17 May 2008
Lectures started at 8am instead of 9am today, because one of the stats lectures ran over and we were all really keen on hearing the rest of it. These guys have a really good knack for explaining some of the horrible stuff really simply. I’ve picked up so much more stuff from the talks than banging my head against a textbook for hours and hours!
Then we had a couple more talks on FreeSurfer and using it to analyse functional data and map it onto anatomicals. We get these step by step tutorials with problems to solve that are actually quite fun and really useful!
During the tutorials people had to finish designing the stimuli for the experiments we designed in the workshops on Tues/Thurs. My group (Melissa and Sajun) came up with what was considered a pretty good idea for our our problem (‘How people consider the uneven distribution of wealth’), but way too hard to design and implement in the short time we have, so we’re just sitting in on the other experiments on Sunday and not running one for ourselves.
The day was scheduled to finish at 6pm, but we kind of finished by about 4pm because by the end of the week I think even the guys giving the talk, and even Dr Savoy who has more energy and enthusiasm than I’ve seen in a long while, were getting tired!
In the evening Jennel (speech development researcher from Dallas) organised for everyone to go to Border Cafe in Harvard Square for Mexican food and margaritas, which was great fun! I had blackened rib-eye steak that was just short of being bigger than my face! It was raining so we had a fun time getting there. Lots of people had plans to meet other people around Boston (for example, Michael went to visit his supervisor who’s on sabbatical in Dartmouth), but we managed to get quite a few people together, almost 12 of us I think.
After dinner we went to a really nice bar called Grendel’s (yes after the Beowulf monster, what a coinkidink innit Mae?) where I had a couple of really nice mojitos and I talked a lot of crap to a lot of people who were probably not a little sick of listening to me ramble on by then! I really got going on Nietzsche and the sale of a letter written by Einstein denouncing religion as ‘childish’! Got home for bout 1ish I think, and just crashed out, which is quite reasonable after the week I’d just had!
Mae
20 May 2008
Sounds like your days are very full! I am glad you got to chill out at Grendel’s in the evening! ;)