Continuing the outreach of the lab into another week, this week I spent a few hours at St. Aidan’s sixth form, where I did my A-levels. The head of KS5 (i.e. A levels), Mrs H. Miland, asked me to come in as one of the St. Aidan’s past success stories, to impart some wisdom of what I did in their shoes at their age to the year 12s. I explained what I did as a neuroscientist at Newcastle, and also how hard I had to work to get to the position I am at now. I explained that were it not for the hard work (and it was very hard work) during year 13 to get the A levels I got I would not be in the position I am in today. It gave me a nice chance to reflect on my own career to date. And unfortunately for anyone who thinks talent alone will suffice you couldn’t be more wrong. Hard work is what makes the world go round and gets you into the positions to have the career you want.

The sixth formers certainly liked it, asked me questions about myself and I got a very kind email from Mrs. Miland thanking me for a job well done. A successful bit of outreach!

Kevin Durant (a famous basketball player from the USA) put it very well:

“Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard”

Last Friday I helped out at the Big Bang festival at Northumbria University. During it we had many different schools approach our stand and it was my job to engage them and get them talking about the brain. We began with discussions on what the brain was actually made up of, and did the children know that the brain gives off it’s own electricity?! We can measure this using some special technology. After the talks we got some volunteers who would put on the headsets, and attempt to use the power of the brain (and the electrical signals from it) to move a cube on a computer screen. The concept went down a treat, and everybody got a brain sweet or a pen for coming to say hello. Hopefully it will have inspired some young scientists to learn more about the brain!

In other lab based news my most recent paper submission came back with some revisions. This is good as it means it wasn’t outright rejected and I can make some changes before Aniketa (a volunteer student) starts in a couple of weeks time to collect some data on a different experiment. I have also had another play with the eyetracker this week (I think we need some more equipment before I can get going on my experiment however), and worked on converting the footage from Sky into stereo 3D to be displayed!

It’s all going well, full steam ahead!

I had a little unannounced demo today. I had bits working, and it seemed to make a relatively good impression.

As it turned out, the alternate blinking is indeed problematic, as Windows on the computer I got has severe scheduling problems. I wish I hadn’t worked on such a tight schedule, so I could re-install it (with Linux, of course).

I got an other computer today: it hasa Quadro 600 GPU, some reasonable amount of RAM and CPU. However, I found a bug in the display driver: when you select an ‘unsupported’ resolution, the display refuses to work after a reboot. The resolution I set was supported by my monitor and worked – until I had to reboot. The only way to restore display is to boot in safe mode and uninstall the driver. I don’t know where the per-display settings were stored (as opposed to /etc/X11/xorg.conf or …/xorg.cond.d/*), so I got one more shot.

Thankfully, using the latest, driver solves this problem.

There is a 64-bit version of Psychtoolbox, and I am installing it right now. As of this moment, I am in a dependency hell because of that. But not for long!

For the past 5 weeks I have been spending most of my time out of the lab, on a works placement/internship with BskyB, the company that part sponsor my PhD.

I have had a fantastic time with the Sky people, and learnt a lot about the intricacies of post production, and also the various compression and editing techniques used by Sky.

While down there I got a chance to work at Telegenic, a camera company that Sky uses for it’s sport broadcast. They showed me the amazing trucks and equipment that they have to use on a regular basis (see below) and gave me the chance to work as an assistant rig tech during the Heineken cup final. I also did convergence for one of the 3D cameras during the Everton vs Man City Premier League game. This involved changing the camera orientation electronically from the truck, to change the interaxial distance (the physical difference between the two cameras), which affected how much depth there was in the scene, and also the ‘toe-in’ of the camera, which determines where in the scene is in the screen plane and what goes in front and behind the screen. Telegenic work with a certain depth budget, and the technology tells you if you’re getting close to exceeding to much depth, or too much in front or behind the screen. That was very interesting. It was also fascinating to learn about the nuts and bolts of the rigs as we stripped one down and cleaned it. I was particularly careful when the guy I was working with explained how much money the different parts were worth!

All in all it’s been a brilliant few weeks away. I got some content for an experiment I’m beginning to code up for and I’m very much looking forward to getting back to science for the next few weeks!

The inside of the truck was very interesting, full of gadgets and gizmos to ensure the picture was as good as it could be.

Pulling apart and putting back together the rig was a fun but very scary experience. The gold strip in one of the photos sells at £100 per cm! Lots of money involved in the rigs. The middle image is what happens after cleaning the rig. It is booted up and tested to ensure that all the different pieces work properly, and calibrated to be at optimum performance!

As a rugby nut one of the massive perks of being assistant rig tech (because nothing went wrong with the rigs after set up) was I got to see the Heineken cup final. Even if I did look a bit daft in my ‘radio cans’!

The lab recently had a fun Backyard Brains Spikerbox workshop led by Jannetta Steyn. We wired up a simple circuit to record neuromuscular activity and used an Arduino board to produce a visual display.

The British newspaper “The Guardian” was always famous for its typos. It had a particularly funny one on its main page this week:

The curse of the Gruaniad strikes again…

Last week I spent two days in London attending the annual 3D creative summit (3DCS) at the British film institute (BFI). It’s a place where all of the big shots from the world of 3D production (such as Sky 3D, Pixar and other companies like the company that worked on The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug) come together and showcase their newest content and discuss just how they did what they did, and the decisions they made. In amongst this different 3D only companies, who provide rigs and technicians, were present, with their equipment, to show people a more in depth look at how different 3D works.

I was amazed by the different talks. Highlights for me were a pre-recorded interview with James Cameron (of Avatar fame) and also Sir David Attenborough. I was also impressed by the showcases from Sky 3D, as well as Pixar and Onsight productions (a 3D company which helps with many different productions throughout the year).

Here we see Onsight productions explain more of their 3D film about pandas. While filming the crew had to go through the same procedure as the staff and wear panda outfits (complete with urine smell) while in the enclosure. As you can see it led to quite an interesting image!

I spent a good hour talking to some of the staff at Onsight at their rig, learning a lot about the subtle differences in 3D production and camera terminology and the more lab based research world I come from.

However the thing I was most impressed by were the autostereo televisions. These are ‘glasses free’ 3D television. And they’re going to be a game changer, in my opinion. Brilliant 3D without the glasses just grabs you immediately. Immersive and entertaining and deals with many of the problems that current 3D displays have to deal with. At 3DCS 2013 they were talking about how it was coming and it would be the next big thing. Well here it is. And I can’t wait to see what happens next year (and when they get cheap enough I’ll definitely be buying one!)

While blurry here, if you had two eyes and were watching the television the impression of 3D was truly captivating.

And the one and only Brian May was there. See, 3D can be cool too!

Such a fun day today. First off, 9am meeting with Paul to refine our Bayesian cue-combination model. Realised we had made some errors in the last implementation but reckon we have fixed them now. Excited to see what Paul produces in the next iteration.

Then a meeting with a senior academic where I got some useful advice on career development. Following that, a brisk bike ride with a colleague down to the Centre for Life. There we attended a meeting on “how can we encourage women into STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers”, organised by the Houses of Parliament Outreach Service, the Institute of Physics and Newcastle Science City. 5 impressive speakers including two local MPs, Chi Onwurah and Pat Bell, who both have a STEM background.

Finally, the lab meeting, with cake courtesy of Vivek, and a chance to catch up on what my talented and productive team have been up to while I’ve been away for two weeks (first at the Computational and Systems Neuroscience conference, and then on holiday). Loads of new data to see. In Claire Rind’s lab, Lisa has been recording spikes from motion-sensitive neurons in the locust. Rob and Nat have been generating interesting new behavioural data on mantis contrast sensitivity, which Ghaith has fit a model to. But most excitingly, Judith, Ghaith and Vivek have been working hard on a new experiment on mantis 3D, which is displaying promising results. We are either close to the breakthrough we have been searching for … or it is a random statistical fluctuation. Another week of data collection should reveal which, and we will either crack open the champagne or be very depressed.

And in a surprise extra, Vivek and Ghaith demonstrated their simulations of different models of science funding. Cool work guys!

Met with a student to discuss project write-up, and finally headed home for dinner with two other academic families: curry and wine for parents while the kids played. End of another week.

How to encourage more women into STEM? I don’t know, but personally I’m loving it here.

The week after we had been to Nuremberg for a demonstration on PlusOptix PowerRef 3 we had a gentleman come in from Eyelink to show the Eyelink 1000 eyetracker system. This systems differs from the PowerRef 3 in many ways.

On the plus it makes about as accurate measurements of gaze location, and measures much more regulary (10 times more than PowerRef 3, at 2m/s measurements).

On the negative side it is much more expensive than the PowerRef3. And because it does not use the standard distance from the camera for the eye needs a setup and calibration step.

Fortunately, ION has bought one of the eyelink eyetrackers them selves for the entire lab so price does not come into it. During the two day training session we learnt how the system worked (measuring the pupil in relation to the corneal refraction) and had a practice at setting up the system using a premade track experiment. The equipment seems easy to use and quite user friendly, with a very good GUI (graphical user interface). One problem is that with the remote version (which we planned to use in an experiment, where the head isn’t on a chinrest) the system can only measure monocular gaze location, not vergence. This will be a slight issue but not a very big one, as combining the PowerRef3 (which we are in the process of buying) with the eyelink 1000, will allow for our experimental designs to be completed as we hoped. Below are two photos of setting up the eyelink system before calibration (this involves ensuring the camera has the pupil in the square shown on the GUI, and is in proper focus for the pupil and corneal reflection). I am very much looking forward to getting involved and seeing how it works with our experiments.

Zoltan attended the 2013 Technical Meeting of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, where he presented a paper on his MRes project. This is a nice photo of him (fifth from left / youngest person present). He’s collecting an award for a 2012 paper in Motion Imaging on which I was an author; none of us 4 authors could make it (shame; I would have made it not a totally woman-free zone!)