One of the questions I regularly get asked as a PhD student / research scientist is what it’s like going away on science business to conferences and the like. Well I thought I would share my recent experience with a conference in Florida, USA to hopefully answer the questions and let people see some of the highs (and lows) of conferences in general!

First things first, and it’s the question I get asked all the time about it: I did not pay personally for the flights, accommodation, conference attendance, or even food while I was there. If you were buying something non-essential (such as beer, or a trip to the gym) it comes out of your own pocket but if it’s something you need to ensure that you are at the conference and comfortable the university (so long as approved by your supervisor) will provide it.

The initial part of any conference is always rubbish: the travelling there, on your own. For me this time that meant a 1am alarm on Thursday morning, a taxi to the airport, a flight from Newcastle to Amsterdam, to Atlanta, to Tampa, which included a missed flight (through immigration controls) and about 26 hours without sleep. This is in my opinion the key worst bit of conferences away: Loneliness. This one wasn’t so bad because once we arrived I was staying at an apartment complex with many of my fellow lab mates and scientists, including Sid and Zoltan. We hired a car from the week (paid for) to ensure we could get to the walmart and back to the airport at the end of the week. It definitely worked out cheaper, but the driving on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road in 3 lane traffic got some getting used to.

Upon arrival we pretty much had time for a quick tea at a local restaurant before bed. Up nice and early in the morning for the first day at the conference. Sid, Zoltan and myself arrived comfortably in time to register, which was a very well oiled machine for a conference of thousands of scientists. You always get a name badge so you can talk to anyone. You just have to hope your interests overlap.

Now I imagine most of you are thinking ‘well yeah but hang about! You get to go to Florida, paid, for a week!?’. That is certainly an upside of VSS, glorious sunshine everyday. However the conference ran pretty much all day every day. So on no day did we get a ‘day off’ to just relax, or explore. That said at these things, particularly when there are literally hundreds and hundreds of different scientific talks, and thousands and thousands of scientific posters, you need to chop and choose which you go to, and make sure you don’t run out of steam. Our lab is fairly specialised, and because of this we all went to similar talks and posters, and in the sessions relevant to us we always had somebody giving a talk or presenting a poster. I won’t bore you with all the full details, but many of our lab presented, as well as other members of the institute, and we all did a smashing job (if I do say so myself!) Zoltan, Jenny and I had posters to present, while Sid (and also Ignacio, a long term collaborator of Jenny’s) had talks to give.

This sort of leads me onto the next bit that is very cool about being at a conference, even though it’s something small: having your name written down in the abstract book for all to see. You feel practically famous!

The talks themselves were all very interesting, and that wasn’t the only thing VSS put on for the scientists. As I’m sure some of you are aware there was a big hoohah about ‘the dress’ earlier in the year. Well the science behind it was explained by members of our institute (Anya, pictured below with Jenny) and some people wore the different coloured versions of ‘the dress’ including our own Jenny! This was at a general demonstration night, where all manner of optical illusions and tricks were shown and explained using visual science. I think this was the highlight for me, personally, as it also had a beach bbq with 2 free beers each!

While I was out in Florida it wasn’t all just work work work. I got the chance to visit the local gym and have a train, as well as catch up with an old friend who had moved out here some months before, which was a lovely extra bonus. The fact you had to pick and choose what talks to go to to ensure you didn’t miss anything you were bothered about also meant you occasionally had a couple of hours free…Ample enough time to catch a bit of sun by the pool!

After that however it was time to go home, which meant another lonely flight back, and back to reality (where you have to submit a receipt for every purchase if you want the money back!).

As conferences go, VSS 2015 was a particular gem, due to location and the fact my fellow lab mates were there. Sometimes it can be a lot worse, with a lot of time spent in your hotel room on your own in the cold with nothing but a book to read to keep you entertained! But the whole conference thing is most definitely a perk!

Back from the Vision Sciences Society meeting; really enjoyed it as ever. The Readlab team had a productive and fun time.

Sid gave a talk about his physiology recordings of V1 neurons in Bruce Cumming’s lab. Zoltan presented a poster about his work using temporal-frequency tagging with disparity in EEG, and Paul gave a poster about how disparity cues influence our perception of size. I gave a poster about ongoing attempts in the lab to decide whether praying mantis vision has distinct spatial frequency channels, a problem which has been engaging lab members Ghaith, Vivek and Lisa as well as long-term collaborator Ignacio Serrano-Pedraza. Ignacio gave a talk about how patching one eye for as little as 2 hrs can result in significant changes in surround suppression, work in collaboration with Holly Bridge down in Oxford.

I’ve just come across the following by Lord Rayleigh, him of the scattering, quoted in The Handbook of Perception and Human Performance:

“In science, by a fiction as remarkable as any to be found in law, what has once been published, even though it be in the Russian language, is spoken of as known, and it is too often forgotten that the rediscovery in the library may be a more difficult and uncertain process than the first discovery in the laboratory.”

Maybe slightly less true today than in 1884, thanks to Google, but still more true than I’d like!

Finally got round to buying a Google Cardboard viewer and trying it out on my HTC One phone. Ooof. That is painful. I don’t know if it’s me or my phone (the magnetic clicker doesn’t work with HTC One, that much I know) but the effect is nauseating. It keeps jumping and skipping even when I don’t move my head. I had to take it off after about two minutes. I hope for the sake of the future of VR that other people aren’t having the same experience as me…

I recently watched “The Machine”, an enjoyable sci-fi flick about a secret defence project to construct an artificially intelligent android who will be the ultimate super-soldier. Naturally, they design their robot killer in the form of a shapely young woman who spends much of the movie in a state of undress. What surprised me was that, in the opening scenes, they manage to totally mess up the well-known Sally-Anne “doll” test for theory of mind.

In the words of Wikipedia, the “the key question [is] the Belief Question: ‘Where will Sally look for her marble?'”. In the movie, the scientist asks “Where should Sally look for her ball?” which makes a nonsense of the whole thing! I am surprised that no one picked up on this in the course of making the movie. Come on people, it’s not rocket science.

I was just reflecting how awesome my four postdocs are, and thought that rather than keeping such thoughts to myself, I should write a blog post and show them some appreciation.
Ghaith, Vivek, Ronny, Kathleen (named in order of when they joined the lab!) are all awesome — so smart and independent. It’s a breeze being PI of this bunch! The only problem is that they do make me feel rather inadequate as I look back and realise how totally clueless I was at the corresponding points in my own career :). When I was recruiting the three postdocs for the M3 project, I remember shortlisting these three and telling colleagues “If they all accept, I really will have my dream team.” Well, they did, and later on Kathleen joined us for ASTEROID. I really am one lucky PI and all I can say is, I do realise the fact.

I’ve been reading the new book “The Folly of Fools: the logic of deceit and self-deception in human life” by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. This is my favourite bit.

“That deception might induce anger and attack was suggested to me very forcefully in my own life some thirty years ago. I was taking a walk, carrying my one-year-old son in my arms, when I spotted a squirrel in a tree. The problem was that my son did not see the squirrel, so I whistled as melodically as I could to draw the squirrel closer to us and, sure enough, the squirrel crept forward, but my son still could not see it. So I decided to reverse my relationship with the squirrel and mimic an attack. I suddenly lunged at it. I expected it to scamper away from me. I would have ruined a budding friendship but allowed my son to see the squirrel as it rushed away from us. Instead, the squirrel ran straight at us, chittering in apparent rage, teeth fully exposed, jumping to the branch closest to me and my son. Now my son saw the squirrel, and I had the fright of my life, quickly running several steps away. For my folly, the squirrel could have killed my son with a leap to my shoulders and two expert bites to his neck. Had I begun the relationship hostile, I believe the squirrel never would have become so angry. It was the betrayal implied by beginning friendly, only to attack (deception) that triggered the enormous anger.”

They clearly have some seriously bad-ass Sciuridae where Trivers lives.

I just love how much stuff is accessible online nowadays. I’m old enough that when I started my scientific career, reading a paper meant walking over to the library and looking up the actual physical paper in leather-bound volumes! I haven’t done that this millennium… it makes me feel ancient to think of it.

And increasingly, out-of-copyright texts are being digitised, so if I come across a reference to a nineteenth-century German work, I can probably now find it in an American library somewhere and read it myself. Or, let’s face it, use the fact that it’s digital to search it for keywords rather than reading all 200 densely-written pages. Even if I only skim, I feel so much more in touch with my scientific heritage now that I can go back to the original texts myself rather than relying on what I read in textbooks. What a fantastic development.

Love this building we saw being put up in London recently. The pattern of the windows makes it look as if it’s a single flat plane. In fact, what we’re looking at is two planes which intersect at a sharp angle. Projective geometry in action!

This is about an unusual flickering artefact with LCD monitors that I noticed while working on a visual stimulus. I am posting about this for reference and to share information about what can potentially have a big impact on psychophysics/electrophysiology experiments that use LCDs to render visual stimuli.

The effect can be induced by launching a PTB window and flashing it (painting min/max luminance at alternate cycles) for 30+ seconds. After closing the window, persistent flashing is observed in dark areas across the screen. What really struck me as weird is that this happens *after* closing the PTB window and would not go away after closing Matlab, shutting down the machine or even unplugging the DVI connector (in the latter case you can see the flickering on top of the “monitor idle” box that floats around when the monitor is disconnected). These observations rule out any software/driver/OS issues as the source of this issue and leave only the monitor itself.

Luckily one of the folks on PTB forums seems to know what’s causing this:

It’s the timing and content of your stimulus interfering with the panels LCD inverter cycle, causing a buildup in the liquid crystal, as they only like AC driving voltage over longer periods of time. A known problem in many (most?) LCD panels, due to the way the physics of liquid crystal displays works. Periodic strong contrast changes at video refresh rate like your stim and some other high frequency spatial patterns are especially effective at triggering it.

LCD’s – more ways to screw up your low level stimuli properties than your wildest dreams could imagine.
-mario

Thread : https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/psychtoolbox/conversations/topics/18208

The flickering goes away gradually over the course of ~10 minutes (on Dell U2412M) so there’s no permanent hardware damage, just another LCD quirk that you need to be aware when designing any visual stimuli involving persistent flashing!

This is a minimal Matlab script to reproduce this effect:

function testFlickerAfterEffect
duration = 30; % seconds
%% open PTB window
SCREEN_ID = 1;
m = Screen(‘Windows’);
if (~isempty(m))

% exit if any PTB windows are already open

return;

end
PsychImaging(‘PrepareConfiguration’);
PsychImaging(‘AddTask’, ‘FinalFormatting’, ‘DisplayColorCorrection’, ‘SimpleGamma’);
PsychImaging(‘OpenWindow’, SCREEN_ID, 0.5, [], [], [], 0, 0);
m = Screen(‘Windows’);
window = m(1);
%% render
col = 0;
h = tic;
while toc(h) < duration

col = 1 – col; % toggle

Screen(window, ‘FillRect’ , [1 1 1] * col * 255, []);

Screen(‘Flip’, window);

end
Screen(‘CloseAll’);
end