La’bora,tory
I’m sitting here at the lab, waiting for the very last step in my data processing to finish. I started with raw text files that the fMRI scanner outputs while you’re doing your business, and when this model finishes estimating, I’ll have a whole set of pictures of someone’s brain. This is awesome. It is also extremely time-consuming. I’ve been working on it for the last four hours, and this is only one subject’s worth of data, for one portion of the study. Oy. This is why we’re trying to get this batch scripted.
Life, other than the data-processing portions, is going very well. I acted quickly on this advisor thing and submitted to him an admission of my pipe dream project. Turns out, he also thinks it’s cool and not impossible, and would be “happy to support this effort”. In that he’s already given me a carte blanche for designing and running an fMRI study, and that I’m right in line to start something for my second QP… I’ve basically hit the jackpot. It’s not going to make him any easier to work with, but it certainly makes me feel secure in my choice. It’s nice to be listened to!
I had a really awesome section this morning, which was also a nice surprise, given how poorly this material went over in the previous sections earlier this week. I changed it up quite a bit – had them work in small groups instead of all trying to solve the problem with me on the board. Also we listened to The Beatles while we worked, and I thought that did a nice job of waking them up and getting them moving this morning. 9 am can be a little bit early for any kind of critical reasoning skills to be awake, so any little bit helps. I’m definitely going to retry this music + phonology problems idea next week.
I was offered another research opportunity today which I wisely declined. With this fMRI thing ready to plow ahead full steam (and full steam it should be, given how long this stuff takes), I just don’t really have time to dabble in other projects. I did agree to record stimuli for this neat language contact experiment our resident creoleist is undertaking, but he understood that I was too busy to attach myself any more than that. I did have a good idea of who else in our department would be good at this stuff, so hopefully my name dropping gets me some good karma points.
Geesh, it’s almost 5 already. I keep thinking this thing is on it’s final rendering step… and then it’s not. Time to go home and leave it to run? Guess I won’t make it to my pretty brain pictures after all.