More updates
The past two months have been busy ones.
Linear Algebra went swimmingly. I love the mathematics of abstraction, and have started looking into nonlinear systems analysis and modern algebra. My professor also expressed interested in working with me later on once I've picked up more math, which is very exciting. More than anything it was wonderful to be in a room full of devoted, intelligent people who were really interested in and curious about the subject matter at hand.
Encouraged by my first class, I am now enrolled in a Human Neuroanatomy course at the FAES school at NIH. FAES may be my greatest discovery of the autumn. It apparently began as a program to conduct training for NIH employees, but it's now open to the public. It's fully accredited, cheaper than community college at just over $100 a credit, and offers amazing courses in the evenings and outside of normal work hours. Plus it's NIH, so you're being taught by some seriously knowledgeable folks, and your classmates are more often than not employed in the labs there doing cutting-edge research.
The class itself is a bit more wetware-oriented than I eventually want to focus, and it's taught from a more clinical than engineering perspective (I think I'm the only non-NIH person in the class). I'm still learning an amazing amount, though, and I'm hoping I'll end up with the right kind of baseline understanding of the jargon and quirks unique to this field that I'll be able to take in more advanced papers. Plus, in a surprise that unnerves me slightly, but mostly impresses the hell out of me, our professor announced that he had gotten permission to use some of the extra human brains for a lab section. I haven't done an exhaustive study or anything, but I'd imagine that the list of institutions that just have extra human brains laying around has got to be pretty short. I'm very lucky NIH is so close by.
In other news, my AIBO is now talking to my PS3 which is running yellow dog linux, and has RapidMind (http://www.rapidmind.net/) installed, and I'm wrestling with the URBI (http://www.urbiforge.com/) interface for remote control. It seems more bare-bones than tekkotsu, and has libraries for java so I can do some quicker prototyping before scaling things up in C/C++. There are some issue's I'm running into with the different versions of Open-R - 1.1.2 will run fine, but 1.1.5 r4 (in which URBI is written) doesn't seem to boot on my ERS-210. While those are being hashed out through trial, error, and forum posts I'm sketching out circuits to take care of simple motor reflexes and things like that. They should provide a good starting point for me to move up the "spinal cord" towards higher cortical functions.
Finally, I'm going to have to put some of this aside to finalize my applications and get them set out. They start coming due this month, so I need to get my personal statement into shape (something I generally hate doing), and wrangle my recommendations into a semblance of order.
Linear Algebra went swimmingly. I love the mathematics of abstraction, and have started looking into nonlinear systems analysis and modern algebra. My professor also expressed interested in working with me later on once I've picked up more math, which is very exciting. More than anything it was wonderful to be in a room full of devoted, intelligent people who were really interested in and curious about the subject matter at hand.
Encouraged by my first class, I am now enrolled in a Human Neuroanatomy course at the FAES school at NIH. FAES may be my greatest discovery of the autumn. It apparently began as a program to conduct training for NIH employees, but it's now open to the public. It's fully accredited, cheaper than community college at just over $100 a credit, and offers amazing courses in the evenings and outside of normal work hours. Plus it's NIH, so you're being taught by some seriously knowledgeable folks, and your classmates are more often than not employed in the labs there doing cutting-edge research.
The class itself is a bit more wetware-oriented than I eventually want to focus, and it's taught from a more clinical than engineering perspective (I think I'm the only non-NIH person in the class). I'm still learning an amazing amount, though, and I'm hoping I'll end up with the right kind of baseline understanding of the jargon and quirks unique to this field that I'll be able to take in more advanced papers. Plus, in a surprise that unnerves me slightly, but mostly impresses the hell out of me, our professor announced that he had gotten permission to use some of the extra human brains for a lab section. I haven't done an exhaustive study or anything, but I'd imagine that the list of institutions that just have extra human brains laying around has got to be pretty short. I'm very lucky NIH is so close by.
In other news, my AIBO is now talking to my PS3 which is running yellow dog linux, and has RapidMind (http://www.rapidmind.net/) installed, and I'm wrestling with the URBI (http://www.urbiforge.com/) interface for remote control. It seems more bare-bones than tekkotsu, and has libraries for java so I can do some quicker prototyping before scaling things up in C/C++. There are some issue's I'm running into with the different versions of Open-R - 1.1.2 will run fine, but 1.1.5 r4 (in which URBI is written) doesn't seem to boot on my ERS-210. While those are being hashed out through trial, error, and forum posts I'm sketching out circuits to take care of simple motor reflexes and things like that. They should provide a good starting point for me to move up the "spinal cord" towards higher cortical functions.
Finally, I'm going to have to put some of this aside to finalize my applications and get them set out. They start coming due this month, so I need to get my personal statement into shape (something I generally hate doing), and wrangle my recommendations into a semblance of order.
posted by PredictionsOfMemory | 8:55 AM
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