back and forth between Jenny and myself with advice on what to chop and change and then after some formatting / binding issues (why double spaced? It uses unnecessary paper and looks worse!) submitted it both online via the NESS internal system and handed in two hard copies to the graduate school. This week I have also submitted an abstract to a conference in America (SMPTE) and have helped out with an outreach activity:
Some of the less well represented schools and colleges in the area brought their students to the university to give them a glimpse at university life to try and encourage them to go along. Because Newcastle doesn’t have a neuroscience undergraduate course the ION set up a stall/desk next to the boardroom where the talks were taking place after a talk on psychology – neuroscience PhD. Then any interested students came to talk to us about questions they had about life as a PhD student and what studying neuroscience was like and how to get into it. I thought I was well placed to talk to people about it because I’m actually mathematically backgrounded rather than psychology, biology or chemistry. Quite a number of students came to ask questions during the hour and I thought it was certainly a help to the students!
Now that the dissertation is submitted I am looking at submitting the work as a paper to a journal (hopefully Journal of Vision, or something similar) and working on another paper regarding the illusions at the Leicester conference I went to, as well as working on a presentation for the final aspect of my MRES year. The beginning of my PhD is nearly here and I’m very excited to get straight into it!
What a productive lab… Lisa and Paul gave great talks as part of their MRes yesterday; today Lisa is delivering multiple talks to visiting sixth-formers as part of Biology Open Day, while Paul is up in Edinburgh on a Matlab course. Nick and Mike are working hard on their interim reports, due in tonight, while Parto is relieved to have finally got her visa renewal confirmed and is collecting control data with a lighter heart. James and I had a very useful meeting with colleagues this morning on taking the smartphone work further. Ghaith only started work with us on Wednesday and from what I see when I walk past his desk, is already making brilliant progress automating the video analysis. How fab to be part of such a talented and motivated team!
Thanks everyone who came along to help Lisa and me move our mantids across to their new home in the dedicated insect facility down the road. Especially Nick and Mike, who probably didn’t imagine when they came to the UK to do a MSc in Computer Games Engineering that this would involve transporting predatory insects! Although Nick — how about doing us a giant mantis in stereoanamorphic perspective? How scary would that be?
This week I have been working very hard at data collection. Getting the cubes (which we managed to get correctly aligned last week) into a workable experiment program took some debugging but we got it sorted shortly after the Leicester conference. Since then 9 participants have come in to take part in the experiment and the data so far looks good. The conference in Leicester went very well. I was well received, the audience seemed engaged and asked questions and a coulpe of neuroscientists in the crowd caught up with me later to bash heads on ideas that I may/could use for my PhD. Jenny has asked me to start thinking about what it is that I wish to look at and I have a few ideas, most of them relating to comfort (and therefore discomfort) while watching 3D TV. The program on the laptop was a huge hit and everybody wanted to have a go!
My deadline for the dissertation and presentation/poster/abstract are beginning to get closer so the next few weeks I will be working on statistically analysing my data, organising my work and writing it up. I am presenting for the behaviour staff next Thursday and that will be my most pressing subject to handle over the weekend.
I was just having a problem with MakeTexture in Psychtoolbox. I like to use
PsychImaging(‘AddTask’, ‘General’, ‘NormalizedHighresColorRange’);
so that black=0 and white=1, not 255. This makes my code transfer easily to high-bit-depth devices like my DATAPixx. But I was having a problem that MakeTexture would only work with the 0-255 colour range. Argh what a pain! But thankfully googling revealed that this was my mistake.
“— In psychtoolbox@yahoogroups.com, “IanA”
Answering my own question, I realised after I posted it that MakeTexture
requires a bitdepth passed to it explicitly, and then the normalised range works
as expected. I had expected the default (0) to follow the window itself, but
reading the documentation properly 😉 see the default is 8bit.
Ian
”
So I just needed to do
tex=Screen(‘MakeTexture’, window, imageMatrix,[],[],1);
instead of
tex=Screen(‘MakeTexture’, window, imageMatrix);
and it all worked. Love Psychtoolbox!
Last weeks debugging finally came to fruition on Friday, with Jenny and myself knocking our brains together for the past 3 days and coming up with the solution to the problem. After altering the viewing frustum using some mathematics and then changing the code with loading identity matrices and rendering the texture we got a perfectly lined up, textured, solid cube in openGL which mapped perfectly onto the points already worked out previously using vector mathematics and trigonometry. So the next step (which is going to be the majority of this weeks work) is to implement it into a matlab program to allow it to be ran and the experiment to be done and recorded. Some images of the cube lined up against a perspex proof are shown here. We put the coordinates of one of the faces in at a funny angle of both rotation about the perspex and the table, calculate the coordinates in world space (in cm) and put them into the code. Open GL recreates the same points perfectly on the screen for the viewpoint. A laser was used to make sure the origin was lined up correctly on the screen (you can see the red laser crosshair on the chinrest on one of the photos) and a laser distance measurer was used to judge the distance from the screen.
 
 
This week I am also submitting an abstract to NEPG, which is the North East Postgraduate Conference, a coming together of many northern universities (from Edinburgh to Leeds) to present data and information. I hope to be given a spot to present in, or a poster place. Either way it’s an exciting prospect to hopefully present up here for my peers to see what it is that I am doing. Regardless of acceptance or not I look forward to seeing other works and attending talks.
To finish off the week I am giving a talk in Leicester on Friday titled ‘an illusion using 3D technology’. Which will be my first time presenting my data to anybody. While I am not in any way nervous yet I imagine I will be come 9:15 when I open the talks of the day as the first speaker. Wish me luck!