Apparently I suck at regular posting.
The good news is that I have a lot of stuff to report since last time.
I) I've set a firm date for the GREs, August 22nd. I'm pretty much caught up on multiplication/division, and now I'm just trying to get rid of those pesky careless mistake and speed up my answers. This is getting high priority because...
II) When visiting some schools, my top choices have so far informed me that they look for either near-perfect or perfect scores on the math section of the GRE. It seems perfect is only 94th percentile, and some of these programs want people to either be in the top 5% or have a good reason why they aren't. I'm closing in as time goes by, but it's going to be a race...
III) A paper of mine (and a co-workers) was accepted for publication! We're presenting early november...now we just need to finish running all the data and write the thing :)
IV) I've enrolled in a Linear Algebra class, to be followed this fall by Diff EQ. I never took those in undergrad, although I did take a class on the mathematics of computer graphics, which was an applied subset of Linear Algebra, and is making this class a lot easier. I have an amazing professor and a great bunch of classmates. Everyone's really interested in learning the math, and it's fantastic to be back in an environment like that, even if I have to get to work an hour earlier two days a week in order to fit the class schedule. The good news is that so far I've been able to get all my homework done on the Metro.
V) I'm searching for books on neuro devo (which I honestly can't type without strains of 80's new wave running through my head), on the idea that everyone in this field is trying to model the really complex end result, which occurs after a highly plastic system interacts with the relatively unpredictable outside world for a good many years. It seems like it'd be a lot easier to work out the rules as the system is starting, and has not yet built up the levels of complexity we exhibit in our own adult lives.
VI) I have a scheme to build a really good robotics laboratory for under $2,000, thanks to Sony's financially questionable tendency to put out insanely high-end products at a loss to themselves. CMU recognized the fantastic advantages of the Aibo as a very cheap robot with color vision, stereo hearing, a rangefinder, touch sensitivity, a sense of down/inner ear, and a propriosensory equivalent. Their Tekkotsu framework allows you to connect to an Aibo wirelessly and control it with a computer program. The only problem is that neural-net based cognitive models are computationally intense, if highly parallel. Thanks to Sony's latest venture - the PS3 - I'm hoping to be able to cluster a number of defective PS3's (I'm leaning towards the ones that just have broken A/V output) pretty cheaply. At 6 cell processors, the theoretical performance starts to exceed one teraflop (1x10^12 floating point operations per second). It should be pretty cool.
Okay, that's about it...recommended reading is sparse because it's mostly been GRE prep books and my Linear Algebra textbook, but I did pick up a book called "Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience" which is wonderful: detailed and accessible for both neurologists and mathematicians, which is good because I lack formal training in either discipline :)
I) I've set a firm date for the GREs, August 22nd. I'm pretty much caught up on multiplication/division, and now I'm just trying to get rid of those pesky careless mistake and speed up my answers. This is getting high priority because...
II) When visiting some schools, my top choices have so far informed me that they look for either near-perfect or perfect scores on the math section of the GRE. It seems perfect is only 94th percentile, and some of these programs want people to either be in the top 5% or have a good reason why they aren't. I'm closing in as time goes by, but it's going to be a race...
III) A paper of mine (and a co-workers) was accepted for publication! We're presenting early november...now we just need to finish running all the data and write the thing :)
IV) I've enrolled in a Linear Algebra class, to be followed this fall by Diff EQ. I never took those in undergrad, although I did take a class on the mathematics of computer graphics, which was an applied subset of Linear Algebra, and is making this class a lot easier. I have an amazing professor and a great bunch of classmates. Everyone's really interested in learning the math, and it's fantastic to be back in an environment like that, even if I have to get to work an hour earlier two days a week in order to fit the class schedule. The good news is that so far I've been able to get all my homework done on the Metro.
V) I'm searching for books on neuro devo (which I honestly can't type without strains of 80's new wave running through my head), on the idea that everyone in this field is trying to model the really complex end result, which occurs after a highly plastic system interacts with the relatively unpredictable outside world for a good many years. It seems like it'd be a lot easier to work out the rules as the system is starting, and has not yet built up the levels of complexity we exhibit in our own adult lives.
VI) I have a scheme to build a really good robotics laboratory for under $2,000, thanks to Sony's financially questionable tendency to put out insanely high-end products at a loss to themselves. CMU recognized the fantastic advantages of the Aibo as a very cheap robot with color vision, stereo hearing, a rangefinder, touch sensitivity, a sense of down/inner ear, and a propriosensory equivalent. Their Tekkotsu framework allows you to connect to an Aibo wirelessly and control it with a computer program. The only problem is that neural-net based cognitive models are computationally intense, if highly parallel. Thanks to Sony's latest venture - the PS3 - I'm hoping to be able to cluster a number of defective PS3's (I'm leaning towards the ones that just have broken A/V output) pretty cheaply. At 6 cell processors, the theoretical performance starts to exceed one teraflop (1x10^12 floating point operations per second). It should be pretty cool.
Okay, that's about it...recommended reading is sparse because it's mostly been GRE prep books and my Linear Algebra textbook, but I did pick up a book called "Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience" which is wonderful: detailed and accessible for both neurologists and mathematicians, which is good because I lack formal training in either discipline :)
posted by PredictionsOfMemory | 11:46 PM
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